Jennings, who served in 2009 on a blue ribbon panel set up to look at Canada’s employment insurance system, says Poilievre deliberately obstructed the panel’s attempts to improve Canada’s employment insurance system from the very start – seemingly carrying out instructions from Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
“I went in there with the real hope or desire that there was real opening on the part of the Harper government to actually affect real change on the employment insurance file and it became clear very, very early on that Pierre Poilievre was there with strict instructions that there wasn’t going to be any significant change,” Jennings recalled in an interview Wednesday with iPolitics.
“We butted heads. There were points where I literally — so as to not reach over the table and actually resort to physical violence — left the room.”
Poilievre is now in charge of Canada’s employment insurance system as well as job training, labour agreements and Service Canada centres, as of his promotion to employment minister Monday.
The blue ribbon panel was created in June 2009 – the price that then Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff exacted for securing Liberal support for the minority Conservative government’s budget and staving off an election.
Jennings, MP Michael Savage and Kevin Chan, a policy advisor to Ignatieff, represented the Liberals. The Conservatives named Poilievre, Human Resources Minister Diane Finley and Malcolm Brown, who was then a senior assistant deputy minister at Human Resources and Skills Development Canada.
The panel was to look at the employment insurance system, then report to Parliament.
Jennings said the Liberals wanted the panel to particularly examine rules that resulted in claimants being treated differently. For example, two people with the same experience laid off from the same plant could find themselves receiving employment insurance benefits for very different numbers of weeks depending on whether they lived in a postal code, with higher unemployment or lower unemployment.
The plight faced by older workers laid off in their 50’s and too young to collect a pension was another subject the Liberals wanted the panel to examine.
From the outset, though, it became clear that the Conservatives had agreed to the panel to get the budget passed and had no intention of taking it seriously, Jennings recalled.
Diane Finley didn’t attend most of the meetings, leaving Poilievre — then parliamentary secretary to the prime minister — to represent the Conservatives.
“It became clear that the Harper government was simply sleepwalking through it and putting up barriers. We would ask for documents. We wouldn’t get the documents at the meeting where we were supposed to discuss the documents.”
Jennings described Poilievre as “smug,”“snarky” and “duplicitous” throughout the meetings, saying he paid lip service to the panel while preventing it from accomplishing anything.
It eventually became clear that the panel wouldn’t be able to achieve anything and the meetings ended, she said.
Given her experience with him on the blue ribbon panel, Jennings says she’s not optimistic about the role Poilievre will play as Canada’s employment minister.
“It’s literally going to be to make sure that as few people as possible benefit…. There seems to be an underlying belief (on the part of Stephen Harper) that people don’t deserve employment insurance.”
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Elizabeth Thompson
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