ECONOMY-CANADA: Support for Unemployed Shortchanges Women – Lawyer

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Feb 3 2003 (IPS) - Women like Kelly Lesiuk who work part-time and have young children are not getting equal treatment under Canada’s jobless benefits scheme.

So argues her lawyer Byron Williams, who is seeking to appear before the Supreme Court of Canada to use the equality provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to challenge the current eligibility requirements of the country’s employment insurance (EI) law.

About five years ago, Lesiuk was denied EI benefits. She had fallen 33 hours short of the 700 hours of previous paid work she needed to qualify for the payments, based on a formula involving the local unemployment rate in the city of Winnipeg where she lived.

The denial put her in a desperate situation because she and her husband were living on his income as a service manager for a crane company and they ended up having to ask her parents for financial assistance. ”If we hadn’t had that option, I don’t know where we would be right now because it would have been a whole different ball game,” says Lesiuk. ”We would have had to look at selling the house.”

Lesiuk was then caring for one child and pregnant with a second one, and she had stopped working as a part-time nurse because her doctor was concerned about the heavy lifting the job entailed.

At the core of Lesiuk’s case is the fact that mothers of young children do a lot of unpaid labour in the home, which makes it harder for them to find sufficient hours of paid employment to qualify for EI benefits, says Norene Pupo, director of the Center for Research on Work and Society at Toronto’s York University.

”Part-time workers have more difficulty getting EI benefits. They have to work over a long period of time in most regions of Canada in order to qualify,” says Pupo.

Her study of the Canadian workforce in the late 1990s showed that a large chunk of the part-time workforce was female – half of women but only 20 per cent of men were working fewer than 35 hours a week.

EI’s underlying premise, says Pupo, is that ”full-time workers are more strongly attached (to work), while part-timers and those working less than standard hours are less committed workers”.

Documents from the government’s Human Resources Development Canada confirm that the introduction of an hours-based system of EI in 1997 ”very likely affected the eligibility of workers working between 15 and 30 hours, mainly youth and women”.

A Federal Court justice found that change and its underlying assumptions unfair when he ruled in favour of Lesiuk after she challenged the denial of the benefits. He stated that EI’s eligibility requirements ”demean the essential human dignity of women who predominate in the part-time labour force”.

But the Federal Court of Appeal reversed that decision in January, accepting Ottawa’s argument that the denial of benefits did not warrant major legislative changes to EI’s hours-based system.

”Whatever the minimum entrance requirement there will always be persons or groups who will not be able to qualify,” stated Justice J.A. Letourneau, writing on behalf of a three-member panel.

Now, Williams is arguing that the Supreme Court should agree to hear Lesiuk’s appeal of that decision because it is a case of ”national importance”.

He estimates that at least 50 similar cases are circulating in Canadian courts but they have been delayed until Lesiuk’s claim is resolved.

”What is really weird,” says Williams, is that the Federal Court of Appeal agreed that Lesiuk experienced systemic discrimination under section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights but the same judges would not go along with the logical conclusion in the same section (known as the ”dignity test”) that she was treated in a manner that ”was less worthy of respect as a Canadian citizen”.

Today, Lesiuk and her husband live in Edmonton, where they are raising their two small children, and where she works regular evening hours at a hospital. But she says the memory of the ”cruel” actions of the EI program still angers her, which is why she is determined to pursue her case all the way to the highest court in Canada.