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August 25th, 2014

Conservatives continue to denigrate unemployed Canadians

By now, we are all familiar with how the Conservative government likes to vilify unemployed Canadians.

After calling them “bastards”, “bad guys” and inferring they are lazy, a Conservative minister has now gone a step further and associated the unemployed with drug trafficking.

In a Radio-Canada interview this weekend, Stephen Harper’s Quebec lieutenant Denis Lebel said:

“We often pay people on employment insurance to sell…well, they’re not always good substances. I want it to stop. I want the people that we’re paying not to work to find a job”

-Denis Lebel, Radio-Canada, August 24, 2014[1]

Let’s not forget Minister of Human Resources Diane Finley, who previously called unemployed Canadians the “bad guys” and inferred people receiving Employment Insurance were lazy as an excuse for her radical cuts to EI:

“We do not want to make it lucrative for them to stay home and get paid for it."

– Diane Finley, January 30, 2009

“The NDP is protecting the bad guys.”

– Diane Finley, February 1st, 2013, In response to an answer to NDP questions regarding Service Canada’s use of “quotas”.

And of course Gerald Keddy, now Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Revenue and for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, previously made this reprehensible statement about unemployed Nova Scotians:

“…all those no-good bastards sitting on the sidewalk in Halifax that can't get work.”

– Gerald Keddy, November 23, 2009

Conservatives are out of touch with the realities facing unemployed Canadian and don’t understand that EI is paid for by workers’ premiums, not the government.

People know it is Tom Mulcair and the NDP they can trust to stand up for the rights of workers.


[French] http://m.soundcloud.com/cimonga/denis-lebel-sur-le-travail-et-lassurance-emploi