Harper Conservatives losing ground....because of stupid PR

So apparently, according to the National Post, the NDP is rising in popularity across Canada.

I'm not surprised as the Conservatives seem hell bent on imploding themselves from a PR perspective.

The thing that caught my eye recently was a story on EI recipients and how they will now be required to take any job that is within an hours drive of their home.

So let's get this straight. You pay in to EI your whole (working) life so that if you lose your job you can get up to $1,500 a month for something like nine months to tide you over until you can find another job. This is why in Canada we pay insanely high taxes right? So that we have social benefits and safety nets like this.

Now though, if you lose your job and McDonalds has an opening an HOUR away (so two hours of commuting per day) you will be expected to take that job or lose your benefits?

So the question becomes, why in the world is anyone paying in to EI if, in the event they lose their job, they have to go take a crappy minimum wage job? I mean, will EI even be paying anything out to anyone any more if people are forced to immediately go take such jobs?

It's actions like this that are eroding the Harper government's brand. They've already extended retirement from 65 to 67 (not to worry though, that doesn't apply to the baby boomers of course, just their kids and grand kids... heaven forbid the boomers ever suffer) and now they want people to commute two hours a day to work at McDonalds instead of leveraging their unemployment benefits that they've paid in to their whole life?

And the thing that is utterly absurd about all this is that you know forcing people to take such jobs will only result in them showing up to work and not giving a damn about the job they do.

The current system works just fine. People lose their job, they get just enough to survive (nowhere near what they were making) and it gets cut off after nine months, after which they have to use up their own money until they go broke and then they go on welfare. That's plenty of incentive for most people to go get a job. Do we really need to force professionals to go work at McDonalds?

I'm a fiscal conservative, but Harper is off his rocker with these kinds of propositions. There is such a thing as going to far and from a PR perspective right now he's coming off as a leader who is looking to drain any drop of blood he can from the Canadian people to save money. Not a good PR position to take during an economic recession.

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