The Employment and Social Insurance Bill. III. Problems in Unemployment Insurance Administration

Abstract

It is a satisfaction that the unemployment insurance legislation now proposed in Canada contemplates a national insurance and placement system as against the federal-state machinery which would be established by the Social Security Bill before the United States Congress. Argument based on the evolution of unemployment insurance in other countries or on the nature of insurance must favour a national system. If the Bills being considered by the two countries are passed in substantially their present form, Canada will have outstripped the United States in unemployment insurance and placement legislation. Indeed, for some years Canada has been to the fore not only in this field but with respect to social insurance and its administration generally. The Canadian law providing for a federal-provincial employment service was passed in 1918, the corresponding Wagner-Peyser Act in the United States in 1933. Workmen's compensation, the one important form of social insurance in which the two countries have had any considerable experience, has provided a high degree of uniform protection in Canada and practically complete coverage although controlled and administered entirely by the provinces. In the United States in an experience extending over almost the same period four states still have no legislation and in the others the great differences in benefit scales, organization, and procedure result in highly dissimilar measures of protection for the citizens of the country. In both old age and mothers' allowances conditioned on a means test, a much larger proportion of the population is covered in Canada than in the United States, and with respect to the former, the government of Canada has been assisting the provinces for several years while in the United States the federal government is only now considering aid to the states.