You may recall that due the economic melt down last year our company threw us a lifeline – we were asked to go down to a 4 day work week and on the fifth day, don’t work at all. Our income would be supplemented by the government run Employment Insurance<\/em> program. We got 55% of our wage for that unworked day back to us but we were not allowed to take on any part time jobs or such while we were on our government sanctioned day off. Just sit there and do nothing.<\/p>\n

I heard and obeyed. I jumped through the paperwork hoops and followed the instructions and gladly took the pay\/activity cut. I played video games and worked as a volunteer on a few websites.<\/p>\n

Flashforward: It’s time to do our taxes and my accountant points to an empty box on the T4 slip (the slip of paper that reports how much money I made on EI). That empty box is how much money the government took off each Insurance paycheque. It’s empty -zippo paid. You’d think the government would either tax that or not let it be included in your claims due to the hardship it represents. To recap: The government took no money from the money it gave to us for not losing my job.<\/p>\n

In doing so, and according to some loophole, I owed close to $1000 in income taxes this year.<\/p>\n

Thankfully I still have my job!<\/p>\n

When people say EI is broken I say “No shit!”<\/p>\n

And before you comment “At least you still have your job!” I’ll just say that I’m very upset that the money I expected back (owing + what I expected = negated completely) was suppose to go to a summer vacation, so any silver lining you try to slap on this fat pig of a cloud won’t cheer me up. This summer will be as lean as last summer. Eat my corn riddled butt, government!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may recall that due the economic melt down last year our company threw us a lifeline – we were asked to go down to a 4 day work week and on the fifth day, don’t work at all. Our income would be supplemented by the government run Employment Insurance program. We got 55% of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":430,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[1080,439],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9WjY-1yo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5976"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/430"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5976\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}