Peter,
With regard to the issue of legally enshrining social and economic rights,
you say that as policy analysts, "we need to be more wary of these sorts of
contraints in order to develop policies with a meaningful effect." Certainly
legal rights act as a constraint, but so does the rule you stated earlier
(with which I agree) "the moral of the story is: first, do no harm."
The question of "doing no harm" can be addressed in two quite distinct ways:
in terms of policy outcomes OR in terms of legal liability. A government
which painstakingly exempts itself from the latter is clearly less
accountable for the former. You raised the spectre of the courts making or
enforcing social policy. The courts do have jurisdiction in matters of
medical malpractice (to stay with the hippocratic theme), but this doesn't
mean that they practice medicine.
I'm sure you heard of the recent attempt of the Alberta government to shield
itself from full legal liability from its past policies of sterilizing
people with mental disabilities. In another case, the federal government is
seeking to limit its liability for compensating people who contracted
hepatitis C from blood transfusions.
Contrast those two cases with the equanimity with which the federal
government introduced the intensity rule in Employment Insurance
legislation. That rule is avowedly intended to discriminate against repeat
claimants for EI in the hope that such discrimination will act as an
incentive for claimants to change the intensity of their labour market
attachment.
Without belabouring the issue of *whether* frequently unemployed people have
that much choice about the intensity of their labour market attachment,
LEGALLY the government has no obligation to provide them with equal
benefits. In effect, the government says, "we're doing this for their own
good" and the claimants have no recourse, even if the outcomes are wildly at
variance with the government's justification of "for their own good."
And, speaking of dubious microsimulation methodology, may I quote the last
line from Beausejour et. al. paper on "Potential Economic Effects of
Experience-Rating the Unemployment Insurance System Using a Multi-Sector
General Equilibrium Model of Canada." After discussing all the difficulties
in estimating the economic effects of experience-rating and estimating,
nevertheless, a reduction in the unemployment rate by about 2.2 percentage
point, the authors add, "In addition, while the analysis is conducted in a
firm-level experience-rating framework, a part of the gains should be
realisable if experience-rating is introduced on the workers' side, such as
the "intensity" rules in the latest Canadian UI reform proposals."
In plain English, the policy analysts didn't have the foggiest notion about
what the likely economic effects of an intensity rule would be and didn't
seem to care a whole lot. What was more important, as Nakamura et.al. put it
was to discourage "the perception that many repeat UI claimants choose to
live this way and are not seriously interested in changing their situations
. . ." A perception that the authors admitted ". . . may be false" ("The
Case for Disentangling the Insurance and Income Assistance Roles of
Unemployment Insurance", Canadian Business Economics, Fall 1994, p. 49).
When policy analysts are more concerned with manipulating perceptions than
with understanding the effects of policies, then perhaps we need to be more
wary of the policy analysts than of the constraints on them. The issue here
is not simply that of policy outcomes, but more fundamentally of policy
accountability. One has to be suspicious of the sincerity of a government
that is unwilling to accept legal responsibility for the outcomes of
policies that overtly discriminate against classes of individuals.
Regards,
Tom Walker
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Vancouver, B.C.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(604) 669-3286
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The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
