Vengeance Is Mine, Sayeth Harper Regime: An Update On Sylvie Therrien

This past July I wrote two posts on Sylvie Therrien, the government employee suspended because she leaked documents that revealed federal investigators were told to find $485,000 of Employment Insurance fraud every year.

An update on her fate, published in today's Star, reveals that she has been fired. The alleged reason?

According to Employment and Social Development Canada, Therrien had her “reliability status’ ... revoked, and therefore she no longer met the conditions for her job.

The real reason, I suspect, is that she dared to stand up to the bullying tactics of the Harper regime, and thus serves as a very public example of what can occur when integrity trumps the 'situational ethics' imposed by a cabal in which morality is a risible concept meant to be treated with the contempt that this government regularly shows to anyone or anything that impedes its debased journey.

More On The E.I Whistleblower

The other day I wrote a post on Sylvie Therrien, the government employee suspended because she leaked documents that revealed federal investigators were told to find $485,000 of Employment Insurance fraud every year.

The “fraud quotas” were just one aspect of an office culture that encouraged cutting benefits from as many people as possible to save money, Therrien said in an interview Monday.

“My values just wouldn’t allow me to do that,” she said. “It was so unfair. These people are like everyone else. They have children, and we send them to the streets.”

Her act of conscience means she will likely be fired (and no doubted added to the ever-growing Harper regime's 'enemies list.')

Steve McCuaig, national executive vice president of the Canada Employment and Immigration Union, promised to defend Therrien if she is wrongly dismissed.

“The message (to whistleblowers) is: ‘Be afraid, be very afraid,’ ” he said. “Employees are asked to do jobs, and they’re asked to never say anything about that job. We wonder why.”

Typical of the soulless and technocratic regime that masquerades as our government, Harper enabler Amélie Maisonneuve, spokesperson for Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, offered the following justification for the harsh measures taken against Therrien:

Civil servants are allowed by law to disclose information to the public only if there is “insufficient time” to contact the integrity commissioner, and it constitutes a serious offence or poses an imminent risk to public health or safety.

Sometimes there are moral imperatives that transcend such narrow allowances, prompted by circumstances that I doubt few supporters of Mr. Harper's cabal could ever understand.

You can read the full story here.

Cancer, E.I., and Government Hypocrisy

The Faces Of Common Humanity

Without doubt, to battle cancer must be a grueling and depleting experience. But to face rebuke and betrayal at the hands of one's government because of the circumstances of that battle must be almost as traumatic.

Such is the almost unbelievable tale of Jane Kittmer, diagnosed with breast cancer while on maternity leave and denied E.I sick benefits. Having fought a 2½-year appeal battle over those benefits, an E.I judge ruled in her favour last December, a month after Parliament voted unanimously to amend the Employment Insurance Act to ensure those on maternity and parental leave are also eligible for sickness benefits. Yet despite that ruling and that legislation, the Harper regime is appealing the decision to give the benefits to Kitmer.

This, despite the fact that the precedent for the legislative change in favour of people like Kitmer was established in 2011, when an E.I. judge ruled in favour of Toronto mother Natalyal Rougas, stating that government officials have been misinterpreting the spirit of the original 2002 law.

Rougas, who was diagnosed with breast cancer during maternity leave in 2010, was awarded the maximum 15 weeks of sickness benefits in addition to her combined 50 weeks of maternal and parental benefits. The award amounted to about $6,000, or $400 a week.

Ottawa did not appeal the Rougas decision and began working on a legislative fix, introduced last summer as Bill C-44.

But of course, one should never underestimate the Orwellian cant at which the Harper government has proven consistently adept:

In response to an inquiry from The Star,

... a spokesperson for Human Resources Minister Diane Finley would say only that the government is helping families “balance work and family responsibilities.”

The government is “offering new support measures to Canadian families at times when they need it most,” Alyson Queen added in an email Friday.

It has been said that a society can be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members. By that standard, the Harper regime is unquestionably beyond denunciation.

The Face of Uncommon Hypocrisy