IN the best tradition of media manipulation, Lloyd Axworthy will announce little tomorrow about his long-awaited reforms to unemployment insurance that has not already been leaked to the press. Yet, in the worst tradition of Canadian politics, it will probably blow up in his face anyway. Having backed away from every other social policy challenge, from welfare to child care to pensions, Mr. Axworthy will get knocked just as silly for his timid tiptoeing about the unemployment insurance system as if he had really tackled it head-on.

This is a familiar scene, for a familiar reason: the absence of reliable yardsticks. It might sound unbearably harsh, for example, for the Conservative government in Ontario to have cut welfare benefits by an average of 21 per cent, until you recall that the level of benefits had been increased over the previous 15 years by 69 per cent, after inflation. When Jacques Parizeau bragged of his party's compassion during the referendum campaign, to the effect that a sovereign Quebec would never slash social assistance as Ontario had done, he might have mentioned, but didn't, that benefits in Ontario remain considerably higher than those in Quebec, even after the cuts.

Unless the proposition is that no cuts in social spending should ever be made, for any reason - that wherever welfare benefits happen to be is exactly where they should be - then we must have some basis for comparison, with which to measure whether a particular level of social benefit is too rich, too poor or just right.

This should not be mistaken for objectivity: Even Professor Christopher Sarlo's "basic needs" measure of poverty involves a value judgment about what is an adequate standard of living. Adequacy, however, is at least a fixed target, as opposed to such purely relative measures as the Statistics Canada low-income cutoff. By this measure, even if everybody in Canada grew twice as rich, the numbers of people in "poverty" would remain exactly the same.

Even a value judgment, in other words, must be plotted on some graph of comparative magnitudes. One dimension in which useful comparisons can be made is time. When it is discovered that the level of family income at which the poverty line is now drawn, with all of its connotations of tar- paper shacks and malnutrition, is equal to a middle-class income in the 1950s in real terms, the absurdity of the current measure becomes evident.

It might be argued that social benefits should become more generous over time, as the means at society's disposal grow more plentiful. On the other hand, since unemployment insurance is by its very nature linked to the employment income of its beneficiaries, it's hard to see why the terms of its original design, which were thought perfectly adequate at the time, should have been held to be so niggardly by the time of the 1971 revisions. We have been paying for that extraordinary loosening of the rules ever since.

But very well: If it is thought beyond the pale to base UI on historic norms, perhaps a different yardstick is in order. Instead of comparing across time, we can compare across countries. And if we do, we find that the present system of unemployment insurance in Canada is, in almost every respect, among the most open-ended on earth. Take, as one example, the eligibility period: that is, the minimum length of time a participant must have worked to qualify for benefits. In Canada, this is now 12 to 20 weeks in the previous year, depending on the regional unemployment rate.

If news reports prove accurate, Mr. Axworthy will raise the bar slightly, at the same time as he is converting the measure from weeks into hours, in order to make more part-time workers eligible for UI. According to one story, the new eligibility period might be 455 hours. Which means that an applicant who had been working a 35-hour week would still require just 13 weeks of work to qualify. This alone may be predicted to raise howls.

How does this compare with other countries? Put it this way. The most extreme critics of the present system would go so far as to suggest a 26- week standard might be more appropriate. How tough is this? Sweden-tough. Italy-tough. Japan-tough. Holland-tough. That's right: All of these highly developed welfare states require at least six months of work in the past year to qualify for unemployment insurance. The 26-week standard is, in fact, the norm internationally. Remember that, as you listen to the demonstrators chant.