One small step for EI...

Today was a good news and bad news day for Employment Insurance (EI). The bad news is that Statistics Canada released figures for January showing that the number of people receiving EI benefits rose 4.4% compared to December. 560,400 Canadians were receiving EI benefits in January. That is an increase of over 100,000 people compared to February 2008.

The good news is that to deal with the ever-increasing number of applications, the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development, Diane Finley, announced today that the government is putting $60 million towards processing these additional claims. Hopefully, this will put an end to some of the heartbreaking stories we’ve been hearing at CPJ about people who don’t get their benefits for over a month after applying for EI. (Thomas Mulcair, an NDP MP, noted in the House today that MPs have been inundated with similar stories).

The additional bad news is that these figures don’t reflect all the Canadians who’ve lost their jobs in the past few months. As Liberal MP Michael Savage noted to CTV, only 23,700 Canadians applied for benefits in January, but 129,000 jobs disappeared that month. While some of the unemployed may have found new jobs quickly, over half of unemployed Canadians do not qualify for EI. There are Canadians who are losing their jobs who have no alternative but personal savings or welfare.

The (comparably slight) good news is that, because the EI system is adjusted monthly, workers in regions of the country that are being decimated will no longer be treated as if they are in a regional economic powerhouse while key industries disappear around them. This means that the number of hours required will be lower, and the number of weeks of benefits available will increase. EI will therefore be available to a few more workers.

Overall, while today’s announcement represented a step in the right direction, it remains a small step. EI’s biggest problems continue to be that access is too limited while benefits are too low. More Canadians will continue to suffer until these fundamental problems with EI are fixed.