Workers applying for employment insurance benefits will have to qualify under pre-pandemic rules starting Sunday, when the temporary measures will expire. The Liberal government has pledged to reform EI and address loopholes in the program, but temporary measures put in place during the pandemic will expire before any reform is implemented. Labor advocates as well as NDP and Bloc Quebecois members of parliament are calling on the federal government to extend the temporary measures, which extended access to more workers. During question period in the House of Commons on Wednesday, Bloc Québécois MP Louise Chabot asked Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough to extend the measures until full reform of the program is implemented. “The minister was instructed to implement a full EI reform this summer, but she didn’t,” Chabot said. “Will the minister at least extend the temporary measures?” In response, Qualtrough said the temporary changes made to EI were measures related to the pandemic and were no longer necessary. “I can assure (Chabot) and everybody that by the end of the year, you will know what the vision is for EI,” Qualtrough said. Under the temporary measures, workers qualify for EI based on the national requirement to have 420 insurable hours of employment, whereas workers would normally need between 420 and 700 hours depending on the regional unemployment rate. Many experts support moving to a national requirement and say variable requirements are unfair to workers laid off in an area with a low unemployment rate. In addition, under the interim measures, pay received after leaving work, such as redundancy, is not deducted from benefits. On Thursday, the National Council of Unemployed Workers held a joint press conference with Chabot, NDP Deputy Leader Alexandre Boulerice and other labor leaders in Parliament about the end of the measures. Qualtrough met with labor leaders Thursday and promised to extend EI sick pay from 15 to 26 weeks by the end of the year, a change promised in the 2022 budget. Milan Bernard, organizing consultant at the National Council of Unemployed Workers, said Qualtrow expressed a commitment to EI reform but no timetable. “We don’t really know what’s going to happen,” Bernard said. Experts and advocates say EI reform has been needed for years, but the COVID-19 pandemic has widened the gaps in the program. Faced with a major disruption to the economy at the start of the pandemic, EI was unable to provide benefits to the staggering number of people suddenly out of work as lockdowns began. In a report published in August 2020, Jennifer Robson, an associate professor of political management at Carleton University, found that EI failed to cover enough Canadians, while also failing on the administrative and technological fronts. The shortages led the federal government to introduce the Canada Emergency Response Benefit to provide quick relief to Canadians. In 2021, the Liberals campaigned on a promise to modernize EI and pledged to expand the program to cover the self-employed and address gaps, including those highlighted by COVID-19. Qualtrough’s mandate letter from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked the minister to “put forward and begin implementing a plan to modernize the EI system for the 21st century” by the summer of 2022. Employment and Social Development Canada completed its latest round of public consultations on EI reform in July. However, there are no details on when the EI reform legislation will be introduced. The list of complaints about the program’s current structure is long, from eligibility requirements to funding to administrative technology. A central concern of labor advocates and experts is that too few can access the program. According to a Statistics Canada report published in 1998, the percentage of unemployed Canadians receiving EI benefits peaked at 74 per cent in 1989. That number declined sharply in subsequent years, in part because of reforms to the program in 1990s. While the temporary changes expanded access to EI, before the pandemic, about 40 percent of unemployed Canadians received employment insurance. Unifor president Lana Payne, who has supported extending the temporary measures, said “we cannot go back to a broken system”. “(If) we go back to pre-COVID requirements, you’re going to have a lot of people potentially falling through the cracks,” Payne said.
