Question Period Note: Employment Insurance Processing for Seasonal Workers

What is being done to ensure seasonal workers are not negatively impacted in their Employment Insurance (EI) as a result of receiving emergency benefits?

• The Employment Insurance (EI) program provides economic security to millions of Canadians when they need it most.

• The Department continues to make significant investments in the EI program, including to better meet the evolving needs of Canadian workers and employers, and offer greater support to Canadian families. This includes seasonal workers.

• Work in seasonal industries in Canada can be unpredictable. Providing predictability and reliability that responds to their unique circumstances will be an important part of the consultation process for EI reforms.

• Now that Bill C-8 has received Royal Assent, Service Canada is beginning to implement these new provisions. The additional weeks will be automatically applied to all impacted existing and new claims. There is no need to reapply.

Seasonal Workers - Temporary Measure

Many seasonal workers rely on the EI program to help them get through recurring periods of unemployment. If the number of weeks of EI benefits that a seasonal claimant qualifies for is not sufficient to bridge the period between the seasonal lay-off and the return to their seasonal work, and the seasonal claimant is unable to find other work, they are said to be experiencing an income gap (often referred to as the ‘trou noir’).

Seasonal income gaps are not a new phenomenon. There have been consistent calls for reforms to the EI program to better respond to the needs of workers in seasonal employment.

The current legislated measure is a one-year replication of the rules of the EI Seasonal Claimant Pilot Project, which ended in September 2021, with the addition of a grandfathering clause which allows any claimant who met the definition of a seasonal claimant under the pilot to meet the definition again. The EI Seasonal Claimant Pilot Project was implemented in 2018 to test the effectiveness of the pilot project’s targeting mechanism in identifying seasonal workers who need additional EI support. It provided up to five additional weeks of EI regular benefits to eligible claimants who demonstrated a seasonal pattern of claiming EI benefits, and who lived in one of 13 targeted EI regions (those with the highest proportions of seasonal claimants to the total labour force and higher-than-average EI unemployment rates in 2017).

The current legislated measure was intended to provide more time to gather lessons learned to inform a longer-term approach to help workers who experience seasonal income gaps.

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