Question Period Note: Employment Insurance for Seasonal Workers

With the upcoming changes to the Employment Insurance (EI) program, how is the Government of Canada supporting seasonal workers and ensuring that they do not lose out?

• The Department is making significant investments in the EI program to meet the evolving needs of Canadian workers, employers, and families. This includes seasonal workers.

• Work in seasonal industries in Canada can be unpredictable. Providing predictability and reliability in response to their circumstances is an important outcome of the consultation process for EI reforms.

• Following an amendment to the EI Act, eligible seasonal workers can continue to qualify for five extra weeks of EI regular benefits with 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 respond better to the needs of workers in seasonal employment.

The current legislated measure is a temporary replication 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 targeted mechanism in identifying seasonal workers who needed 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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