Number of Canadians Collecting EI Lowest Since 1997: StatCan

The employment insurance section of the Government of Canada website is shown on a laptop in Toronto on April 4, 2020. The Canadian Press/Jesse Johnston

The number of Canadians collecting Employment Insurance (EI) benefits has reached the lowest amount ever since the federal government began keeping records on the matter in 1997, a new Statistics Canada study finds.

The agency says that 375,000 Canadians received regular EI benefits during the month of January, which was down by about 20,000 from December 2022, representing a drop in recipients of 5 percent.

“This was the lowest number of regular EI beneficiaries on record since comparable data became available in 1997,” Statistics Canada wrote in a report published March 23.

The agency noted that it was excluding the seven-month period at the beginning of the pandemic when the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit was available from March to September 2020, during which time EI collections spiked.

Statistics Canada also says in the report that the number of regular EI beneficiaries in January fell by 294,000 on a year-over-year basis from 2022, representing a decline of nearly 44 percent.

The largest declines in recipients were among young people aged 15-24 years old, with the number of female recipients in that age group declining by 74 percent and male recipients declining by almost 60 percent.

According to the report, eight of the provinces saw a decline in EI recipients from December 2022 to January 2023, with Quebec having the largest drop of nearly 11 percent in that time frame.

Prince Edward Island had the second-largest proportional decline during that time with a drop of around 8 percent in EI recipients, followed by Alberta with a 5.5 percent decline.

EI Decline

The steady downward trend of EI recipients across the country follows a record-high peak of over 1.6 million beneficiaries in May 2021—a little over a year after pandemic lockdowns began.

Since then, the rate has declined almost every month.

Statistics Canada added in its report that, despite EI rates decreasing by a large margin nationwide, the country’s unemployment rate held steady at 5 percent in January, which was just above the record-low in June and July 2022 of 4.9 percent.

The report also showed that the proportion of long-term unemployment—which it defines as individuals continuously unemployed for 27 weeks or more—was down by around 4 percentage points in January compared to a year prior, going from 19.9 percent in 2022 to 15.8 percent this year.

Despite this, a House of Commons committee recently heard from an expert witness that Canada’s unemployment rate is expected to increase by a sizeable margin this year in the face of a possible recession.

Jimmy Jean, vice president and chief economist of the Desjardins Group, told the Commons Standing Committee on Finance on March 23 that he is anticipating Canada’s unemployment rate to rise by about 2 percentage points in 2023 and end the year at around 7 percent.

Jean added that the “conditions are in place” for a recession to occur over the next several quarters, but said he still expects the national inflation rate to trend downward.