The Progressive Economics Forum

Saskatchewan’s Brad Wall recently issued a statement exhorting his fellow Premiers to blaze largely unspecified new trails on healthcare, Employment Insurance and Equalization. Unfortunately, he misses the ball on all three issues. Greg Fingas and Verda Petry have already refuted Wall’s call for further healthcare privatization. On Employment Insurance, Wall implies that eastern Canadians are [...]

Today, Statistics Canada reported that the number of Canadians receiving Employment Insurance (EI) benefits fell for a third consecutive month in November. This decline would be good news if it reflected an improving labour market. Unfortunately, unemployment has also increased for three consecutive months. The trend is a dwindling number of beneficiaries among a growing [...]

Michael Mendelson has posted a long comment on my earlier post regarding the Mowat Report on EI. He defends Caledon’s proposal for temporary non EI income support for the unemployed as a clear improvement over welfare , and stresses that it is not intended to undermine EI as a social insurance program. I read the [...]

Amidst the plethora of media reports on “payroll tax” increases for 2012, there was little mention of increases in benefits.  For example, the Toronto Sun,cued by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, reported: If you feel a hand grabbing at your wallet next week, calling the cops won’t do any good because it’s the federal government picking [...]

It may be a grim Christmas for thousands of unemployed Canadians. Today’s Employment Insurance figures show that fewer workers received benefits in October, even as more became unemployed and filed EI claims. Specifically, the number of people receiving regular benefits declined from 546,580 in September to 541,230 in October. The Labour Force Survey indicates that unemployment [...]

Further to my post yesterday on the Mowat report on EI, I looked up the most recent rates of unemployment for the 58 EI regions. In the current regionally differentiated system, which Mowat wants to replace with a single national system, these unemployment rates are those which determine the level of hours needed to qualify [...]

The Mowat Centre final report on Employment Insurance (EI) released today has won a fair bit of media attention, and will serve to deepen the national debate over Canada’s most important income security program for working age adults and families. The Task Force has commissioned and published a number of important research studies which improve [...]

A research paper published by the Canadian Breast Cancer Network underlines that the economic costs of cancer are huge due to a lack of supportive public and workplace  policies. As they say ” we may think of breast cancer as a health condition, but it is also an economic condition.” Based on surveys of former [...]

The federal government has launched consultations on EI premium setting. This provides the opportunity to shift from a very ad hoc system to one that is more fair to workers, and more economically rational. The current worker premium is $1.78 per $100 of insured earnings  and the employer premium is $2.49 per $100, adding to [...]

Statscan have released an interesting paper, “The Income Management Strategies of Older Couples in Canada.” It looks at who controls the family finances in couples with one partner aged 45 and over. (They used the age cut off because a special question was added to the General Social Survey which is restricted to that age [...]

 At the CEA meetings I participated on a panel organized by IRPP to discuss a recent paper  – by Finnie and Gray – on older laid-off workers and the policy option of “wage insurance.”  The paper shows that older laid off workers leaving stable jobs and finding new employment typically experience significant declines in earnings [...]

Prime Minister Harper today re-announced the 2011 Budget proposal to introduce a one year program to reduce EI employer premiums by up to $1,000 for small businesses which expand employment in 2011 compared to 2010. I would characterise this as more of a token gift to the Canadian Federation of  Independent Business than a serious [...]

Well under one half of Canada’s 1.5 million unemployed workers are collecting EI benefits today, even though the national unemployment rate is still almost 8%. Special EI measures introduced as part of the 2009 Budget, notably an extra 5 weeks of benefits for all claimants,  expired this fall, long before a real labour market recovery [...]

TD Economics have released an interesting if rather thin report on the Toronto recovery. I say thin because, while there is not a wealth of current data, we do get labour market data for the huge Toronto Census Metropolitan Area. As they show, there has been a huge loss of manufacturing jobs in the region, [...]

Here’s my take on Canada’s jobs recovery, written for the Economy Lab. The Economy Lab is a new on-line feature of the on-line business section of the Globe and Mail, part the newspaper’s extensive print and electronic make-over launched on October 1. Editor Rob Gilroy has made it a lively spot. The Daily Mix is [...]

In case progressives needed another reason to distrust Michael Ignatieff, he just pulled the rug out from under Employment Insurance improvements: Michael Ignatieff is reversing his support for a wide range of enhancements to Employment Insurance (EI) benefits, saying they are too expensive and are no longer required. The Liberal Leader attempted to provoke a [...]

The fact that 31,400 fewer Canadians received regular Employment Insurance (EI) benefits in July would be good news if it reflected an improved job market. But the Labour Force Survey indicates that, in July, employment decreased by 9,300 and unemployment increased by 17,900. These figures suggest that thousands of unemployed workers are running out of [...]

Total employment reportedly increased by 36,000 in August. This increase was entirely driven by 68,400 more jobs in educational services, which simply offset a decline of 65,300 in July. In other words, the educators that Statistics Canada counted as being “unemployed” in midsummer are now “employed.” So, today’s Labour Force Survey confirms that July’s release [...]

For reasons that escape me, the Globe ran a headline front page story today on what all fiscal policy and Employment Insurance wonks have known to be true for some time. Under current legislation, and as announced in the 2009 Budget, the EI premium rate set by a supposedly autonomous but tightly constrained new body [...]

While the Canadian economy has begun to recover from the “Great Recession” in terms of the level of GDP and overall job growth, unemployment and under-employment still remain well above pre-recession levels. The national unemployment rate in June 2010 was 7.9%, well up from 6.0% two years earlier. The number of unemployed workers was, at [...]

For the first time in eight months, the number of Employment Insurance (EI) recipients increased in May. We already knew from the Labour Force Survey that unemployment had increased by just over 8,000 in May. It is good news that EI expanded by the same amount because it implies that those who became unemployed that [...]

Today’s Employment Insurance (EI) figures for April indicate essentially no change in the number of Canadians receiving benefits or in the number filing claims. To put these flat EI numbers in context, April was the strongest month yet of labour-market recovery. Indeed, it saw the largest percentage increase in employment since August 2002. In one [...]

Statistics Canada reports that, after February’s pause, Employment Insurance (EI) resumed its contraction in March. Specifically, 24,200 fewer Canadians received regular EI benefits. The key question is whether these unemployed workers found jobs or simply ran out of benefits. The Labour Force Survey indicated that employment rose by 17,900 in March. Therefore, it seems unlikely [...]

Erin has blogged before on variable EI coverage of the unemployed at the city level  http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2009/09/28/employment-insurance-benefits-by-city/ and I have been aware for some time that  coverage is relatively low in the giant Toronto CMA. Nonetheless, I was taken aback to find out that, in the most recent month for which we have EI and Labour [...]

A recent article in The New York Times illustrates this point with the story of an unemployed administrative assistant in her 50s, who has not been able to find a job for over two years after being laid off. As the journalist explains, her difficulties are likely not the result of age discrimination, the weak [...]

This morning, Statistics Canada released Employment Insurance (EI) figures for February. These figures show slightly more recipients nationally, but somewhat fewer recipients among provinces. Statistics Canada confirms that this apparent discrepancy reflects the fact that each province is seasonally adjusted separately from the national total. When seasonal adjustment is tipping the balance between an increase [...]

The number of Canadians receiving regular Employment Insurance (EI) benefits dropped by 47,700 in January, the largest monthly decline in years. As usual, the key unanswered question is whether these workers are no longer on EI because they found jobs or simply ran out of benefits. The Labour Force Survey indicates that employment rose by [...]

The number of Canadians receiving Employment Insurance (EI) benefits plummeted in December. The drop of 40,100 was the largest monthly decrease in years. One would anticipate some decline in the number of EI recipients as the job market begins to recover. But the magnitude of December’s decline suggests that, in addition to those former recipients who [...]

The content in the EI report by myself and Sylvain Schetagne which was released by the CCPA yesterday won’t be new to readers of this blog – an updating of trends in unemployment and EI use to show that tens of thousands of workers who lost their jobs early in the Great Recession are and [...]

The number of Canadians receiving regular Employment Insurance (EI) benefits declined by 7,300 in November. As always, we do not know whether these workers found jobs or simply ran out of benefits. The Labour Force Survey indicated higher employment and slightly lower unemployment that month, which supports a positive interpretation. Following these declines in recipients [...]