You're right. There has been a significant increase in the number of EI applications that we've been receiving, unfortunately. In fact, in the first three months of this calendar year--January, February, March--we saw an increase of almost 50% in the number of applications we had to process.
That's why we took action early to try to staff up. We brought people back from other departments. We engaged new people. So far we've brought on 900 additional personnel to deal with this significant increase in demand. We are also in the process of hiring another 400 people. We're streamlining processes. We're working with companies to do electronic filing, because that's much faster and much more accurate.
We want to make sure that those who are unfortunate and lose their jobs do get the benefits that they deserve, get the options to which they're entitled explained to them, in a very timely manner.
This is a really appropriate opportunity to thank those people who have been working on expanding the EI program from a policy point of view, and those who have been working on the front lines. We've expanded the hours of our service call centres to include weekends and hours later in the day. There are a lot of individuals working for HRSD through Service Canada who really are going the extra mile right now to help Canadians in their time of need, and I personally would like to say thank you to them. They've been maintaining their accuracy standards and they've kept us pretty much on track with our delivery standards, which we're also increasing so that we can meet the needs of Canadians.