Thank you, Mr. Chair.
For many years, a program called the best 14 weeks pilot project has been run in 25 of the 58 EI regions across the country. As you say, it was a number of years ago, and what it said basically was that in areas of high unemployment where it's difficult to find a job, instead of taking their average wage, we were just going to take it from the best 14 weeks they worked. One of the problems was that if you worked extra, it started to bring you down a bit.
But the other thing that we found was that in those regions where the pilot project was running, when they started the pilot project they might have been at 13% or 14% unemployment, and they're now sitting at 5%. Yet other parts of the country where there was a 5% unemployment rate, people needed maybe 22 to 26 weeks. That's how they were evaluated, so they would be taking more work but at a lower rate. They ended up getting fewer benefits in dollars than the people in the pilot regions, and that wasn't fair.
So we said we were going to make it equal across the country and adjust it according to the unemployment rate in their region. Now if you have two parts of the country where the unemployment rate is the same, somebody has the same job experience, they're going to get the same benefits. But we're also going to make sure that it does vary according to our belief that when an unemployment rate in an area is low, it's easier for people to find work, so it makes it harder to qualify for EI. They have less need for it because there's more opportunity for them to be working.
So it's going to vary directly with that, which I think is fair. In areas where it's tough to find another job and the unemployment rate is high, then the number of weeks required to determine the benefit rate will be lower in recognition of those differences that exist between different regions.