Sure.
At roughly the same time the Social Security Tribunal was created, the department on it's own volition decided quite commendably to launch a more proactive and high-touch kind of outreach to EI applicants who had been refused and who had requested a reconsideration.
I want to give credit to a very distinguished, now unfortunately retired, public servant, Karen Jackson, who was our associate deputy minister for operations at HRSDC. She and her team in Service Canada led this initiative, which was hugely successful. In fact when they first briefed me on it they were quite nervous about how good the numbers were. They thought it couldn't possibly continue, but they were seeing a 90% reduction in the number of appeals to the SST versus the number of appeals that used to go to the EI board of referees.
What was happening was their officials were picking up the phone and calling the people asking for a reconsideration and working through the file with them. In most cases these are not always black and white, a case of fraud or a case of someone who has been unfairly denied. Often someone has submitted the wrong form or inadequate documentary evidence to support the release from employment or the record of employment. Often the Service Canada official can, with the proactive reconsideration process, sort out those document or clerical issues with the person or tell the person, “I'm sorry, but in the region you're in you have to work an extra 10 days to qualify,” or “This is not adequate evidence that you've been released from your job”.
As a result we see a much faster process. I believe this is being done in less than six weeks, and certainly less than three months, in almost every instance, as opposed to the old EI board of referees model, which took months. It was six months on average.
We think that this kind of client-based, non-adversarial, faster approach is very—but if they still don't like the answer they get, if the officer on the reconsideration tells them, “I'm sorry, but you still don't qualify”, they have every right without any prejudice to make a formal application for an appeal to the tribunal. The number of those formal appeals is down by 90%, which means the clients themselves believe that they're getting fair decisions at the reconsideration stage and good service.