There have been a number of changes, as you know, Mr. Chairman, but the one that's received the most attention is connecting Canadians with available jobs. It was essentially a clarification of the longstanding rules implicit in the employment insurance system, that applicants for EI are required to actively seek and accept available work at their skill level in their local area. We have given a little more definition to what acceptable work and the local area are defined as—always to be applied with a flexibility by our officials.
Basically, Mr. Chairman, the reason we implemented these clarified guidelines is that we saw a really strange paradox of a growing number of employers, even in regions of very high unemployment with large numbers of habitual EI recipients, filing labour market opinions to bring in workers from abroad. Frankly, it made no sense at all to me that someone from Thailand, the Philippines, or Russia would be willing to get on a plane and fly across the world to go to a community to do a job where people who have done precisely that job are down the street, or in the next village, collecting employment insurance.
EI is supposed to be there, and it will be there, for folks who lose work through no fault of their own, and for whom no relevant work is available in their local area. Now there's been a lot of fearmongering about these changes. I can understand there's a lot of understandable anxiety. Whenever there's change, people are going to be anxious, especially when it relates to their income security. I get that 100%. We could have done a better job, perhaps, of communicating those changes, especially in areas where people are very dependent on EI.
Having said that, I really do think some of this was just political fearmongering. I mentioned in question period that one member of Parliament was running around northern New Brunswick saying that this was the end of EI, the end of seasonal benefits, that these communities will be destroyed, that families would go into poverty—complete unadulterated balderdash, invented from whole cloth, and nothing to do with the rules. I followed those speeches and rallies and media stories, and it's interesting that none of them mentioned that the specific changes made were actually quite modest clarifications of the longstanding rules. Now we have the first seven months of data indicating that there has been virtually no negative impact on EI applicants as a result of connecting Canadians with available jobs.
To give you one example in the province of Quebec, for the first seven months of this year versus the first seven months of 2012, there were 6,000 more people whose EI applications were not accepted. We looked a little more deeply into the data and found that only 160 of those people, as best we could tell, had their claims refused because they did not comply with the new requirements under connecting Canadians with available jobs, and that about 5,000 of those refused applicants were refused because we discovered they were living outside the country.
That's not to say everyone who is refused is clearly way outside the rules, but it is to say that on debates like this, as elected political officials, we should not recklessly frighten people about their income security.
Finally, I would like to say that we don't have comprehensive data to draw meaningful conclusions from this, but there's anecdotal evidence building from employers that we achieved the objective. I’ve heard from some fish processing plants in the east coast.
I have also heard about the Regroupement des employeurs du secteur bioalimentaire, a Quebec organization, and from the Saint-Bruno ski resort, where the normal number of out-of-season workers has increased because of the changes we have made.
We just want to encourage unemployed Canadians to be a little more active and to look for a job in their region. As of now, we are meeting our objectives.