The association I've seen with insurable hours is due to the fact that there's a greater prevalence of women in part-time work and part-time full-year work, which generally leads to much lower rates of accumulating a sufficient amount of hours worked. The current program favours part-year workers, but not part-time, full-year workers.
The degree of difference is that full-time, full-year workers with a valid job separation in this country, almost no matter where you live, qualify for regular EI benefits at a rate of about 90% to 95%. Those are the data. There's no editorial.... However, the numbers for part-time workers usually drops to somewhere around 60% to 65%, so there's a big gap there and it's due to the fact that there are just so many different forms of employment and we try to do a lot and it's hard to meet them all.