Thank you very much.
The employment insurance system is so big and complex that these idiosyncrasies often find their way into the system, even if they weren't designed to be there.
I remember when I was knocking on doors in the community of Osgoode, a soldier told me that his wife had a child three days before he went to serve Canada in the Middle East, in the Golan Heights. He was there for a year. He came back and applied for his parental benefits, but they said, “You can't take them, because you have to take parental leave during the first year.” He said, “I was soldiering abroad for the country in that year. Surely there must be an exception.” They said, “There is only one exception, and that is if you were, otherwise, imprisoned in a federal penitentiary, in which case you could have deferred your benefits, but not if you're protecting the country in uniform.” Anyway, we managed to fix that with the Fairness for Military Families Act.
You have identified another problem, probably one that wasn't designed to be there but just happened to be. Are there other hidden gems such as this in the system that we should know about right now while we're at it?