There was a presentation sent out ahead of time. Did everybody receive it? It was a deck. You have it? Good.
I want to thank the committee for the opportunity to speak today on information related to your study on the impact of the changes in 2012-13 to EI and of access to the program. I'll be using survey and administrative data to provide some background related to the work of the committee, where StatsCan has information and data related to some of the changes to the program.
Of course, there are many factors that can have an impact on the data that I'll be showing you today, other than changes in the EI program. These include changes in the global, national, or local labour market; and demographic changes, including the aging workforce, etc. Therefore, we always caution users about making assumptions of a direct cause and effect relationship between changes in a program and changes in labour market data.
Going to the second slide, I want to give you a bit of general information on the current labour market. In the graph on the left, we have data since 2005 for both the employment rate, which is the blue line, and the unemployment rate, which is the red line. As you can see, neither the employment rate nor the unemployment rate have returned to their pre-recession levels.
Still, in the context of the post-recession labour market, we see from the graph on the right the proportion of the unemployed population that is potentially eligible to receive EI benefits—the blue line, It has been declining since 2009. Of course, conversely, the proportion of the unemployed population that is not potentially eligible to receive EI benefits is rising.
From other data from the labour force survey, not provided here, we know that since 2008, the proportion of the unemployed who have been unemployed for long durations—more than 26 weeks—has increased from 13% in 2008 to 20% in 2014, which could impact their eligibility for EI, that is, they do not have enough insurable hours to qualify for EI benefits before becoming unemployed again, or they could have exhausted the maximum duration of EI benefits before returning to work.
Going to slide 3, I want to take this opportunity to explain two fundamental concepts that people sometimes think are the same thing. There's the unemployed, which is published each month by StatsCan, which is from the labour force survey. There are three categories of unemployed. Those who were without work but had looked for work and were available for work. That's the largest group. That's about 90% of the unemployed. You'll note there, there's no criteria for their actually having worked in the past, but you just are without work and are looking for it. The other two categories equally split the last 10% of the unemployed: those who are temporarily laid off due to business conditions with an expectation they will be recalled and are available for work, and those without work but who had a job to start in four weeks.
These three are in comparison to regular EI beneficiaries in the EI program. Those are EI claimants who have temporarily or permanently lost their employment, but in order to be eligible for regular benefits, they must have experienced an interruption in earnings, be capable and available for work, and are unable to find suitable employment.
Looking quickly at slide 4, this shows the distribution or the share of the unemployed that can be found in each province, which is in blue, as well as the share of the EI recipients, in red. What becomes obvious right away is that Atlantic Canada and Quebec have a greater proportion of regular EI beneficiaries than they do unemployed persons, whereas the reverse is true in Alberta and B.C.
This again goes back to differences in the labour markets among the provinces. There are proportionally more workers in the labour market with temporary jobs—in particular, seasonal ones—in the Atlantic provinces. This will cause some of the differences in the distribution, since it can lead to higher chances of having multiple employment insurance claims over a year. Also, depending on the circumstances, people who are temporarily off work may or may not be counted as unemployed in the labour force survey.
Because I know we're short on time, I'll mention a couple of things that are related to some of the changes in 2012-13 to the EI program. I'll to go to slide 5, and then I'll probably skip a few slides.
I wanted to look at the next slide because it is related. The red line shows a change in the program. It looks at the average weekly benefit payments, which have trended upward since the implementation of EI benefit calculations based on the 14 to 22 weeks during the previous year when earnings were the highest. This is a change that came into effect in 2013. To explain this graph, the blue dot is what the trend would have looked like if the trend prior to April had continued, whereas the black is the trend in the benefits after April 2013. It's to show that the trend in the benefits did go up.
I'll skip quickly to slide 9. One of the things was an interest in accessibility to job alerts and job information. There was a change in 2013 to the job alerts system. The changes that were made implied that people had access to the Internet to get information on job alerts. One of the concerns might be whether or not people with low income would have access to these sorts of things. In this one, we're using information that came through a supplementary survey to the labour force survey. The blue line is people who contact employers as their main way of searching for jobs and the red is those who use the Internet. This is by type of education. We don't have it by income, but we do have it by education, and there's a correlation between education and income. Less educated people still tend to contact employers directly versus using the Internet, but the more highly educated people use the Internet. This shows that there's definitely a disparity in the type of job search, depending on your education. There's more information in the deck about that as well, and hopefully it's quite evident.