My understanding is that the issue is that pregnant women who are applying for the CERB through Service Canada are of course accurately declaring they are pregnant, and then finding they are being shuffled into maternity benefits. If I understood correctly from the testimony of the deputy minister last week, this is because the back-end system that runs the employment insurance side of the CERB, separate from the CRA-administered side, is not able to distinguish or to handle those exceptional cases.
In normal times it is not uncommon for expectant women who find themselves laid off to take some time of regular EI benefits, and then transition to maternity or parental benefits, sometimes with an adjustment to the number of weeks they will qualify for. I do not have a full sense of, and I was not able to glean from the deputy minister's testimony, exactly the nature of the technical limitations, but I did note that he referred to the antiquated system of COBOL, which is older than me, so that's getting up there in years.
Members may be interested that, on my Twitter feed over the weekend, I posted a brief snapshot of COBOL code, which does only one thing: It prints records from one file onto a piece of paper. It struck me that if that is the complexity of the code required to simply print something, then creating exceptions to cases, to tell a long-standing system to do something different, to make an exception that if somebody says she is pregnant she can still receive the CERB, must be rather complicated from an IT perspective.
That said, I am disappointed because it struck me that this is obviously a series of cases that ought to have been expected. I have not heard similar concerns for women who have been applying through the Canada Revenue Agency. I wonder if it might not be worth the committee's time to pursue and understand how the back-end system is different at the CRA relative to Service Canada.