Thank you.
That's absolutely correct. As I tried to outline in my opening remarks, because we have so many regions we are stretching the capacities of Statistics Canada's survey instrument to its very limit. Statistics Canada wants to give you the best signal possible, so it uses a three-month average of past unemployment rates. What we saw in this pandemic, what we saw in Alberta when the oil prices bottomed out, and also in Saskatchewan when potash prices collapsed, and what we saw in the great recession was an employment insurance system that was looking backwards. When the pandemic hit, it was still January's unemployment rate that was helping to determine eligibility for the program.
My suggestion is to make the bands that determine the eligibility rules much wider, or to cut back on the number of regions for a type of special benefit. Just use provincial employment rates or urban versus rural in a province. Statistics Canada can give us provincial employment rates on a monthly basis, and I think that would be hard-wiring a quicker, real-time facility into EI, rather than fossilizing it by being backwards-looking when important things happen quickly.