Thank you, Ms. MacDonald.
I would like to highlight a few important points. First of all, in terms of the payment of EI benefits, the results since the beginning of the pandemic have never been better than they are today. We have been able to pay benefits within our service standard 88% of the time, whereas prior to the pandemic it was closer to 80%.
We know that some people are waiting, but the vast majority of applications are being processed in a very short time frame. In terms of the number of applications received and processed, as of today we have received approximately 3.1 million EI claims, and we have already processed 2.9 million. Currently, 200,000 applications are being processed, including those we received last week.
We will do everything we can to resolve existing problems.