I will do my best. I will ask Mr. Thompson to answer the second question, because he is more familiar with the details of the program.
Maybe if I could, though....
I apologize, but I would like to continue in English, because the details are a little technical and—
I don't want to add anything to the confusion around this.
You talked about the reconciliation of the figures. One of Mr. Thompson's requests when he was here previously was around this issue of the percentage of men and women who do not qualify for employment insurance because they don't have enough hours. We're just finalizing that analysis in the department, and it will be on its way to the committee shortly. I think you asked for a historical comparison.
Let me go back to a couple of things. One is about how you qualify for employment insurance benefits. The first thing is that you have to be paying into the employment insurance program, so automatically those folks who don't contribute to EI aren't eligible. That's actually a significant percentage. It includes folks who haven't been in the workforce and people who are in self-employment. It's actually a very significant percentage. Almost 35% of women who don't qualify for EI are in that situation because they are not contributors.
Next, let's say you're in the program and you're a contributor to EI. Then you lose your job. Well, to be eligible for the regular benefits under employment insurance, it would basically have to be an involuntary separation from work. If people voluntarily quit their jobs--if they quit to go back to school, for instance, or because they want to find another job--they are not eligible for employment insurance according to the current legislation. They make up about 16.4%.
Then there are the people who don't have enough hours to qualify. That's the 9.3% of women. In the case of the people who may be coming into your office to ask you why they can't get EI, we have to go back and look at the reason they're not getting EI. Are they contributing to the program? What were their reasons for separation from the workforce? Do they have enough hours?
Because economic conditions have been changing so dramatically, it's important to go over the importance of the variable entrance requirement for having enough hours. For the variable entrance requirement, as I think I said in my remarks, we look at EI economic regions, the number of hours necessary to qualify for EI benefits, and the number of weeks for which you'd be eligible. It depends on the employment situation in the EI economic region you live in.
Over the course of the last...since October, so not very many months, five months of labour force data, 26 of the 58 EI regions in the country have seen the variable entrance requirements adjusted on the basis of changing economic conditions. For the most part, we've seen unemployment going up, although there have been some exceptions there, so 26 of--