As we heard from Ms. Howard as well, the 700 hours in high-employment areas like Ontario, for instance, would exclude a lot of part-time people. The other issue in the universities, related to this question of basing it on hours, is what hours get counted when you teach? If there are three lecture hours, for someone to go into that classroom for three hours takes an awful lot more hours before you go in, and the extent to which those hours are counted or not is a big issue in terms of qualifying for EI. If you're teaching a 12-week course and it is counted as only five hours or six hours per course, for instance, you're ineligible for EI as a result. We need to start developing, as was suggested by Ms. Howard, targeted EI for those kinds of precarious employment that are ineligible, even though they pay into EI.
On October 26th, 2017. See this statement in context.