Mr. Speaker, the department is not in a position to accurately represent the number of individuals who were denied Employment Insurance benefits for the sole reason of their COVID-19 vaccine status.
While we have data representing the number of EI claims submitted and denied with the Record of Employment, or ROE, code of M, or terminated, and a comment specifying “non-compliance to employer's mandatory vaccine policy”, the “comment” section is not a mandatory field on the ROE; as a result, it is not possible to provide an accurate count of all EI claims denied for the sole reason of the COVID-19 vaccine status.
For these reasons, producing and validating a comprehensive response to this question would require a manual collection of information would lead to the disclosure of incomplete and misleading information.