Thursday, August 27, 2009

If You Are Working Regularly and On The Books You Are eligible

Stephen Gordon: Employment insurance isn't broke. So why fix it?
Posted: August 26, 2009, 4:00 PM by NP Editor

If asked, people might say something along the lines of this Toronto Star editorial:

The rolls of the unemployed in Canada continue to grow... Many or most of them won't be eligible for employment insurance (EI), due to the program's Byzantine eligibility requirements.

Very alarming - especially that word "most". But how do we know that a large fraction - let alone "most" - of the newly-unemployed are in fact not eligible for EI? Isn't that something we'd like to know?

I know it's something I'd like to know, so I decided to do some digging. It turns out that the EI system is holding up pretty well - in fact, much better than one might have expected.

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