Employment Insurance: Toronto's Jobless Have Less Than 1-In-5 Shot To Get Benefits
OTTAWA -- It was a barely noticed peculiarity in the government's latest employment insurance numbers — just 17 per cent of unemployed workers in Toronto are collecting EI, among the lowest rates in the city's history as it confronts a higher jobless rate than the provincial and national average.
There are more than 307,000 jobless Torontonians, according to the latest Statistics Canada figures. Fewer than 55,000 of them are collecting EI in a city with an 8.9 per cent jobless rate.
Experts point out that while many of the jobless are chronically unemployed citizens who don't qualify for EI, others are part of an evolving urban labour market that isn't being reflected by Canada's EI system.
Matthew Mendelsohn, director of the University of Toronto's Mowat Centre, says EI is out of step with labour market realities in the country's biggest cities, leaving tens of thousands of workers without a social safety net.
"The federal program to support unemployed Canadians is no longer aligned or consistent with the labour market realities in a city like Toronto, so what that means is that workers in cities like Toronto have no protection from sudden job loss or income loss," Mendelsohn said in an interview Wednesday.
"The way EI is designed doesn't address the new world of work and the fact that fewer and fewer people have traditional employer-employee relationships, and that new world is much more prominent in big metropolitan cities like Toronto."
Read More: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/09/04/ei-benefits-toronto_n_5764800.html?utm_hp_ref=canada-business
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