The number of Canadians collecting Employment Insurance (EI) benefits has reached the lowest amount ever since the federal government began keeping records on the matter in 1997, a new Statistics Canada study finds.
The agency says that 375,000 Canadians received regular EI benefits during the month of January, which was down by about 20,000 from December 2022, representing a drop in recipients of 5 percent.
“This was the lowest number of regular EI beneficiaries on record since comparable data became available in 1997,” Statistics Canada wrote in a report published March 23.
The agency noted that it was excluding the seven-month period at the beginning of the pandemic when the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit was available from March to September 2020, during which time EI collections spiked….