The announcement, a few days ago by Minister Karina Gould, of the full-time reassignment of call center employees who process employment insurance claims is a matter of common sense and should be welcomed. With thousands of workers waiting for their benefits, the decision by senior ministry officials to stick to the budget no matter what made little sense.
Because, it must be said, the program is currently experiencing a situation that is unprecedented to say the least: at a time when requests for benefits are at their lowest for 25 years, the number of dormant files is higher than it has been a long time. These difficulties are both effects of context and the result of ill-advised decisions.
The pandemic and its effects on the program are at the forefront of the causes. It will be recalled that, faced with the exceptional demand in March 2020, the program would have been unable to absorb the processing of applications. In less than two weeks, a parallel program (the CERB: Canadian emergency benefit) was therefore created from scratch (a feat that should be noted) to replace employment insurance.
Since 2020, employment insurance has regained its place, but successive rule changes have created confusion not only among claimants, but also within the administrative apparatus itself.
Similarly, the transition from the CERB to employment insurance, which generated a posteriori the sending of no less than 1.7 million overpayment notices, of which a few tens of thousands are now contested by the service providers. , mobilizes among the most experienced employees of the ministry.
Added to this are the complications caused by the problem of identity theft, which has been particularly harmful in Quebec, affecting tens of thousands of files.
Successive rule changes have added to a more structural problem for the department: the high turnover rate of its workforce, which has exacerbated the situation. Almost half of the employees who work in call centers and processing have been hired since the pandemic and have had to learn under changing and difficult conditions. Anyone who is familiar with employment insurance will recognize the (too) great complexity of its rules. It takes a new employee several months to master them.
A three-year plan
In the fall, the Minister responsible for Service Canada, Karina Gould, went to seek additional funds which will be much needed to overcome the problem, but in the opinion of the Department itself, it will take time to time. With these credits, a three-year plan was put in place to set things right.
For the moment, the program floats.
Every day, my office receives complaints from claimants caught in an administrative black hole, not sure when they will receive their benefits. Many are still waiting months. In desperation, some officers are reported to have gone so far as to suggest applicants go to food banks…an unacceptable situation.
In making this inventory of the damage, we cannot omit mentioning a key aggravating factor: the premature return to the usual administrative rules decreed by the Minister of Finance in her 2022 budget.
Decreed for strictly budgetary reasons, this decision has undermined a device that was struggling to recover from the effects of the pandemic. In this, the government will have been its own worst enemy.
It should be remembered that in 2021, the return of the CERB to employment insurance was made within the framework of relaxed rules which facilitated the processing of files. The simplification of employment insurance rules regarding the treatment of so-called separation amounts (vacation pay, severance pay, etc.), records of employment, the number of hours to qualify and the divisor allowed effect of doubling the percentage of requests that can be processed automatically without the intervention of an agent, thus generating time savings and better use of human resources.
In a context where the minister responsible for employment insurance, Carla Qualtrough, was simultaneously chairing consultations where the issue of simplifying the rules of the program was one of the main points of consensus on the part of stakeholders, maintaining these measures should have gone without saying. For reasons difficult to grasp, this was not the case.
There is an urgent need to correct this error to take the pressure off the ministry’s resources and speed up the resolution of the files of thousands of service providers lost in administrative limbo, but also because the program urgently needs simpler rules. Should we have a new crisis tomorrow morning that the employment insurance program, having failed to learn the lessons of 2020, would be in much the same situation as in March 2020.