When Emersyn* lost her full-time job at a nonprofit and applied for Employment Insurance (EI), she expected the social safety net to catch her. 

It didn’t.  

“It was not enough to live on,” says the Nova Scotia resident. “I would receive $800 every two weeks or so, and I had to stretch this to my rental payments, groceries, utilities, car payments, debt payments and everyday purchases.” 

After a few months, she was able to find part-time employment in retail and continued to collect some supplemental support from EI. But this, too, came woefully short of what she needed to live on, in part because she had to commute to and from her job and pay for parking. 

“The inadequate level of coverage, even when I had part-time employment income and EI benefits supplementing, affected my life greatly,” she says. “I fell behind on my debt payments, missing most of them constantly because I had a complete lack of disposable income. I had to prioritize certain expenses over others, sometimes going weeks without having a proper amount of meals each day.” 

Emersyn wasn’t necessarily expecting to experience food insecurity; after all, she had been able to study and then take on full-time work. But no matter a person’s circumstances, “there isn’t a single human being who deserves to have to choose between having a place to live and affording groceries,” she says. “This is a stark indicator that the system as it is will not sustain those in need.” 

“It Clearly Isn’t Doing Its Job” 

Reforming EI is one of Food Bank Canada’s top policy recommendations for the federal government. In our latest Poverty Report Cards, which grade governments on their efforts to reduce poverty and food insecurity, our analysts noted that EI payments, which typically amount to at most 55% of a worker’s insurable earnings, are often not enough to live on. 

They also emphasized that EI was “built for a postwar labour market defined by stable, full-time employment with a single employer” – a model that does not reflect today’s workforce. At a time when an increasing proportion of work is part-time, temporary, or contract-based, “the program covers a shrinking share of workers … [This is] disproportionately affecting youth, people with disabilities and racialized Canadians,” the report said. 

The government has frequently introduced temporary changes to EI but has so far stopped short of introducing the permanent reforms that are needed.  

According to Statistics Canada, more than half of the 1.4 million Canadians who were unemployed at any given point during 2024 were ineligible for EI. Sometimes this was because they had left their work voluntarily, for reasons such as going back to school. But nearly half a million people were excluded because they had jobs that were not covered by the program, and another 137,000 hadn’t accumulated enough insurable hours on the job to qualify. 

To help fill in the huge gap represented by the first group, Food Banks Canada recommends: 

• Strengthening the enforcement of worker classification: When people are classified as “contractors” yet meet the criteria for being an “employee,” they miss out on benefits they are entitled to, including EI. This is illegal, yet widespread. 

• Designing ways of collecting premiums from and offering the insurance to people who are genuinely contractors, self-employed or gig workers. 

To extend better coverage to the second group of excluded workers, who didn’t manage to accumulate enough insurable hours before losing their employment, FBC urges the government to lower the total number of hours required to 420. 

And when it comes to inadequate payments, we recommend implementing a floor of at least $450 and raising the income-replacement rate above the current 55%. 

In short, Food Banks Canada is calling on the federal government to deliver permanent, structural reform to EI — one that expands access, improves benefit adequacy, and reflects the realities of today’s labour market and cost of living. This way, unemployed workers will be able to meet their essential needs while focusing on retraining and/or looking for new opportunities. 

For her part, Emersyn believes governments should replace EI with Universal Basic Income but agrees that if EI is to remain in place, “then there needs to be an increase in the percentages of income that are given to beneficiaries. And there needs to be less red tape in the way when it comes to eligibility criteria.” 

“My final thought is just an utter disappointment in [EI] as it stands,” she concludes. “I appreciate that it’s an attempt to give people what they need, but it clearly isn’t doing its job when people are still making incredibly difficult decisions.” 
 

Join the call for a modern EI for a modern workforce. 

*Surname omitted for privacy.