Employment Insurance Beneficiaries

Overview

Summary

The Employment Insurance (EI) program provides temporary income support to unemployed workers while they look for employment or upgrade their skills. It also provides special benefits to workers who take time off from work in relation to specific life events (e.g., illness; pregnancy; and caring for a newborn, newly-adopted or critically-ill or injured child or adult). Workers receive EI benefits only if they have paid premiums in the past year and meet qualifying and entitlement conditions. Self-employed workers may participate in EI and receive special benefits.

The EIB data consist of person-level, weekly records covering the period of January 1997 to June 2018. It includes information for only one week per month, which coincides with the Labour Force Survey reference week. Each of these weekly records was produced from information available about 3.5 months following the reference period. Individual records cannot be longitudinally linked over time by person or business. Please refer to the Employment Insurance Status Vector data for longitudinally linkable beneficiary records.

Each record contains policy-relevant information on the claims, such as the previous occupation of the claimant, insurable hours and earnings, and the claim’s weekly benefit rate. Each record also contains information for the reference week including benefit type, earnings and number of continuous weeks on claim.

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