BC continued to see a downward trend in the number of people receiving Employment Insurance.
When you break it all down, the province has been experiencing a downward trend for a while.
“For the year-over-year comparison, we see a noticeably large decline of 8% for the province. The number of beneficiaries was unusually high in the latter half of 2016 thanks to policy changes that came into effect,” says Gordon Song, Statistics Canada analyst.
In BC, over 50,500 received some form of benefits in August.
However, the number of claims in the province went down by 16.9% – that’s mostly due to claims increase in July due to the wildfires.
In Canada, the outlook was eerily similar according to Song. “The number of people receiving regular EI benefits was down 1.8% or 9,600 people. Canada ended up being down a larger percentage than BC.”
Just over 524,000 people across the country were on Pogge during this time.
Alberta led all western provinces with 67,190 residents collecting EI, while Quebec had the most out of all the provinces at 130,910.