Research summary: Employment insurance receipt, unemployment rates and temporary resident employment
Official title: The interactions between employment insurance receipt, unemployment rates and temporary resident employment
Authors of the report: Michelle G. Laing, Mamadou Diallo and Samuel Laryea
Alternate formats
Employment insurance receipt, unemployment rates and temporary resident employment [PDF - 273 KB]
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Why this study
Employers sometimes have a hard time finding people with the right skills for jobs. There are not enough young Canadian graduates to fill all the jobs, and they may not have enough experience if they just finished school.
Instead of only hiring new graduates, employers could also look for:
- people who are unemployed and receiving regular Employment Insurance (EI), or
- foreign workers who can work for a short time in Canada
These foreign workers are called Temporary Residents (TRs). The goal of this study was to see how TRs might affect competition for jobs.
What we did
We used data from 2014 to 2019 from the Employment Insurance Coverage Survey (EICS), the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamics Database (CEEDD), and the Labour Force Survey (LFS) to study the job market. First, we looked at the data to understand how job market conditions, EI receipt, and TRs were connected. Then, we did a deeper analysis to see how strong and important those connections were.
What we found
Employed TRs mostly lived in regions with low unemployment rates. Those regions had fewer unemployed people who were receiving EI benefits. They also had fewer people who wanted to work if they could find a good job and fewer people who believed they could find a good job.
What it means
The findings suggest that even if not many people are looking for jobs, those jobs might not be good for the people who don't have work. There might be personal reasons that make it hard for them to take those jobs, like needing someone to watch their kids or needing a way to get to work. So, employers might have to hire people who can work for them temporarily. This suggests that TRs are likely helping to fill job openings instead of taking jobs from Canadians.
Contact us
For access to the full report, please contact us using the email address below.
Skills and Employment Branch, Labour Market Information Directorate, Policy Research Analysis and Geomatics Division
Email: esdc.nc.sspb.research-recherche.dgpss.cn.edsc@esdc-edsc.gc.ca