AI Analysis: Employment insurance claims received by province and territory, monthly, seasonally adjusted

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Employment Insurance dataset (Table 14100005) spans 83 years of monthly claims data from January 1943 to February 2026, capturing dramatic economic shocks including the COVID-19 pandemic peak of 1,603,300 claims in October 2020. As of February 2026, Canada recorded 399,460 total EI claims, reflecting a significant but incomplete recovery from pandemic-era highs. The data reveals strong regional concentration, with larger provinces like Ontario and Quebec dominating claim volumes, while the distribution is heavily right-skewed due to national-level aggregates pulling the mean far above the median.

Key Findings

• The dataset covers 83 years of monthly EI claims (January 1943 – February 2026), comprising 998 time periods and over 73,000 rows across 16 geographic regions and multiple claim types.
• Canada's all-time EI claims peak was 1,603,300 in October 2020, nearly 4x the statistical upper bound of 420,501, driven entirely by the COVID-19 pandemic — with 60 months flagged as outliers, mostly concentrated in 2020–2021.
• The most recent data point (February 2026) shows 399,460 total EI claims nationally, well below the pandemic peak but still elevated relative to pre-pandemic norms.
• The distribution is strongly right-skewed: the mean of 22,355 claims is more than 4x the median of 5,225, with 50% of all records falling within a relatively narrow IQR band of 600 to 16,560 claims.
• Canada's national aggregate leads all geographic segments with an average of 152,894 seasonally adjusted EI claims per month, while smaller territories and Atlantic provinces rank at the bottom of the regional volume ranking.
• Seasonally adjusted initial and renewal claims combined show the highest average (35,641) and greatest variability (standard deviation: 68,209), reflecting the outsized influence of national-level figures on the dataset.
• Claim types are highly correlated by construction — 'Initial & Renewal Claims' is strongly correlated with both individual claim types — and the 2008–09 global financial crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic stand out as the two most prominent spikes across the 83-year time series.