AI Analysis: Employment insurance regular income benefit characteristics, monthly, seasonally adjusted

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Employment Insurance regular income benefit dataset (Table 14100008) spans nearly 30 years of monthly, seasonally adjusted data from January 1997 to February 2026, covering 16 Canadian regions across two key metrics: benefit payments and benefit weeks. The dataset is dominated by a historic COVID-19 pandemic spike, where benefit payments peaked at $4.18 billion in June 2021 and benefit weeks reached 7.9 million in May 2021 — far exceeding any prior economic disruption. Outside of this anomaly, the data reveals strong regional concentration in larger provinces like Ontario and Quebec, a robust correlation (r = 0.89) between payments and weeks, and consistently right-skewed distributions reflecting wide variation across regions and time.

Key Findings

• EI benefit payments peaked at an all-time high of $4,178,184,290 in June 2021, while benefit weeks peaked at 7,905,620 in May 2021, both driven by the COVID-19 pandemic.
• A strong Pearson correlation of 0.8867 exists between benefit payments and benefit weeks, confirming that dollar outlays rise proportionally as the volume of weeks claimed increases.
• Ontario leads all provinces with an average of ~$464 million in monthly benefit payments over the last 12 months, reflecting its large labour force relative to other regions.
• Canada-wide average monthly benefit payments over the last 12 months were approximately $1.39 billion, with average monthly benefit weeks totaling roughly 2.5 million.
• Both distributions are heavily right-skewed: benefit payments average $131.6 million but have a median of only $39.9 million, while benefit weeks average 351,380 but have a median of just 126,020.
• Outlier detection using a rolling 12-month z-score method identified the 2020–2021 pandemic period as the most extreme anomaly, with the 2008–2009 financial crisis producing a smaller but still notable secondary spike.
• The dataset covers 16 geographic regions and 350 monthly periods, with seasonal adjustment applied throughout, making it a reliable resource for long-term labour market trend analysis.