Employment Insurance

The Community Legal Assistance Society has served the interests of unemployed workers since the 1970s. CLAS's Employment Insurance Program combines test cases and other casework with aggressive law reform and community building to tackle the outstanding problems facing unemployed workers under the current law and policy.

Test cases primarily take place within the appeal system, but CLAS has also challenged the Commission's position in all levels of the court system. The Stella Bliss case, decided by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1979, sought equality for pregnant women pursuant to the Canadian Bill of Rights. The Court's rejection of CLAS's arguments was widely criticized, and was part of the impetus for the far stronger equality rights provision in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Ultimately the Supreme Court itself repudiated its reasoning in Bliss in the 1989 Brooks decision.

CLAS has also taken many test cases to the Federal Court of Appeal. For example, the Whiffen decision in 1994 put an end to the Commission's practice of denying benefits to a worker who had to quit a job to move with his or her spouse to a smaller community. In Roussy, decided in 1992, the Court overturned an expanded concept of "casual employment" that had been used by the Commission to deny coverage to many construction workers and others who sometimes work directly for homeowners or other non-commercial employers.

Beginning in 1980, CLAS has organized the UI Working Group, which has a membership of more than 50 union reps, worker appointees to the Boards of Referees, community advocates, and others. The Group meets monthly, and is recognized by the Commission and the community as one of the major stakeholders in Canada for unemployed workers. 

In 1999, CLAS and PovNet began to co-sponsor a confidential email list that enables labour referees and advocates for unemployed workers to keep abreast of new developments in unemployment insurance law, and to exchange advice and information with each other.