About 1,750 people in Prince George collected benefits through Ottawa’s Employment Insurance program in August.

BC continued to see a downward trend in the number of people picking up the funding.

When you break it all down, both regions have been experiencing a downward trend for a while.

“For the year-over-year comparison, we see noticeably larger declines for both regions, 9.3% for Prince George and 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 people 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.”

Alberta led all western provinces with 67,190 people collecting EI, while Quebec had the most
out of all the provinces nationwide.