OTTAWA—Cliff Groen gulped when he saw the numbers.

It was the middle of March, and even as the economy quavered and COVID-19 evolved into a global pandemic, Groen and his colleagues at Service Canada were chugging along as usual. Jobless claims stayed steady at around 7,500 each day, processed at the routine pace of bureaucracy.

Then the wave hit, and it hit hard.

Service Canada got more than 71,000 applications for employment insurance on March 16, the most ever in a single day — until the next day, when it got more than 88,000.

By the time the tally for the third day came in at more than 130,000 claims, Groen knew routine wasn’t good enough anymore. They would need to change everything — fast.

“Definitely there was a big gulp on my part and lots of my colleagues,” Groen, the assistant deputy minister of benefits delivery at Service Canada, told the Star by phone this week.

“Unless we did something dramatically different,” he said, “there would be no way we would be able to process those applications on any kind of a timely basis.”

You could say the necessity to do something completely different is the modus operandi of the public service in the time of coronavirus. With thousands of workers shifting to home offices, Ottawa has redeployed workers to process millions of jobless claims as Groen and his team designed a whole new program to replace EI and reach more people — it’s called the Canada Emergency Response Benefit — over the span of just three weeks.

At the same time, the government has reimagined its industrial policy to rally Canadian companies to the coronavirus fight by converting factories to pump out much-needed medical equipment. Charles Vincent, an acting assistant deputy minister responsible for COVID-19 industry mobilization, said he has seen hundreds of civil servants step up to clock in extra hours to field thousands of proposals to help domestic manufacturers convert to help with the pandemic fight. This included a complete reorganization of his department as workers focus exclusively on the crisis, he said.

“I have not seen anything quite like this ever before, to be frank, and it’s been three weeks at this pace — 16, 17 hours a day, seven days a week,” he said.

Groen and his team at Service Canada shifted into high gear that week after they received record-setting jobless claims for three days in a row. That was a “call to arms” for the team, Groen said, which began immediately with a rush of meetings and briefings to other departments and cabinet ministers about the tsunami of EI claims flooding in.

Groen said it was clear even then that the current EI system wouldn’t cut it. They needed something simpler and quicker. They also wanted to make sure people that aren’t eligible for regular EI — like self-employed business owners and people who leave work to care for someone else — received government support amid the pandemic, he said.

“The other key element was it needed to be extremely speedy. We knew that we couldn’t take months to develop and launch this new program,” Groen said.

The rush carried into that weekend, March 20 and 21, as public servants scrambled to write legislation to create the new benefit, Groen said. IT workers with Service Canada and the Canada Revenue Agency also started the crucial task of creating the web platform for applications that would need to be able to carry the huge volume of expected requests, he said.

Like many of his colleagues, Groen said he was working 18 to 20 hour days, walking home to crash briefly before returning to the Service Canada headquarters in Gatineau, Que.

“Typically there are lots of checks and balances within government. Normally the policy design is developed, and there’s consultation, and there’s review by different areas within government,” Groen said.

Instead, from the realization a new program was needed when legislation was tabled in the House of Commons on March 24, six days had passed. After that, it was a matter of testing the system to make sure it could handle the volume, and then applications opened April 6.

About 4.58 million of 5 million claims had been processed by Thursday this week, including EI claims since March 15 that were rolled into the new benefit, according to Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough’s office.

“In my career, and I’ve been a public servant for over 20 years, I have never seen anything in that order, and then in less than three weeks it was fully launched,” Groen said.

“There’s nothing in my career that compares to that.”

Mollie Jacques is a chef in Toronto who lost her job last month, applied for EI, and received two payments already this week. While she questioned whether she received the right amount of money, and noted many she knows in her beleaguered industry are still confused how the benefit works, Jacques said she is “impressed” to see the payments flowing so soon.

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“As someone who has applied for EI before, two to three months is the normal amount of time it takes,” she said. “I’ve dealt with the government quite a bit over the years, and snail’s pace is what I normally expect … I’m honestly surprised that it has come together this quickly.”

Groen said he has never been prouder to be a public servant that during the pandemic.

“Especially when we were able to launch the benefit and knew that people were going to be able to get their payments, tears did come to lots of our eyes,” he said. “We were so happy and proud that we … were there for Canadians.”