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Canada hasn’t seen unemployment rates higher than 20 per cent since the darkest days of the Great Depression. Yet, at the end of the first day of eligibility for the new emergency aid benefit, three and half million Canadians had applied for Employment Insurance or the new benefit.

Nearly one quarter of the Canadian labour force is currently out of work – and we’re not done yet.

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By Monday evening, the number of EI claims made since March 16 was 2.72 million. There were 788,000 Canada Emergency Response Benefit applications made on Monday alone.

These are staggering numbers and it is a testimony to the unsung heroes in the public service that 2.38 million of the EI applications have already been processed. The money to buy groceries or pay rent for more than two million hard-pressed families is either in their bank accounts, or will be in the next day or two.

That satisfactory outcome was by no means guaranteed, according to senior government officials.