The Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability says 1.3 million Employment Insurance requests were received over the past 2 weeks.
Carla Qualtrough calls this an unprecedented number of EI requests over a 2-week period.
She says the reality is the system was not designed to deal with a pandemic outbreak of this scale, but she reassures the new system developed will be able to handle upwards of 400,000 requests at a time.
**With files from Mo Fahim