The Federal Court of Appeal has found that Employment Insurance rules limiting access to regular benefits after maternity and parental benefits infringed the equality guarantee in section 15 of the Charter. The applicants had received maternity and parental EI benefits and then lost their jobs shortly before, during or shortly after their leave. When they later applied for regular EI benefits, statutory limits on combining the different benefit types meant they received little or no job loss protection. The challenged rules were facially neutral. They did not expressly say that women would receive less protection. The Court looked instead at how the rules operated in practice. Maternity benefits are available only to women and women also receive a disproportionate share of parental benefits. As a result, the rules limiting how maternity and parental benefits could be combined with regular EI benefits placed women at a particular disadvantage when they lost employment around the same period. The Court found that this created an adverse effects distinction based on sex.
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