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The goal of this paper was to see whether there were long-term employment effects caused by the reforms of Bill C-17. It is apparent that C-17 did introduce major changes in the relationship between unemployment insurance benefits and lasting characteristics of new jobs. In many ways, these changes seem to be linked to the fundamental modification of the distribution of weeks of benefits that was induced by C-17. The very nature of UI wage effects has changed in a manner strikingly similar to the change in the distribution of weeks of benefits.

There does seem to be evidence that C-17 both lowered the number of seasonal jobs and the percentage of workers finding full-time jobs. The first result was a desired objective of C-17 but the second was not intended to be an outcome. It is possible that this hours-worked effect reflects the fact that old "job-sharing"schemes in which different individuals took full-time jobs for weeks at a time have been replaced by schemes in which part-time workers share jobs for the same period.

Overall, the tightening of benefit rules does translate into a loss of wages holding behaviour constant. In particular, there was no evidence that persons whose entitlement was reduced the most under C-17 had wage outcomes worse than those of the general population. Behaviour was not constant, however, and appears to have more than compensated for changes in benefit weeks. A puzzling aspect of this change in behaviour is an apparent greater propensity to accept new jobs with relatively few weekly hours. There is thus some suggestion that workers faced a trade off between hourly wages and weekly hours when searching for a new job. Of course, it is far from clear that reductions in hours worked actually represent involuntary cuts in work time. The possibility that some job sharing was undertaken using hours is an interesting topic deserving further study. An ideal opportunity to examine this possibility will be provided by future monitoring of responses to changes in the new Employment Insurance program such as the switch from weeks to hours as the basis for benefit eligibility calculations.