Employment Insurance Appeal Division: How to appeal

Starting your appeal

Fill out and send us the Application to the Appeal Division – Employment Insurance form to start your appeal.

You have 30 days to send it to us. Give all the information the form asks for.

You need to include information about your General Division decision. You can include one of the following:

A copy of your General Division decision
The date of your General Division decision
The file number of your General Division decision. You can find the file number on the first page of your General Division decision. It begins with “GE.”

Asking for permission to appeal

The form asks you to explain why you think the General Division made a mistake based on a ground of appeal. This is where you give the “reasons for your appeal.” At this stage, you need to convince the Appeal Division to allow your appeal to go ahead. This is called getting leave (or permission) to appeal. You have to show the Appeal Division that you have an argument that could possibly succeed.

Costs

There’s no fee to appeal to the Social Security Tribunal (SST).

But you may have to pay costs related to your appeal if you:

make photocopies of documents you want to send to us
send documents to us by Canada Post or a courier service
hire a representative
translate documents into either English or French
travel to an in-person hearing

In very rare cases, if you must attend a hearing, you may be able to get reimbursed for travel expenses, living expenses or lost income. The SST chairperson decides if there are special reasons that justify a reimbursement under section 63 of the Department of Employment and Social Development Act. Learn about these special situations in our policy on reimbursement of expenses and payment of allowances.