Hundreds of thousands of unemployed Canadians could see their benefits run out with no job prospects in sight, according to an analysis the Canadian Labour Congress released Monday.

The analysis by CLC chief economist Andrew Jackson found that 500,000 Canadians who initiated EI claims in 2009 could exhaust their benefits before finding a new job despite Ottawa's move to extend Employment Insurance benefits by five weeks.

Half a million Canadians could lose EI benefits before they have any job prospects, the Canadian Labour Congress says. (Paul Sakuma/Associated Press)

His report found there were 120,000 more unemployed Canadians unable to collect benefits as of October 2009 compared with before the recession hit in October 2008.

"We can expect that the total number of new regular claims in 2009 will [have] hit about two million," Jackson said in his report, written for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

"If the exhaustion rate were to remain the same as in 2006-07, we could eventually see some 500,000-plus exhausted claims in late 2009 and into 2010," he wrote.

The report gave credit to the government for the changes to EI but said they were inadequate to handle the additional demands on the system caused by the recession, where at the peak more than 400,000 jobs were lost.

The number of Canadians who were collecting benefits rose from about 500,000 to more than 809,000 between October 2008 and October 2009, but the number who were jobless and not collecting benefits also rose, Jackson said.

Many of those were women, his report added.

Only about half of the unemployed nationally were collecting benefits as of last October, the report said. In Ontario, one of the hardest-hit provinces, that number was as low as 41 per cent, Jackson said.

Jackson found that the average time it took to find a job stood at 17 weeks as of last September, compared with 13.6 weeks in September 2008.

With files from The Canadian Press