CERB may be model for future: minister
COVID-19 benefit of $2,000/month
OTTAWA • The newly created benefit for workers whose livelihoods are affected by COVID-19 may be a model for how the federal government helps unemployed Canadians in the future, Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough said Thursday.
Dubbed the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, the $2,000-a-month taxable benefit will be available to any worker who earned $5,000 in the previous year and whose income drops to zero due to COVID-19.
Qualtrough says the government opted for the single benefit because the decades-old employment insurance system wasn’t designed to handle an economic shock where millions of workers wouldn’t qualify for assistance.
Funded partially outside the EI system, the new benefit has pushed direct financial aid in the economic package to $52 billion, out of the $107-billion overall total.
Qualtrough said close to 10 per cent of Ei-eligible workers have applied for help in just over a week and the labour crunch is likely to get worse. That works out to about 1.5 million workers.
But there are still more than five million workers — or almost one-quarter of the overall Canadian workforce — who aren’t eligible for EI, including because they may be self-employed, a gig worker, or don’t have enough qualifying hours.
“What we’re going to show through the CERB is that we can actually have a really straightforward income-support system at the federal level,” Qualtrough said in a telephone interview with The Canadian Press.
“This could be the impetus to really, radically simplify how people access income support from the federal government.”
That’s a discussion her department has been having for some time, and the pandemic will fuel those talks, she said, but it’s a conversation that won’t be settled quickly. Instead, Qualtrough said the government is focused on the labour situation right now — one she warned would get worse before it improves.
With the benefit about to be introduced, the government warned Thursday of a text scam that may be praying on concerned workers by asking them to reply or click on a link to get the CERB, which isn’t officially available yet. “I want to remind everyone that the government’s website is the best place to find reliable information on everything we’re doing,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives estimates nearly two million workers are at the greatest risk of being laid off by the end of the month. If three-quarters of those workers lost their jobs by March 31, the jobless rate would rise to 13.9 per cent — the worst it’s been in 70 years, wrote David Macdonald, the centre’s senior economist.