I Fought the , and I Won
The Canada Emergency Response Benefit helped me survive COVID- 19’s first wave. Then the government tried to claw back the cash
The Canada Emergency Response Bene t helped me survive -19’s rst wave. Then the government tried to claw back the cash
Some indeterminate day last fall, back from my biweekly masked trudge to the grocery store, I arrive home to a letter from the Canada Revenue Agency. They want proof that my income in 2019 was greater than $5,000 to confirm eligibility for cerb payments I received over the summer.
The Canada Emergency Response Benefit was a sensible, wide-ranging backstop, shoring up the livelihoods of those who found themselves struggling in a suddenly frozen economy. Rolled out quickly and efficiently last March and run on an honour system, cerb allowed anyone facing loss of income because of covid-19 to go online, check a few boxes confirming eligibility, and receive $2,000 in monthly assistance. I put in a call to the cra in September, inquiring after one of these cheques that had gone missing.
A phone number is included in the letter, and I call it. With my bank account well into an uncontrolled dive, I’m on hold, waiting to speak with one of the more than 44,000 personnel who make up the largest apparatus of the federal public service, its average budget a nose over $5 billion in pursuit of around $430 billion in annual tax revenue. It’s a leviathan. I’m krill. After thirty minutes, I’m talking to a perfunctory but nonthreatening cra agent, Barney. (Agents, supervisors, and managers all offer their names on contact, I’ll come to learn.)
Barney seems eager to help with my case and be on his way — bigger fish, a man about a deduction. It should be straightforward. In 2019, I was one of the Canadian writers who got lucky with a $25,000 arts-production grant, an award of taxable income to help with subsistence while working on an ongoing project. The grant represented the largest portion of what I’d made that year. The cra’s online portal listed types of income and/or situations that would be ineligible for cerb. “Arts-production grants” didn’t appear.
I’m now sitting cross-legged on my floor, the central stamen in an array of splayedpetal papers. “So this one will work? The t4a?” “From the arts council grant? Yes, that’ll work. Upload that.” That was my first, cataclysmic mistake. Doing what I was told. On the day I was told to do it.
Lockdown last March exploded everyone’s sense of the future’s relative predictability. Yes, the sun kept coming up, but over the never seen before. It hit everyone hard psychologically and some harder materially: the underemployed, the working poor, the self-employed, the “precariat.” As happens for writers, I was already having a thin year. Now, covid-19. My course at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies was cancelled. Three residency/fellowship opportunities: cancelled. My upcoming book: bumped from spring to fall. Prospects looked grim.
I’m living in a one-and-a-half-bedroom, the cheapest rental I could find within my son’s school catchment in Toronto. With me half the time, in his half bedroom, he’s been Zen-ishly uncomplaining throughout this upheaval, as though he’s seen pandemics before. If we’re going by the usual metric advising we allocate no