The Canada Revenue Agency headquarters in Ottawa on Aug. 17, 2020.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
The Canada Emergency Response Benefit helped a significant number of Canadians get better jobs, mainly because it gave them the financial means to improve their skills through training programs, a new study has found.
The study, conducted jointly by two think tanks, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Future Skills Centre, suggests the CERB program aided workers during the pandemic not only by tiding them over until they could find new jobs, but also by helping them move into new fields with greater job security and higher income potential.
CERB provided taxable $500-a-week payments to Canadians who were out of work because of the pandemic. The program, introduced in April, 2020, was later replaced by the Canada Recovery Benefit, which stopped taking applications in December, 2021.
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For the study, the polling company Abacus Data conducted a survey of 1,500 CERB recipients in November, 2022.
“We found that the program disproportionately played a key role for a large number of users to pivot to better employment,” said Katherine Scott, a senior researcher at the CCPA and a co-author of the study’s report. “The study illustrated that a large number of people, with a modicum of financial security, turned their attention to whether they were happy in their jobs.”
About half of survey respondents said CERB had helped them re-enter the job market, and 37 per cent said that they had used the benefit to pursue education and training to advance their careers.
Of the respondents, 41 per cent said they had ended up in new careers after receiving CERB, and 37 per cent said they had improved their standing in existing careers.
The survey also found that roughly 80 per cent of CERB recipients continued looking for work while receiving the benefit. Of those, 66 per cent said CERB had allowed them to land new positions, and given them time to look for the right jobs, not just the first that came along.
The study’s authors argue that the current version of Canada’s employment insurance program is not broad enough, and not easy enough to access, to have the same benefits CERB did.
“The financial support and predictability of CERB allowed recipients to pause and evaluate whether they wanted to return to their previous jobs, or to invest in an alternative career,” Ms. Scott said. Survey participants, according to the report, noted that while they had thought of improving their skills prior to CERB, it was the benefit that gave them the time and money to execute their plans.
Among those who did not enroll in training and education programs using CERB, a majority said it was a lack of money that had prevented them from doing so.
“This is an important finding, because while CERB was viewed by most in a positive light, it wasn’t enough for many to pay the bills and afford upskilling,” Ms. Scott said. The study’s authors are recommending that future government income-support programs be combined with affordable education and training opportunities.
CERB, and other pandemic relief programs, such as the Canada Wage Subsidy, have been mired in controversy because of the broad, often confusing qualification criteria the government used to evaluate who was eligible. This resulted in a substantial number of people receiving money to which they were not entitled.
A December, 2022, report from Canada’s Auditor-General found that Ottawa had disbursed $4.6-billion to people who weren’t eligible for CERB and the CRB, and $27.4-billion under other programs to potentially ineligible employers.
But the study’s authors argue in their report that, regardless of glitches in CERB, its benefits to the labour force far outweighed its costs.
For example, of the 41 per cent of respondents who ended up in new careers, close to half said those jobs better matched their skills than their old ones, and were more satisfying.
Young people, in particular, used CERB to enroll in education programs. Of respondents aged between 18 and 29, 60 per cent said they had pursued some kind of training or education program while on CERB, and most said they would not have been able to do so if the benefit had not existed.
Ms. Scott said the benefits the study associates with CERB are similar to those that have been found to flow from universal basic income programs, which provide participants with grants to use as they please. The now-defunct Ontario Basic Income Pilot program, which was launched in 2018, found that a significant number of participants were able to move into better jobs with better wages after receiving income support from the government for a period of time.
“I think what we can conclude is that targeted income support, as a tool for supporting displaced workers, does work,” Ms. Scott said. “It was, after all, telling that a significant number of CERB recipients chose to pursue training and education on their own accord while they received the benefit.”