The Canadian Emergency Response Benefit payments issued during the first year of the pandemic were a never-before-used kind of economic intervention intended to stabilize the economy and — more important — to protect Canadians from losing key resources at a time when they were most needed.
A new analysis from Statistics Canada concludes CERB kept the income gap between white and racialized workers from growing even wider. The finding, which lines up with previous research by other groups, provides further evidence of the effectiveness of CERB at cushioning the impact of the massive pandemic economic downturn on a wide swath of Canadians.
“CERB payments played a crucial role in stabilizing income by offsetting lost wages among racialized and non-racialized workers,” says study author Sadjad Kalhor, an analyst in the statistical agency’s Diversity and Sociocultural Statistics branch. “Racialized” in the definition Statistics Canada uses means a person who is a member of a visible minority, excluding Indigenous people.
Twenty-five per cent of Canadian workers received CERB payments in 2020, before the program was retired in favour of more targeted benefits. For its recipients, StatCan found that CERB replaced $0.95 for every dollar of lost income.
If you look at racialized workers specifically, CERB’s impact is even more significant. Both racialized women and racialized men have a higher rate of labour-market participation than their white counterparts. Their jobs were also more vulnerable to lockdowns. “A greater share of racialized workers received this benefit — 29 per cent,” Kalhor says. Thirty per cent of racialized women and 27 per cent of racialized men who were workforce participants received CERB.
Both groups also lost more employment income because of COVID-19 lockdowns: 20 per cent of 2019 income for racialized men and 23 per cent for racialized women. By comparison, white workers lost 15 per cent of 2019 income, while white women lost 17 per cent. The persistent racial wage gap in Canada makes this number more stark, because, on aggregate, racialized workers were also earning less than white workers.
Agenda segment, April 7, 2020: Basic income and COVID-19
“This study found that the pandemic had a strong and negative impact for racialized workers,” Kalhor says, “especially among women.” But the study also found that CERB played an important role in offsetting those losses, he adds.
For racialized men, CERB replaced $0.83 cents for every lost dollar of income, compared to $0.78 for white men. For both racialized and white women, CERB more than replaced lost employment income, reflecting the gendered wage gap that means women, generally speaking, earn less than men for the work they do. The $2,000 monthly payment represented a functional raise for both groups of women — $1.09 for every dollar of income for racialized women and $1.17 for non-racialized women.
“If receiving [$2,000 per month] means you’re better off, that’s an indication that you’re not earning much money,” says McMaster University political scientist Peter Graefe. However, he notes, it’s important to remember that this Statistics Canada report focuses on the median income of each demographic, meaning half the group benefited even more from CERB, while the other half took a loss.
Andrea Burke is a PhD candidate at Western University. (Adrienne Elkerton)
This study adds further weight to the evidence that the program achieved its goals, says Andrea Burke, a gender-studies PhD candidate at Western University who studies the impacts of CERB.
“No one can say that CERB wasn’t an impressive program,” she says. “We do have to remember it got money into people’s hands, and that was so important.”
But it’s also important to remember the workers who were declared essential, she says. Many of them worked in industries where racialized people are overrepresented. They couldn’t qualify for CERB and thus had to keep working, regardless of other factors such as pre-existing health conditions that made them more vulnerable to COVID-19. Burke hears from those workers in her research and says she’s heard an overwhelming sense of frustration.
In a 2023 article for Policy Options, Burke wrote that “government assistance in future crises should be available to all workers, targeted toward the most vulnerable to prevent further devastation.”
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