It was March 2020, just before the first lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Ottawa resident Stephanie Fortin had recently lost her full-time retail job.
As soon as businesses closed their doors in compliance with public health measures, it became nearly impossible for Fortin to find work. So he applied for Canada’s Emergency Response Benefit, a hastily assembled government program that offered eligible beneficiaries $500 a week from March 15 to September 26.
Fortin is one of 20.7 million Canadians who received pandemic support in 2020, according to 2021 census data that Statistics Canada released Wednesday.
The data shows that Canadian income trended 9.8% higher during the early pandemic than five years earlier, with Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador seeing the only overall declines. The median after-tax household income was $73,000, a reflection of slow job income growth over five years and higher government transfers in 2020 specifically.
Despite fewer Canadians receiving labor income during the pandemic, transfers reduced the low-earning rate to 11.1% in 2020 from 14.4% in 2015, the largest decline since 1976. Statistics Canada also attributes a decline in income inequality to programs. .
Experts warned that the earnings data, which is based on tax and benefit records from the Canada Revenue Agency, would form a complicated picture of the early pandemic and should be viewed as a snapshot in time: the longer-term factors term are at stake to understand how the picture. has evolved since then.
During his time as a CERB recipient, Fortin was able to cover his bills, pursue long-abandoned hobbies and plan ahead for his next steps toward an education that would lead to a better-paying and more satisfying job.
what people are reading
“For a lot of us, it was the first time that we couldn’t identify ourselves as our work. We had to really figure out who we are,” he said in an interview. “And that break, both mentally and financially, where I didn’t have to worry about money, allowed me to visualize what I wanted for myself in the future.”
Last year, Fortin enrolled in a dental assistant program at La Cité, a francophone university in Ottawa, and after graduating this spring, the 30-year-old is working as an assistant in a dental office.
In every economic crisis, there is a measurable trend of younger workers seeking more education to become more attractive to employers, economist Armine Yalnizyan explained ahead of the census data release.
Canadian income rose in 2020 amid acceptance of pandemic benefits: Census data. #CDNPoli #NationalCensus #CERB #Covid19
Yalnizyan, an Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers, argued that 15-34-year-olds currently have “the biggest head start of any generation since the 1950s” in finding the kinds of jobs they want. Although CERB played a role in helping some young people achieve those goals, she said the most important factor to pay attention to is the aging of the population.
Half a million older adults have entered the 65+ demographic since the pandemic began, with many others taking early retirement. This affects the mobility of younger adults in the labor market, Yalnizyan said, but will also distort average earnings trends, as retirees form a large population bloc and tend to earn lower fixed incomes.
“What the pandemic actually did was accelerate the main story of the labor market over the last 10 years,” Yalnizyan said, referring to the effects of an aging population. “It just sped up what was going to happen anyway.”
That longer-term trend is reflected in census data, which shows that more than 20 percent of the workforce was already in the 55-64 age category by 2020.
Another factor Yalnizyan said will influence overall earnings and labor trends in the wake of the pandemic is the expansion of Canada’s temporary foreign worker programs, which are admitting larger numbers of non-residents for whom wage growth is often stagnant. .
This year’s federal budget promised to address labor shortages, including in sectors such as retail, food service and health care, by relaxing restrictions on how many temporary workers can be brought on board and for how long they can last. to work.
That labor shortage is a reflection of how quickly employment rates returned to something that seemed normal after the initial drop in the pandemic, according to Casey Warman, an economics professor at Dalhousie University.
“The recovery was unbelievably fast. Surprisingly fast,” he said in an interview ahead of the release of the census data. “By the middle of 2021, we are completely back to where we were before.”
Still, the 2020 numbers offer a valuable snapshot of what people’s sources of income were during the pandemic, he said.
At a press conference Wednesday morning, André Bernard, head of Statistics Canada’s center for income and socioeconomic well-being, said it’s difficult to break down what would have happened in 2020 without the impact of government transfers, although some year-over-year Two-year statistics show the negative impact of the pandemic when viewed in isolation.
The proportion of Canadians receiving labor income has fallen since 2019, with more women than men leaving the labor market. The gender pay gap remained, with men earning 35 percent more than women, based on median earnings rates.
In 2020, 113,835 fewer Canadians received earned income than in 2019, and 415,585 more earned less than $20,000.
Taken in isolation from the benefits of the pandemic, median labor earnings were down from 2019 in most provinces. The largest losses were in resource-rich Alberta, Newfoundland and Labrador and Saskatchewan, down 6.3%, 6% and 4.2% respectively, losses attributed in part to record low oil prices .
The higher median earnings in British Columbia, Prince Edward Island and the three territories are a reflection of job losses in low-income sectors, the agency reported, because people who did not earn any income are not reflected in the median income calculations.
More than two-thirds of Canadian adults, or 68.4%, received government benefits related to COVID-19, and 27.6% of adults received federal emergency and recovery benefits, most often CERB.
More than half of adults also received supplements from existing federal programs, including 90.5 per cent of seniors, and 4.2 million Canadian adults also received money through provincial or territorial relief programs.
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on July 13, 2022.