It was March 2020, just before the first lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Ottawa resident Stephanie Fortin had just lost her full-time retail job.
As soon as the businesses closed their doors in compliance with public health measures, it became almost impossible for Ms. Fortin to find work. So she applied for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), a hastily implemented government program that offered eligible recipients $500 a week from March 15 to September 26.
Ms. Fortin was among some 20.7 million Canadians who received help under pandemic-related measures in 2020, according to 2021 census data that Statistics Canada released on Wednesday.
Data shows that Canadian incomes increased by 9.8% at the start of the pandemic compared to five years earlier. Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador were the only countries to register declines. The median after-tax household income was $73,000, reflecting weak employment income growth over five years and higher government transfers in 2020 in particular.
Although fewer Canadians received employment income during the pandemic, benefits brought the low-income rate down to 11.1% in 2020, from 14.4% in 2015, the largest drop since 1976. Statistic Canada also attributes a decrease in income inequality to the programs.
Experts had warned that the income data, which is based on Canada Revenue Agency tax and benefit records, would present a complicated picture of the start of the pandemic and should be seen as a snapshot – factors to longer term are at stake to understand how the landscape has since evolved.
During the time she received the CERB, Ms. Fortin was able to pay her bills, pursue long-abandoned hobbies, and plan her next steps toward an education that would allow her to obtain better-paying and more satisfying employment.
“For many of us, it was the first time that we couldn’t identify with our work. We really had to figure out who we were, she said in an interview. And this break, both mental and financial, where I didn’t have to worry about money, allowed me to envision what I wanted for myself in the future. »
Last year, Ms. Fortin enrolled in a dental assistant program at La Cité, a French-language college in Ottawa, and after graduating this spring, the 30-year-old found herself a job. as an assistant in a dental office.
In every economic crisis, there is a measurable trend of young workers continuing their education to make themselves more attractive to employers, economist Armine Yalnizyan explained ahead of the release of census data.
Ms Yalnizyan, who is the Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers, argued that young people aged 15 to 34 currently have “the biggest head start of any generation since the 1950s” in finding the types jobs they want. While CERB has played a role in helping some young people achieve these goals, she said the most important factor to pay attention to is the aging population.
Half a million adults have entered the over-65 demographic since the pandemic began, and many more have taken early retirement. This affects the labor market mobility of young adults, Ms Yalnizyan said, but will also skew average income trends, as retirees form a large block of the population and tend to earn lower fixed incomes.
“What the pandemic has done is actually accelerate the main story of the labor market over the past 10 years,” Ms Yalnizyan said, referring to the effects of an aging population. “It only accelerated what was going to happen anyway. »
This longer-term trend is reflected in census data, which shows that more than 20% of the workforce was already in the 55-64 age category at the start of 2020.
Another factor that Yalnizyan says will influence overall income and work trends in the wake of the pandemic is the expansion of Canada’s temporary foreign worker programs, which admit more non-residents for whom the Wage growth is generally stagnant.
This year’s federal budget promised to address labor shortages, including in sectors such as retail, restaurants and health care, by easing restrictions on the number of temporary workers who can be recruited and on the duration of their work.
This labor shortage reflects how quickly employment rates have returned to something that seemed normal after the initial crisis of the pandemic, according to Casey Warman, professor of economics at Dalhousie University.
“The rebound was incredibly quick. Surprisingly fast, he said in an interview before the census data was released. Halfway through 2021, we are completely back to where we were before. »
Still, the 2020 numbers offer valuable insight into people’s sources of income during the pandemic, he said.
At a press conference on Wednesday morning, André Bernard of Statistics Canada said it was difficult to determine what would have happened in 2020 without the impact of government assistance, although some statistics from a year on the other show the negative impact of the pandemic when viewed in isolation.
The proportion of Canadians with employment income fell from 2019, with more women than men dropping out of the labor force. The gender pay gap persisted, with men earning 35% more than women, according to median income rates.
In 2020, 113,835 fewer Canadians earned employment income compared to 2019, and 415,585 more earned less than $20,000.
Taken in isolation from pandemic-related benefits, median employment earnings were down from 2019 in most provinces. The largest losses occurred in the resource-rich regions of Alberta, Newfoundland and Labrador and Saskatchewan, down 6.3%, 6% and 4.2% respectively – losses partly attributed to historically low oil prices.
Higher median incomes in British Columbia, Prince Edward Island and the three territories reflect job losses in low-income sectors, the agency reported, as people who did not earn no income are not taken into account in the calculations of the median income.
More than two-thirds of Canadian adults, or 68.4%, have received government benefits related to COVID-19, with 27.6% of adults receiving federal emergency and recovery benefits, most commonly the CERB.
More than half of adults also received top-ups from existing federal programs, including 90.5% of seniors, and 4.2 million Canadian adults also received money through provincial assistance programs or territorial.