Thank you, Chair, and thank you for the invitation to appear.
My brief comments will first address some data, followed by thoughts about the future.
For the data, I analyzed the Statistics Canada labour force survey for March, along with economists Tammy Schirle and Mikal Skuterud, for the C.D. Howe Institute. Already in March—and I know that March was the very beginning of this crisis—we can see a very big impact of COVID on the work of Canadians.
Already then, more than 2.2 million Canadians had shifted out of work. It is important to emphasize, however, that you can't just look at the unemployment count, because some didn't move to unemployment. More of them actually shifted to some kind of furlough, meaning that they kept their job but moved to zero or very few hours worked. That's a really important aspect of what's going on in the labour market.
Overall, hours worked dropped by 18% in March compared to February. The hardest-hit occupations were in cultural work, education and food service. It was low-wage earners, women and young people who took the hardest hit. For example, women earning less than $15 an hour saw a total drop in hours worked of 30%.
That was in March. What's happening now?
The answer is actually hard to know because we lack timely data. Large businesses, small businesses, charities and families are all trying to make very big, important decisions about their future every day, and what they need is fresh data in this fast-moving crisis.
Statistics Canada has reacted effectively by expediting their GDP numbers and putting out some innovative and timely data products. In addition, we now have administrative data on the emergency response benefit three times per week. That's something that was added last week, and that was a very great move to see the government make.
We know from today's update that 7.1 million Canadians are now on the emergency response benefit. As someone else mentioned, that's one-third of our labour force. This is entirely unprecedented in the history of economic statistics. We need more data to guide Canadians' crucial decisions going forward.
Number one, we need provincial breakdowns of the emergency response benefit, because, as we know, some provinces have very different situations from those of other provinces. We need to know that so that local businesses and families can make plans about their economic future.
Number two, as these other new programs begin to take application, like the wage subsidy, the emergency business account, and the emergency student benefit, administrative data on each those, again broken down by province, would be very nice to have. It's not nice to have for academics to play with data; this is for real businesses, real families to make plans about their future in this very uncertain environment.
To close, I want to emphasize that in the middle of this emergency, we need to keep our eyes on a plan for the future. We need to consider how the emergency benefits we are now designing and implementing will serve Canadians in a partially open economy that may be with us for some time.
In addition, we need to give employers and employees clear signals about how we will transition away from emergency benefits when the time is appropriate. These kinds of clear signals about the transition are needed so that everyone can plan, make hiring decisions and make other decisions.
Finally, we need to ensure that we learn lessons from this crisis about how we support unemployed workers, and how we support our public servants who delivered the programs that we really needed when the crisis hit.
Thank you for the opportunity to make the comments.