Thank you for the question.
Let me give you some quick numbers on the emergency student benefit support.
We've helped 682,722 unique applicants, so 682,000 young people have accessed the CESB. We've had 1.8 million applications. Of those, 1.5 million were at the $1,250-per-month mark, and 303,000 were at the $2,000-per-month mark. We've paid out about $2.5 billion under this program alone. We have created tens of thousands of jobs.
Let me speak directly to that, because I didn't do as good a job yesterday as I could have at the other committee at explaining how these measures are a comprehensive package and how, indeed, they are stackable.
In other words, students have access to a number of the measures. A student who can receive the CESB, which is $1,250 or $2,000 a month, can also get a larger Canada student loan when they go back to school in the fall, and that same student may have their existing student loan payment put on hold because of the moratorium. Additionally, that student can earn up to $1,000 per month and still get the CESB. Finally, under the CSSG, they could have accumulated volunteer hours, earning a grant of up to $5,000 in the fall.
It's important to appreciate that a student receiving the CSSG would have also been able to access the CESB, so a student earning $5,000 over four months through the CESB, or $8,000 if they had dependents or a disability, could have earned an additional $5,000 through the CSSG. They could have received either $10,000 or $13,000 between the two, plus additional allowable earnings of $4,000.
I think that's what maybe is being missed here. This was a comprehensive package. A student could access the CESB, but then, instead of staying home, could go and volunteer and earn volunteer-hour credits towards the CSSG.
What we'd heard from student groups was that they wanted comprehensive measures, a package, and that's what we delivered to them, but I think we tend to speak about them in isolation, as if they don't relate to each other. Perhaps we need to do a better job of really explaining how stackable they are.