CERB has been a lifesaver. We would have been hit with a tsunami of desperate people in our community food centres.
The irony of CERB is that it's completely highlighted how inadequate our social support systems are. CERB is about $2,000 a month, as you know; if you get that over a year, that's the poverty line: $24,000 a year for a single person. As I mentioned in my remarks, CERB gives you two or three times more than any social assistance rate across this country. You'd have to be making about $21 per hour full time to get the same on CERB as you would on EI. I think CERB has been very important in stabilizing people's lives to be able to land in an okay position and then start to try to figure out how to rebuild.
It has been critical for our work. I think we would have been completely smashed if there hadn't been those kinds of income supports. There has been a bit of emergency relief via food, but without those income supports, it would have been trouble.