Back in the initial stages of the crisis, there was a lot of very vigorous and productive debate, I thought, about how to provide income support to Canadians.
There were two important criteria, I think. One was for something that we could do quickly. Another one was for a program that could replace lost income for people who lost their job because of the crisis. There are various different ways to do that. The one that was chosen was using the CERB, which, as we all know, was delivered fairly efficiently and quickly through the Canada Revenue Agency. By early April, cheques were arriving in mailboxes and by direct deposit. It was focused on replacing income.
The contrast is to some kind of system of basic income or “a cheque to everyone” kind of approach. There would be two challenges with that approach. Number one, it is not actually clear that it would have been any faster, because there does not exist any master database so that you can just press a button and send a cheque to everyone. That simply doesn't exist. It would have taken time to build that, and in fact would have taken longer than the CERB to deliver things.
The second thing is that there are millions of Canadians who lost their jobs and, at the same time, there are 30 million adult Canadians. If you had sent a cheque to every one of those 30 million adult Canadians, that would have spread the same amount of money very thinly. Instead of sending everyone a smaller cheque, the idea was to focus resources on those who lost income because of work.