Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to join you today. I'm Jennifer Robson, an associate professor of political management at Carleton University.
To try to minimize some of the technical problems that I've been aware of in recent meetings, I am going to deliver my remarks today in English only. I do apologize in advance, particularly to Madame Chabot and and Monsieur Lafrenière, but I just know that I will make a mess of things if I try to think about what I'm saying and click different languages back and forth. I do apologize.
My remarks today are informed by my research on Canadian social policy and by the countless inquiries that I've received from Canadians about the emergency income supports during the pandemic. Members of the committee may be aware that since March 25 I've been regularly updating a plain-language summary of income benefits. In fact, I just posted an update to that before beginning the testimony today. Finally, I'm also speaking as a mom of three who, like millions of parents, has been trying to figure out how to juggle full-time work and home-schooling at the same time.
I've previously described the economic shutdown due to COVID as a medically induced coma. As a country, we might be slowly starting to come out of that coma, but we're still not able to do much without some kind of life support. As we regain consciousness, there are some important truths that we need to grapple with.
COVID-19 hasn't hit all Canadians equally, whether in health or economic effects. I'm going to focus on four different kinds of inequalities that have mattered in the crisis and will continue to matter during the economic reopening and eventual rebuilding.
The first one is inequalities in information and technical capabilities. There has been uneven information and help for individual Canadians to understand and use government benefits. At the same time, it has been evident that government has not always had adequate data or IT systems to be able to launch or adapt programs as nimbly as policy-makers, or the public, might want.
The second one is inequalities in the financial resources that households have to self-insure against an income interruption and the inevitable need to wait, even a short time, for government help.
The third one is inequalities in how COVID has impacted paid work. There are people whose work has been largely immune to the shutdown, workers who were suddenly deemed essential, too many Canadians who suddenly lost all or most of their paid work, and then there are those whose pre-COVID unemployment has been significantly prolonged.
Finally, the fourth one is inequalities in the responsibility for unpaid care and unequal opportunities to fully participate in the economic reopening and eventual rebuilding.
Let me add a little more detail and offer some recommendations to the committee.
The Government of Canada does not have enough information about Canadians or the computer systems to be able to design and deliver income supports in a way that can nimbly handle big month-over-month changes in employment and income. The fact that the back-end system that runs EI was able to ramp up from processing an average of five claims a minute to processing 1,000 a minute is nothing short of a public administration miracle.
As you heard from the deputy minister himself, there is much we cannot do as quickly as we should, or even at all, because our IT systems cannot handle rapid changes or fine-grained exceptions to general rules. While many have touted a national basic income as the right answer, the fact is there is no magic list of Canadians to be able to find and send a cheque to everyone, let alone whoever would meet the eligibility criteria that Parliament might set. Therefore, I hope this committee might support a plan to invest significantly, and for the long-term, in the back-end capacity of government so that we are better placed to not only prepare for the next macroshock but to also address the wide range of needs of Canadians who experience microshocks all the time.
Too many Canadians find government programs confusing. They are confusing. Online frequently asked questions and call centres are no substitute for personalized guidance and help. I don't have to tell you as MPs how important it is that Canadians have access to local, accessible and accurate help to use government programs. You and your constituency teams have been playing a vital role in connecting people to the help they need, but you can't do it all. No one network could.
We need to build a properly resourced web of non-profit, no-fee services to answer questions, problem solve and advocate for clients who can't do it themselves. Here I would encourage the committee to look into the Citizens Advice bureaus in the United Kingdom or the Financial Empowerment Centers in the United States as sources of inspiration.
Many Canadians are going to continue to need income support for the next while, and they will need active measures to get them back into the workforce. We have to hope that the emergency wage subsidy will mean that some share of layoffs won't become permanent. However, many sectors that were the hardest hit in job losses, sectors such as accommodation and food services, retail trade and education services, are also lower down the list for reopening in provincial plans. We want to incentivize work, but work that is safe to do.
The emergency programs such as CERB are going to have to be wound down gradually and likely morphed into more nimble designs that can handle a wider range of cases. This is going to be hard to do, in large part because of the same gaps in federal data and IT that I mentioned a moment ago. Work should also be under way now with provinces to adapt and expand active-measure employment programs so that they can be more effective, handle increased demand and work within the constraints imposed by social distancing, which is likely to continue for some time.
One-third of Canadians came into this crisis without enough liquid savings to pay for even a poverty-line standard of living for one month, let alone keeping themselves at their usual level of consumption. A bit of additional liquidity in the form of mortgage and tax deferrals will have helped some, but part of the rebuilding phase is going to have to be rebuilding household finances, and I hope the members of this committee will work with colleagues on the finance committee and others to find better tools to help households reduce debt and build emergency savings.
Finally, too many families with kids are going to face awful and unreasonable choices during the reopening, as they continue to juggle unpaid care and returning to paid work or a job search. By best estimates, two-thirds of the lost employment in March—and we'll get updates on Friday in terms of those lost hours of paid work as well as jobs—was among women, but it is moms who lost the most paid work, more than other women without kids and more than dads.
Provinces are taking a range of approaches to reopening, but it increasingly looks as though most elementary schools will not be able to reopen until September. Child care services that were already unable to meet demand precrisis won't be able to operate at full capacity for some time to come. I worry about the potential loss of child care spaces as operators lose revenue and lay off staff. I worry about mothers being left out of work or job hunting, even as governments lift public health restrictions. I also worry what will happen to household finances if, on average, 40% of the earned income of the family vanishes because mom has to stay home with the kids. This isn't a private problem for families to solve; it's a macroeconomic disaster waiting to happen.
With provincial agreement, federal support should be directed at protecting existing child care spaces when current revenues put a centre's viability at risk. We should also increase the number of child care programs that can work within provincial health guidelines so that parents, and moms in particular, can participate in the economic reopening and eventual recovery.
Thank you. I look forward to your questions.