Canada Emergency Response Benefit
Financial Management

Canada Emergency Response Benefit

Today I saw a lot of advertisement for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit where people can soon start applying for funding due to a loss of work as a direct result of the COVID 19 pandemic. Because they are expecting a huge surge of applicants it’s actually interesting to see that they are requesting people to apply based on their month of birth for specific dates. I suppose this will help them to organize requests as well.

According to the site, applicants must meet the following criteria:

Residing in Canada, who are at least 15 years old;

-Who have stopped working because of COVID-19 and have not voluntarily quit their job;
-Who had income of at least $5,000 in 2019 or in the 12 months prior to the date of their application; and
-Who are or expect to be without employment or self-employment income for at least 14 consecutive days in the initial four-week period. For subsequent benefit periods, they expect to have no employment income.

The Benefit is only available to individuals who stopped work as a result of reasons related to COVID-19. If you are looking for a job but haven’t stopped working because of COVID-19, you are not eligible for the Benefit.

So this will be interesting on how many people will actually qualify considering self-employed people often have multiple sources of income. For example, if a typical parent who normally works a regular job as their main income but has a side business that generates an extra $100 a month in residual income as it is recession free per se then does that disqualify them from receiving this funding? This will be interesting to see how it plays out.

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