Report

The impact of the Canada Emergency Response Benefits and the three Canada Recovery Benefits on the Canada Child Benefit program

Jun 8, 2022

This report provides an estimate of the impact of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and the three Canada Recovery Benefits (CRBs) payments on the Canada Child Benefit (CCB) program.

Highlights

We estimate the cost of the CCB program to be $1.1 billion higher than the projected cost of the current program over the 2021-2022 to 2023-2024 fiscal years if pandemic benefits had not been paid out to CCB beneficiaries and Employment Insurance program was not interrupted in 2020.
We estimate the cost of the CCB program to be $1.45 billion higher than the cost of the current program over the 2021-2022 to 2023-2024 fiscal years if the income received from the CERB and the CRBs is excluded from the definition of the CCB income test.
Compared to the hypothetical scenario where CERB and the CRBs payments are excluded from the definition of the CCB income test (resulting in higher CCB payments), actual CCB payments are lower for 1.67 million individuals in 2021-2022, 791,000 individuals in 2022-2023 and 596,000 individuals in 2023-2024.
The hypothetical average CCB reduction by family is estimated at $535 in 2021-2022, $606 in 2022-2023 and $133 in 2023-2024.