Journal of Poverty

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Legislated Poverty? An Intersectional Policy

Analysis of COVID-19 Income Support Programs in
Ontario, Canada

Laura Pin, Leah Levac & Erin Rodenburg

To cite this article: Laura Pin, Leah Levac & Erin Rodenburg (2022): Legislated Poverty? An
Intersectional Policy Analysis of COVID-19 Income Support Programs in Ontario, Canada, Journal
of Poverty, DOI: 10.1080/10875549.2022.2113590

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10875549.2022.2113590

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JOURNAL OF POVERTY
https://doi.org/10.1080/10875549.2022.2113590

Legislated Poverty? An Intersectional Policy Analysis of

COVID-19 Income Support Programs in Ontario, Canada
a a
Laura Pin , Leah Levac , and Erin Rodenburgb
a
Department of Political Science, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada; bDepartment of
Population Medicine, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
In this paper, we use intersectionality-based policy analysis (IBPA) Income support; social
to examine how COVID-19 income support policies enacted in assistance; intersectionality;
Ontario, Canada, affected people living with poverty. We find that poverty; Canada; COVID-19
the privileging of formal labor market attachment in eligibility
requirements systemically excluded constituencies most likely to
be living with poverty. More broadly, these exclusions represent
a retrenchment of neoliberal logics in social policy, and the rejec­
tion of universal social welfare programs. In conclusion, we sug­
gest that the experiences of people living with poverty during the
COVID-19 pandemic further highlight the need for comprehensive
social welfare programs, including a universal basic income.

Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic had – and continues to have – a major impact on the
ability of people living in Canada to meet their basic needs (Ferdosi et al., 2021;
Statistics Canada, 2021). An early social consequence of the crisis was that many
Canadians, who previously considered themselves economically secure, joined
precarious and low-wage workers and the non-working poor in experiencing
a high degree of economic instability. The Federal government responded
quickly, and the Ontario government soon followed suit, with income support
measures aimed at “keeping a roof over [Canadian’s] heads,” a tacit admission
of the inadequacy of existing social support measures to meet basic living costs
(Government of Canada, 2020). Anti-poverty activist John Clarke has used the
term “legislated poverty” to describe Ontario’s pre-COVID-19 social assistance
regime: a patchwork of insufficient programs that left people in poverty (Clarke,
2018). The framing – “legislated poverty” – suggests poverty is directly related
to intentional policy decisions made by government actors. For people living
with poverty prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, new state interventions in
income security programs created hope that the tragedy of the COVID-19
pandemic might serve as an impetus for a more just and equitable income

CONTACT Laura Pin lpin@wlu.ca Wilfrid Laurier University, 75 University Ave W, Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5,
Canada.
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10875549.2022.2113590
© 2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 L. PIN ET AL.

assistance regime moving forward. This paper examines COVID-19 income

support policies in Ontario, Canada, with attention to their impact on people
living with poverty, focusing on the initial response to the pandemic from
March – August 2020 by the Canadian federal government, and the Ontario
provincial government. In this article, we define poverty as a lived experience of
systemic material deprivation and the attendant struggles to meet day-to-day
needs (Gazso & Waldron, 2009). We recognize that poverty intersects with
multiple structural forms of marginalization, including insecure housing, dis­
ability, racialization, and lone mothering, among others (Prime et al., 2020).
This research makes a key contribution to our understanding of how COVID-
19 related income support policy changes affected people living with poverty
during the pandemic. We examine whether the significant public investment in
income support at the onset of COVID-19 created an opportunity for
a reconstitution of income assistance programming away from punitive models
toward practices based on universal entitlement.
Our analysis finds that the privileging of formal labor market attachment in
eligibility requirements created barriers to accessing COVID-19 related assis­
tance for constituencies most likely to be living with poverty, including social
assistance recipients, unemployed people, lone parents, and people unable to
work. The impact of these exclusions was (and continues to be) unevenly
experienced, with feminized and disabled people experiencing barriers to acces­
sing income support. In conclusion, we suggest that the experiences of people
living with poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic further highlight the need
for transformative income assistance reform.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows. First, we provide a brief
review of the literature on income assistance provisioning in Ontario, with
attention to Ontario’s recent (truncated) experiment with a universal basic
income (UBI). Next, we lay out our theoretical orientation: the moral govern­
ance of poverty and intersectionality-based policy-analysis (IBPA). We then
move into a discussion of our findings with attention to who benefited from
the income support policies introduced, how spending on these policies was
distributed, and what groups of people were systemically excluded from
accessing COVID-19 related income support. We conclude with a discussion
of how the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn into relief the inadequacies of
current income assistance programs, and the need to explore a UBI.

Background
Income assistance provisioning in Ontario: a brief overview
We use “income assistance” to refer to government programs designed to
meet day-to-day needs among working-age people unable to meet these needs
through the labor market.1 In practice, the major forms of income assistance
 JOURNAL OF POVERTY 3

available to working-age individuals in Ontario are employment insurance,

a federal area of social provisioning, and social assistance, a provincial area of
provisioning. The federal employment insurance program in Canada dates to
the early 1940s, as a means of providing income support to individuals with
recent labor market attachment. The provincially funded and administered
social assistance programs in Ontario date back to the Mother’s Allowance in
the 1920s, with the depression of the 1930s serving as the impetus for the
development of further programming (Graefe, 2020). Like many aspects of the
Canadian welfare state, income assistance programs expanded in the postwar
period of the 1960s and 1970s, due in part to the use of fiscal levers by the
federal government to encourage the development of provincial programming
(Finkel, 2006; Lightman et al., 2006). As income assistance programs in
Canada evolved in the 1980s and 1990s, they were subject to a broader
neoliberal shift that has redefined the relationship between government and
citizens. Wendy Brown suggests this neoliberal shift reflected a move to assess
policies through “a generalized calculation of cost benefit” and their ability to
facilitate the spread of market logics (Brown, , p. 14). Emphasis on the market­
ization of state functions, individual responsibility for wellbeing, and cuts to
social assistance budgets, led to the retrenchment of the welfare state (Mckeen
and Porter, 2003; Bakker, 2003; Lorenz, 2012). Eligibility criteria for UI
became more restrictive, excluding many part-time and seasonal workers
from coverage. Benefit rates also declined from 75% to 55% of insurable
earnings, as the program transitioned from UI to Employment Insurance
(EI) in 1996. Social assistance benefits became increasingly conditioned on
participation in job training and/or work readiness programs, including
unpaid work placements (Lightman et al., 2006). Substantial cuts to federal
transfer payments to provinces for social programming in the early 1990s
culminated in the 1995 adoption of the Canada Health and Social Transfer
(CHST), what Lightman et al., call “the final nail in the coffin of Canada’s
postwar welfare state” (Lightman et al., 2006, p. 127). In Ontario, this coin­
cided with the election of Conservative Premier Mike Harris’ austerity govern­
ment, which used the new federal flexibility under the CHST to restructure
social assistance in a more “cost effective” way.2 In 1997, what had previously
been the General Welfare Assistance and the Family Benefits program was
split into Ontario Works (OW) and the Ontario Disability Support Program
(ODSP), the main forms of provincial income assistance available today.
ODSP targets people with disabilities recognized by provincial social assis­
tance guidelines, and OW is available to adults without labor-market attach­
ment. Responsibility for administering, and increasingly, funding both
programs was downloaded to municipalities (Baker Collins et al., 2020). At
the same time, the Harris government cut social assistance rates by 21.6%
across Ontario, leaving many recipients unable to meet their basic needs
through social assistance programs (Baker Collins et al., 2020). While over
4 L. PIN ET AL.

the past 20 years, subsequent governments have made modest cost-of-living

increases to social assistance rates in Ontario, current rates are well below the
poverty line, leaving recipients unable to meet day-to-day needs (Smith-
Carrier et al., 2020). The consequences of the restructuring of social assistance
to punish those unable to work or without work were disproportionately born
by groups that experience substantial discrimination when accessing the labor
market, and/or face other barriers to labor market participation (Baker Collins
et al., 2020; Gazso, 2012; Harell et al., 2014, Smith-Carrier, 2017).

Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs

The multiple failings of income support programs – as they have come to be

structured over the last few decades – to “break the cycle of poverty” have been
noted by academics, advocates and policymakers, piquing interest in the
restructuring of income assistance programing. In Ontario, much of this
discussion has centered around the feasibility of a UBI program. Although
specific formulations vary, UBI programs generally refer to state income
support programs that are unconditional; that is, they do not include
a means test or work requirement (McDowell & Ferdosi, 2020). The logic of
universal entitlement associated with UBI programs is therefore different than
the current federal EI and provincial social assistance programs. Rather than
positioning economic security as a function of moral deservingness, UBI
programs are consistent with an approach that recognizes economic security
as an inalienable human right, a basic entitlement (Klein, 2018).
After the 2015 election, the Liberal government of Ontario began exploring
the implementation of a Basic Income program, which culminated in the
Ontario Basic Income Pilot (OBIP). The OBIP was a form of UBI called
a “basic income guarantee” which sought to ensure all residents had an income
great enough to meet basic needs, without requiring recipients to meet any
conditions (McDowell & Ferdosi, 2020). This varies substantially from the
existing EI, OW, and ODSP programs, where accessing support is restricted to
those who can demonstrate recent and sufficient employment, a qualifying
disability, or documented efforts to secure employment.
The OBIP was planned as a three-year project available to low-income
residents, and support rates were set significantly higher than existing OW
and ODSP rates.3 Approximately 4,000 participants in three jurisdictions
across Ontario began receiving OBIP payments in April 2018, but after
one year, the program was canceled when a new provincial government was
elected. Although research efforts into the pilot were stymied by the early
cancellation, studies of the effects of the OBIP indicated that recipients experi­
enced improved nutrition, education, health, housing stability, and social
connections (Hamilton & Mulvale, 2019; McDowell & Ferdosi, 2020). While
traditional social assistance payments were too low to meet day-to-day needs,
 JOURNAL OF POVERTY 5

receiving OBIP payments enabled participants to cover basic necessities.

Freedom from the constant exhaustion and anxiety engendered by the con­
ditionality of traditional welfare programs also enabled participants to engage
in long-term planning (Hamilton & Mulvale, 2019).
Despite positive outcomes for recipients of OBIP payments, since the
cancellation of the OBIP, income support programs in Ontario have been
relatively unchanged from the reforms of the 1990s and early 2000s. The
system remains punitive and disciplinary, with workforce (re)entry the “pre­
ferable alternative wherever possible” (Hamilton & Mulvale, 2019, p. 3).
Assistance levels have remained stagnant, and what Tiessen calls the “poverty
gap” – the difference between support rendered and the cost of basic needs –
has grown significantly since the 1980s (Tiessen, 2016). Recent increases in
rental prices combined with the absence of readily available subsidized hous­
ing options have increased this gap further (Kramer, 2018).

Income support and COVID-19

Into this context, the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, dramatically – and
unequally – affecting everyday life for people living in Ontario. The pandemic
affected the ability of many low-income people in Canada to meet their basic
needs, due both to a decline in incomes and an increase in the cost of many
essential goods and services (Statistics Canada, 2021). In Canada, the federal
government and provincial governments responded by enacting new income
support policies, and adjusting existing policies, to help ensure Canadians
were able to maintain access to housing, food, and other necessities. These
programs represent the most substantial new state investment in income
assistance programs in decades. They also represent an opportunity for
income support programs to be offered under a radically different premise:
the presence of a global pandemic as a crisis structuring need beyond indivi­
dual moral culpability. Did the presence of a pandemic contribute to more
equitable and just income support programs for people living with poverty?
We describe our approach to answering this question in more detail below.

Theoretical framing
Income assistance as moral governance
Despite the structural dimensions of poverty, state social assistance regimes
position poverty as an individual moral failing. The changes to the welfare
state described earlier increased the application of moral judgments to desig­
nate social assistance recipients as deserving or undeserving (Baker Collins
et al., 2020; Chouinard & Crooks, 200; Coulter 2009). In the American context,
Hasenfeld (2000) has written about the relationship between moral
6 L. PIN ET AL.

assumptions made of poor women who are lone parents, and the organization
of welfare offices, where assessment criteria are never neutral but represent
moral judgments of deservingness, particularly in a context of fiscal restraint.
In turn, with respect to social assistance, these moral judgments reflect the
dominant views of government on work ethic and family values, imbibed with
assumptions about race, class, and gender; that receipt of welfare represents an
individual failure to engage with the labor market and an individual failure
with respect to family planning (Hasenfeld, 2000). In the Ontario context,
Baker Collins et al. (2020) note, “[while], historically, those in receipt of social
assistance have always been deemed less morally deserving than those who rely
on social security, the changing role of case work and the need to demonstrate
sufficient work effort have opened up new arenas for the moralizing judg­
ments” (p. 74). Moreover, negative moral judgments intersect with race,
Indigeneity, gender, disability and sexuality producing heightened stigma
and vulnerability for recipients at the intersection of multiple identity factors.
This is demonstrated in the extensive literature on the “welfare queen” stereo­
types applied to Black mothers (Foster, 2008), dependency narratives dom­
inating news articles about Indigenous recipients (Wallace, 2021) and
discriminatory practices forced upon recipients with disabilities (Lightman
and Vick, et al., 2009). The intersection between moral judgments of social
assistance recipients and identity factors is further unpacked in our discussion
of our second theoretical frame, intersectionality-based policy analysis.

Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis (IBPA)

Intersectionality – popularized by Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé
Crenshaw in the late 1980s – is a theoretical framework, an analytical tool,
and a praxis that can help to reveal and respond to societal injustices resulting
from complex inequalities (Crenshaw 1989; Hill Collins & Bilge, 2016). In
public policy analysis, it is useful for revealing whose needs are rendered
invisible in policy developments. Intersectional analyses focus on the opera­
tion of power, which can include examining disciplinary power (e.g., what
options do people have or perceive themselves to have?) and structural power
(e.g., how are organizations structured and for whom do they work?) (Ibid.).
Taking up these power analyses, IBPA (Hankivsky, 2012) considers how
complex interrelations between dimensions of peoples’ identities and systems
of power shape their experiences with public policies (Hankivsky & Cormier,
2011). For instance, IBPAs have been used to consider the visibility and
experiences of young women in provincial social policies (Levac & Worts,
2018) and violence against Indigenous girls (Clark, 2012), among many other
pressing policy issues. IBPA uses a series of guiding principles, and a set of
descriptive and transformative questions, to prompt the analyst to consider
how someone’s experience with a public policy is shaped by the complex
 JOURNAL OF POVERTY 7

interplay between their identities and systems of power. Intersectionality

originated as language to describe the experience of Black women in the
United States. As theories of intersectionality have been broadly adopted in
feminist work, scholars have raised concerns about the displacement of Black
women – and women of color more broadly – from the center of this work (see
for example, Bilge, 2013). A limitation in taking up intersectionality through
IBPA is the potential flattening of race which becomes one among many
dimensions of identity. Nonetheless, we believe that IBPA is an appropriate
theoretical and methodological tool for not only considering the complexities
that arise out of the intersection of multiple structures of marginalization with
income support policies, but also challenging the principles that underpin
these structural inequalities.

Methods
To undertake our analysis, we began by searching for all income support
legislation enacted from March 15th to June 30th, 2020 by the federal govern­
ment and the province of Ontario (see Appendix 1). We also included
announcements of changes to key income support programs, even if these
did not require legislative approval. We adapted the IBPA framework put
forward by Hankivsky et al. (2012) to create a list of nine questions for guiding
our analysis (see Appendix 2), including, “Who do the policy decisions
primarily serve?,” “What core values/goals drive the policy decision?,” and
“What inequities exist in relation to (or are exaggerated by) the policy area?”
From July to September, 2020, we also conducted semi-structured inter­
views and focus groups with 23 people with lived experience of poverty
(Appendix 3), and semi-structured interviews with 5 key informants from
organizations that work with people living with poverty, and in service of
aiming to eliminate poverty (Appendix 4). The research design and ques­
tions were developed in collaboration with a community steering committee,
comprised of organizations that work with people experiencing poverty in
southern Ontario. The creation of a community steering committee reflected
a commitment to engaging with IBPA through “politically-grounded
approaches to truly collaborative research” (Rice et al., 2019). Specifically,
we sought to create usable information grounded in the knowledge of
practitioners and community-members engaging with the day-to-day
impacts of policy changes. Semi-structured interviews are useful for examin­
ing the interactions between individuals and macrostructural forces and
understanding the subjective experience of policy processes, particularly
those among constituencies under-represented in those processes
(Hermanowicz, 2002). Due to public health guidelines related to COVID-
19, all interviews were conducted over the phone or internet. Interview
transcripts were read and analyzed thematically. All names used in this
8 L. PIN ET AL.

manuscript are pseudonyms. In addition, the names of people and places

have been removed from quotes to further protect participant identities. The
research received approval from the Research Ethics Board of the University
of Guelph (REB #20-06-031).

Findings and discussion

In this section, we begin with an overview of the major federal and provincial
COVID-19 income support policies that were enacted in the early stages of the
pandemic. We then examine these policies through the lens of social assistance
as moral governance, and according to questions laid out in our IBPA frame­
work. Through this examination, we reveal that the discrepancy between the
Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), implemented in response to the
COVID-19 pandemic, and regular OW and ODSP assistance rates, highlights
the perceived moral failings of people living with poverty. Our findings also
highlight how the main value of labor market attachment centers a particular
subject as deserving of state support, to the exclusion of many people living
with poverty who not only experience income insecurity on an ongoing basis,
but who experienced worsening income insecurity due to the dynamics of the
COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 income support policies

Income support measures were a major component of the policy response to
COVID-19, both federally and provincially (see Appendix 1). On
March 25th, the federal government passed Bill C-13 (Bill C-13, An Act
Representing Certain Measures in Response to COVID-19, Second Session,
43rd Parliament, 2020), which included a set of income tax measures
intended to support citizens, including a one-time increase to tax credit
payments, a one-time increase to the Canada Child Benefit, increased flex­
ibility on retirement savings withdrawals, a pause on interest accrual on
federal student loans, and the provision of eligible small employers with
a wage subsidy.
Bill C-13 also included the Canada Emergency Response Act which estab­
lished the CERB income support program, essentially wrapping the federal EI
program into CERB. CERB provided income support of $500 week for:

● Those who were previously employed and lost their jobs due to the
COVID-19 pandemic
● Those eligible for EI benefits
● Those who had recently exhausted regular EI benefits but were unable to
find work
 JOURNAL OF POVERTY 9

● Those who were employed but temporarily unable to work because they
were caring for children or other dependents whose care facilities were
closed due to COVID-19
● Those who were employed but unable to work due to COVID-19 sickness
or quarantine, or because they were caring for others who were sick or
quarantined

On April 16th, the federal government passed interim orders further expand­
ing the CERB program (Interim Order No. 3 Amending the Employment
Insurance Act, 2020). Changes included lowering work requirements to $5000
in employment earnings from the previous year, expanding the self-
employment category, creating a universal EI maximum available to all eligible
claimants regardless of prior earnings, and extending eligibility to self-
employed claimants who’s regular EI benefits had expired, but who were
unable to find work.
Another key federal income support measure was the Canada Emergency
Wage Subsidy (CESW) program enacted in April 2020 (Bill C-14: A Second
Act Representing Certain Measures in Response to COVID-19, 2020).
Through this program, the federal government provided 75% of eligible
employee remuneration on behalf of an eligible employer, up to a maximum
of $847 per employee per week. Programming excluded public employers,
such as schools, hospitals, universities, and local governments.
Finally, with the end of the post-secondary term approaching, on April 29th,
2020, the federal government passed Bill C-15 (Bill C-15, An Act Representing
Canada Emergency Student Benefits, First Session, 43rd Parliament, 2020),
which established the Canada Emergency Student Benefit Act (CESB), author­
izing the payment of emergency benefits of $1250 per month for a maximum
of 16 weeks for eligible secondary and post-secondary students who were
returning to school in the fall, or were recent graduates searching unsuccess­
fully for paid employment.
Like the federal government, the Ontario government also enacted several
income support measures. On March 25th, the Ontario government’s Bill 188
(Bill 188, Economic and Fiscal Update Act, 2020) included an amendment to
the Ontario Guaranteed Income Act to provide additional payments to low-
income seniors. Other changes to regulations in Ontario included pausing
interest accrual and repayment on the provincial portion of student loans
(Government of Ontario, 2020a); subsidizing electricity costs for residential,
small business, and farm consumers (Government of Ontario, 2020b); and
providing a one-time payment to parents of children aged 12 and under
(Government of Ontario, 2020c). In mid-April, the Ontario government
announced that social assistance recipients not receiving CERB were tempora­
rily eligible for top-up payments of $100/month for a single person and $200/
month for a family (Government of Ontario, 2020d). On May 29th, 2020, the
10 L. PIN ET AL.

province also passed a regulation indicating how federal pandemic pay funds
would be allocated; eligible front-line workers with over 100 work hours per
month in work would receive a top-up on their pay (Ontario Regulation 241/
20, 2020).
The most substantial income support policies in terms of expenditure were
the CESW and the CERB (Government of Canada, 2020). Together these
federally funded programs accounted for over 90% of all federal and provincial
pandemic-related income support spending. At the provincial level, by far the
most expensive program was the residential electricity relief program, at
$1.5 billion, which provided funds to subsidize all residential electricity users
across the province. At both the federal and provincial levels, smaller amounts
of one-time funding were allocated to targeted groups including low-income
seniors, families with children, on-reserve Indigenous people, and social
assistance recipients.
The moral judgment of recipients of income assistance is apparent when
considering the different levels of material support available according to
different programs in Ontario. There is significant variation in monthly pay­
ments for single individuals when comparing CERB, CESB, EI, OW, and
ODSP (see, Table 1).
CERB and EI recipients, who had recent and substantial labor market
attachments, and who lost their job through no fault of their own, were
assigned a higher degree of moral deservingness, and thus a higher degree of
financial support, in terms of state assistance. In contrast, CESB and ODSP
recipients, who lacked sufficient labor market attachments to qualify for
CERB, received less support. In turn, they receive more support than OW
recipients. In the case of CESB, recent educational enrollment and youth are
taken as mitigating factors beyond the recipients’ control and are recognized
as making employment difficult. However, this support was only temporary,
presumably in part based on the assumption that students would be expected
to return to paid employment before the end of the pandemic. In the case of
ODSP, the presence of a qualifying disability is a circumstance that is accepted
as making employment challenging for reasons beyond a person’s control. In

Table 1. State income assistance programs in Ontario, 2020 rates.

CERB CESB EI ODSP OW
Monthly payment for $2000 $1250 55% of employment $1170 $733
a single individual earnings up to
$2292
Taxable Yes Yes Yes No No
Monthly employment $1000 $1000 50% of earnings $200 $200
earnings before deducted, up to
deduction a ceiling
Asset-tested No No No Yes Yes
Additional notes Temporary $100 top up Temporary $100 top up
in response to in response to
COVID-19 COVID-19
 JOURNAL OF POVERTY 11

contrast, OW recipients, who may in fact have disabilities (Lightman, Vick et

al., 2009) as well as other factors that create employment challenges, do not
have these mitigating factors recognized through social assistance governance
mechanisms. As such, they are judged deserving of the least amount of
material support. In the case of all these state income assistance programs,
assistance for a single individual does not vary according to need-based
factors, but rather according to an assessment of moral deservingness based
on the applicant’s history of labor market attachment.

Labor market attachment

Drawing on our analysis of policy documents, we suggest two key values drove
the income support measures enacted by the federal and provincial govern­
ments: labor market attachment and the exceptionality of the pandemic
circumstances. We further suggest that these centered a particular subject as
deserving of income assistance: individuals experiencing labor-market inter­
ruptions, and those experiencing temporary income insecurity. The result was
a profound unevenness in accessing support that was particularly acute for
women and social assistance recipients.
Both the federal and provincial responses described the livelihood conse­
quences of the COVID-19 pandemic primarily in terms of employment and
wage loss. Consider this comment from then Finance Minister Bill Morneau,
upon the release of the COVID-19 Canada Economic Recovery Plan:

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on the social and economic well-being
of Canadians in every part of the country. For many it has meant lost jobs, lost hours and
lost wages. Our government has understood, from the moment this pandemic began,
that it was our role to step in to support Canadians and stabilize the economy.4

In this quote, the impact on economic and social well-being is described solely
in terms of employment loss. Similarly, in the March 2020 COVID-19 Action
Plan, the Ontario government framed income supports as “support for people
and jobs.”5 Access to the majority of income support spending was mediated
by recent labor market attachment, rather than need. To access CESW or
temporary pandemic pay, an individual required current employment. To
access CERB, individuals were required to demonstrate a substantial and
involuntary decline in labor market attachment, as well as at least $5,000 in
employment earnings over the previous 12 months.6 Recent and substantial
labor market attachment is not a neutral criterion. Exclusion from the labor
market overlaps with other dimensions of structural vulnerability: racialized
people, disabled people, social assistance recipients, Indigenous people, lone
mothers, and youth, are less likely to be formally employed, and more likely to
be living with poverty (Burlock, 2017; Hahmann et al., 2019; Wall, 2017).
12 L. PIN ET AL.

The emphasis on labor-market attachment assumed that only people

experiencing involuntary employment loss had their ability to meet their day-
to-day needs affected. However, regardless of traditional labor market attach­
ment, all people living with poverty experienced increased costs of food,
hygiene items, and cleaning supplies at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic
(Pin et al., 2021; Statistics Canada, 2021). Interview participants explained that
typical survival strategies disappeared in the face of COVID-19 restrictions.
Explained Dennis, a man with a disability and two children: “Before the
pandemic, in terms of grocery shopping, I would go, like, I would go like
twice a week and now I have to go once every two weeks. And not exactly easy
when you’re on ODSP.” Due to social distancing requirements and stay-at-
home orders, people living with poverty were unable to spread out costs with
many small purchases or split the cost of items with friends.
Some also experienced income loss from non-traditional labor, or “infor­
mal” work, which was also not captured by the assumption that those who had
their ability to meet day-to-day needs affected has lost formal employment.
Two participants share examples of informal work that provided additional
income necessary to meet their essential needs; both of which could not be
performed during the COVID-19 pandemic. One man who completes com­
puter repairs within his home shared that “ . . . with everything else and the
tools and everything else and taking these items that were on the side, on the
side of the sidewalk or whatever, I could, I could not do it. I was afraid that if
somebody had the COVID-19 on that it was quite possibly that it was on that
object and I could get COVID-19.” Another participant shared their experi­
ence of losing a form of informal work that had been a part of their livelihood
due to the implemented public health restrictions: “it was really hard for me
because I’ve been doing this for over ten years now. Like, I loved the painting
job . . . but it was hard on me because I, I lived by that extra little bit of money
sometimes.” By assuming that only the loss of formal employment would
affect the ability to meet day-to-day needs, individuals engaged in informal
work were excluded from accessing many COVID-19 income support
programs.

Temporary and limited support

Outside of CERB, most income support measures were one-time pay­
ments, or had ceased by August 2020, including more targeted forms of
income support such as increases to the Canada Child Benefit, payments
to seniors, support for students, and small top-ups to social assistance
recipients. These modest income supports were not replaced with equiva­
lent programming in Fall 2020, despite the fact that the impact of the
pandemic on livelihoods has been ongoing, and intermittent closures of
schools, businesses and recreation facilities from October 2020 to
 JOURNAL OF POVERTY 13

May 2021 indicate that the impacts of COVID-19 are far from over. More
substantive income support measures also ended prematurely. For exam­
ple, CESB ended in August 2020, but recent graduates still experience
difficulty transitioning from educational programs to the labor market.
Alana recounted how after a promising interview she received an e-mail
stating that due to COVID-19 the employer had enacted an “immediate
and indefinite” hiring freeze. Alana elaborated, “there’s slim, slim pickings
out there right now,” yet once the CESB program expired in August of
2020, many recipients remained ineligible for CERB or EI. As discussed
below, the temporary nature of support was especially problematic for
people living with poverty for whom income insecurity is not a temporary
experience.

Uneven experiences in accessing support

The structuring of income support policy interventions around the values of
labor market attachment and exceptionality created unevenness in the ability
of people living with poverty to access supports, as well as a mismatch between
the type of support available (limited, one-time) and the ongoing needs of
many people living with poverty. The following section focuses primarily on
CERB, as this was the main form of income support participants discussed
accessing. Other programs were mentioned only occasionally, and rarely in the
context of the interviewee directly benefitting from the program.
For some participants, being able to access CERB was crucial for survival.
Explained Katherine, a woman leaving an abusive relationship while coping
with income loss, “with my husband leaving I collected CERB which was quite
helpful with rent and food and expenses, since we had to separate.” Leaving an
abusive relationship was possible because of access to CERB, though in her case,
a lack of housing options meant moving to a motel-shelter, which was the only
place she could afford on CERB.7 Another participant, Michael, an older man
with health conditions that increased the likelihood of serious illness from
COVID-19, decided to leave a public-facing retail job due to safety concerns.
Michael’s voluntary leaving would have rendered him ineligible for CERB, but
because the store closed a week later, he ended up being able to access CERB.
Michael said accessing CERB, “helped quite a bit in terms of being able to stay
where I am and hopefully not have to be at risk by going out and trying to find
a job in the, in the service industry.” Karen, an older woman with a disability
had a similar experience where her retail employer was cutting back her hours,
and she also had safety concerns going to work. Her disability symptoms
became very severe, but “the only reason [she] was able to leave was because
of the CERB.” Like Michael, Karen had a positive opinion of the CERB
program, especially in relation to provincial social assistance programs, which
had been her main source of income in the past and had left her unable to
14 L. PIN ET AL.

support herself and her daughter. Yet despite accessing CERB, like Katherine,
Karen was living at a motel-shelter at the time of our interview, due to a lack of
affordable housing options. To sum up, for those able to access CERB, the
program was often a lifeline enabling them to support themselves while redu­
cing risk of harm from to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, access to CERB
did not necessarily mean access to permanent stable housing for participants.
Moreover, access to CERB, among people living with poverty, was uneven, as
we discuss in the next section.

Gendered gaps

Assessing eligibility for CERB using formal labor-market attachment

affected the eligibility of low-income women for the program, as these
women were more likely to have been engaged in part-time or informal
work, or to have needs related to caregiving responsibilities that were
inadequately addressed by the program. Jane, a woman with a young child
and a disability, explained her frustrations: “I’m stuck in a middle bracket
right now where I didn’t have enough hours [cut] to receive CERB [but] they
still want me to pay full childcare costs.” Jane went on to suggest that many
parents, particularly women, were “forced to choose between childcare and
career, literally.” In Jane’s case, the absence of affordable childcare options,
coupled with a reduction in work hours left her unable to meet her monthly
living costs, and unable to access childcare support. Moreover, if Jane
voluntarily left her job, she would have been ineligible for CERB. This
emphasizes how gendered labor and caregiving intersects with uneven access
to income supports.
Informal work practices dominated by women were also affected by the
pandemic but left many unable to qualify for CERB, either because they were
below the earnings threshold, or because of the informal nature of the work.
One interviewee recounted losing income support due to being unable to
continue to watch a neighbor’s children in her home. Another discussed
a good friend who was struggling but could not access CERB: “She works,
she does cleaning for herself as a little business, you know. I don’t know if that’s
what affected it. She’s one of those people who fell through the cracks.” Another
issue for women engaging in part-time work was balancing employment and
CERB. One participant, Krista, explained that she does freelance work and “I’ve
been kind of burned a couple times making, like, a thousand and ninety dollars,
which means I have to pay back my CERB.” Because the $1000 earnings cap is
an absolute threshold, going even slightly over renders a person ineligible for
any assistance through CERB. Yet due to a decline in work, Krista did not make
enough to support herself without the CERB assistance. To sum up, the
employment requirements of CERB created barriers for low-income women
in accessing support they needed.
 JOURNAL OF POVERTY 15

Social assistance recipients

Many of the people living with poverty we interviewed were social assistance
recipients, relying on ODSP or OW as their main income source. Every person
on social assistance was eligible for a $100 COVID-19 monthly top-up from
March to June, 2020. Still, some people reported being unable to access any
income-related support, like Sam, a young woman with a disability receiving
ODSP, who was unaware of the top-up program. Administrative barriers
limited the full impact of this already marginal income support available to
social assistance recipients. Jane, a social assistance recipient, discussed this at
length:

I had to call, I had to, I was causing an uproar about it in my MPs office and all of the
places . . . because they weren’t just giving the same thing to everybody, you had to
actually call in and you had to actually find out about it. But you didn’t get it unless you
found out about it by watching the news which I’m going to say, in my building, most
low-income people didn’t have news channels because people don’t have cable, they just
have internet boxes. And they wouldn’t have found out about it unless it was through
word of mouth . . .

Because the $100 was not treated as an entitlement, social assistance reci­
pients had to connect with a case worker and know to request it. Combined
with an inability to visit the office in person, this created substantial admin­
istrative barriers to accessing support, and stood in marked contrast to the
administrative process for accessing CERB. The $100 in support was also
inadequate to cope with additional costs social assistance recipients faced in
terms of accessing food, transportation, and cleaning supplies. The decision
to end the $100 in support was justified by some case workers with an
assertion that support was no longer needed because people were going
back to work. However, as Jane noted, most social assistance recipients do
not have formal employment: “We’re on ODSP. So, what do you mean
people are going back to work?”
For social assistance recipients with some labor market attachment, acces­
sing CERB was also seen as “risky” because people feared being asked to repay
benefits, losing access to medication subsidies, or having difficulty returning to
provincial assistance once CERB ended. As Eliza said, “As someone in poverty,
you have to know all the rules or you know, you’re breaking them” and
knowing all the rules was particularly difficult during the first months of the
pandemic when the rules concerning income assistance were constantly chan­
ging. When asked about accessing COVID-19 related income support pro­
grams, Daria, a woman receiving ODSP said “I wasn’t able to risk my disability
on that. I wasn’t about to.” Another interviewee receiving assistance was
unsure if he qualified for CERB, but with the loss of informal income, he
made the difficult decision to apply even if it needed to be paid back, because
he needed it to meet his living expenses. Fear and confusion regarding the
16 L. PIN ET AL.

relationship between social assistance and CERB was exacerbated not only by
the absence of any definitive statement from the Ontario government until late
April 2020, but also by participants’ previous experiences with the policing of
benefit eligiability.8

Transforming income assistance

When asked about the messages policy-makers should take from the pandemic,
the most common response from participants with lived experience of poverty
was the need for a UBI program. Participants suggested that if CERB had been
applied as a UBI program, many of the inequities in access would have been
mitigated. Drawing on comments from interviewees, three principles of
COVID-19 income assistance interventions that would have provided more
equitable support emerge. First, interviewees emphasized the importance of
universal access to income assistance for everyone experiencing need. As Eliza
expressed,“they said that people deserve $2000 [per month]. Except if you’re
disabled like myself or on welfare, you know. Then you don’t deserve even close
to, even half of that.” As Eliza captured, multiple identity factors intersect with
exclusions from labor-market participation to make specific constituencies like
social assistance recipients and people with disabilities vulnerable. Participants
expressed support for a UBI program rooted in a universal entitlement to
economic security, rather than labor market attachment. A second theme
that emerged, was that of an income assistance program that provided sufficient
assistance to meet basic needs. As Jane stated, “I don’t understand why people
on ODSP aren’t getting the same, the same as the CERB people. Like, if that’s
basic income then what is ODSP?” Ontario’s social assistance programs leave
single individuals well below the poverty line, while the monthly assistance
rendered by CERB enables recipients to meet the Market Based Measure
threshold, an amount that provides for a modest standard of living (Petit and
Tedds, 2020). Third, interviewees expressed the need for an income support
program that recognized that experiences of economic deprivation and poverty
were not limited to the COVID-19 pandemic. Karen, who had previously
received social assistance, expressed how much CERB had helped her meet
her basic needs during the pandemic. But then added, “now I’m afraid of it
getting taken away because if it gets taken away before I find a job, viable
employment. That goes down to 55% of what I was making at my minimum
wage job. Nobody can live on that.” Participants with lived experience of
poverty discussed the need for income assistance measures that extend beyond
the pandemic and provide adequate, ongoing support.
As others have pointed out (Green et al., 2020), the design and implementation
of a UBI program of income assistance is a complex task. However, support among
participants for a UBI program was linked to the need for income assistance
programs predicated on principles of universal entitlement, livable assistance
 JOURNAL OF POVERTY 17

rates, and permanence. People living with poverty were acutely aware of the
limitations of state-related COVID-19 income support measures and suggested
a need to value people beyond their labor market contribution. As one participant,
Dennis, noted, “I think one of the biggest eye openers for me was just how the
government views people and how the government has put the citizens of Canada
in silos. They’ve set a precedent that if you are able bodied and you’re able to join
the workforce, you are worth $2000 a month.” The exclusions of CERB, and the
differences in funding between CERB and social assistance demonstrate the moral
governance of poverty, where the “deserving” and “undeserving” receive different
treatment.

Conclusion
The absence of sufficient income supports for people living with poverty
increased their vulnerability during the COVID-19 pandemic, and these effects
were especially pronounced for women and social assistance recipients. These
individuals were left to cope with increased costs related to the pandemic
without receiving additional income supports, since many were ineligible for
CERB, CESW, or other temporary income support measures. The differential
payment rates of CERB compared with OW and ODSP also created substantial
inequality. In fact, the creation of an entirely new income support program –
CERB – in response to widespread employment income loss, reinforces the
inadequacy of existing social support measures.9 Our intersectional analysis
reveals how existing inequities were exaggerated, not only by COVID-19, but
also by responses from both the provincial and federal governments. We high­
light the importance of gender, disability, and social assistance status as con­
siderations in an intersectional analysis about income support programs. We
had limited data from Indigenous and Black-identifying people living with
poverty, but we suspect that these would also be important intersection of
exclusion in relation to COVID-19 related income support measures.
The stark discrepancy between income supports before and during the
COVID-19 pandemic has created an opportunity for transformative thinking
about income assistance, moving beyond “last-resort” punitive income support
programs to imagine what a more humane approach might look like (Hamilton
& Mulvale, 2019). The CERB program in particular demonstrated that it is
possible to quickly provide more far-reaching income assistance for people
deemed to be morally deserving. The uneven and unjust exclusions of people
in need from CERB and other pandemic-related income support programs
reinforces the resonance of moral deservingness as a frame for allocating income
support. Our analysis also highlights the failures associated with basing income
support programs primarily on labor market attachment. At the same time,
while CERB was not a UBI program, arguably it was the closest Canada has
come to such a program on a national or provincial level. The possibilities
18 L. PIN ET AL.

engendered by CERB help us envision what a more inclusive and just income
support program could look like – one based on the inherent value of all people
and the right to economic security.

Notes
1. In our analysis, we exclude public retirement programs such as the Canada Pension Plan
(CPP) and Old Age Security (OAS) because our focus was on adults of what is sometimes
called working age (between 18 and 65), who are usually ineligible to draw on benefits
through these programs.
2. ODSP was eligible to disabled people with a qualifying disability. The qualifying criteria
has been critiqued by disability activists and scholars for requiring excessive documenta­
tion and excluding many episodic disabilities. Individuals who did not qualify for ODSP
were eligible only for OW. Within both programs was increasing emphasis on fast-
tracking recipients to employment. For more details see: (Lightman et al., 2009 and
Smith-Carrier et al., 2020).
3. In addition, participants were permitted to keep 50% of any employment income.
4. https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2020/07/historic-covid-19-plan-
provides-canadians-with-the-support-they-need-to-get-through-the-economic-crisis.html
5. https://budget.ontario.ca/2020/marchupdate/action-plan.html
6. Supporting documentation was permitted if 2019 tax filings did not accurately reflect
a change in earnings in the first three months of 2020.
7. We use the term “motel-shelter” to refer to motels being used as shelters for people
without permanent, stable housing, through formal and informal agreements with local
service providers.
8. https://pooranlaw.com/covid-19-ontario-partially-exempts-cerb-from-social-assistance/
9. Thank you to a member of the Guelph-Wellington Taskforce for Poverty Elimination for
making this observation at a preliminary presentation of the data

Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge the valuable contributions of research assistants Kelly
Hatt and Jee-Ho Paik, and community partners Services and Housing in the Province, A Way
Home Canada, and the Guelph-Wellington Taskforce for Poverty Elimination. The authors
also acknowledge their work and presence on Indigenous lands, with a commitment and
responsibility to recognize the ongoing impacts of colonization.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work was supported by the University of Guelph under the COVID Catalyst Program
[grant number 054597.
 JOURNAL OF POVERTY 19

ORCID
Laura Pin http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2127-1355
Leah Levac http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9049-4491

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