Commerce student examining CERB as part of study around Universal Basic Income

Mount Allison University Commerce student Cynthia Dyck is conducting research on individuals who received the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB). CERB was a government program started in March 2020 for those who were forced to stop working or who lost hours/earnings because of COVID-19. Dyck is looking at how CERB recipients used their time while not working but receiving a stable form of income.

This is part of a larger independent study course examining universal basic income (UBI) and unpaid work, which Dyck is working on under the guidance of Commerce professor Dr. Rachelle Pascoe-Deslauriers. An independent study course allows students to pursue an area they are interested in that is not covered in detail in other courses.

UBI is a proposed program that would provide an unconditional income sufficient to meet a person's basic needs.

“One of the big arguments against UBI, when it is being debated, is that when people do not need to work for income, there may be an incentive to just sit back and do nothing,” says Dyck.

Dyck realized that the CERB program offered an opportunity to actually see what people do when they are not able to do paid work but have a stable income.

“I also wanted to look at the unpaid labour force because there is a lot of work that is not actually monetarily valued — like housework, childcare, eldercare, and volunteerism. I want to see what that looks like in action,” says Dyck. “How many people would invest their time in that? Would it increase when they were not doing paid work or do people actually ‘sit back and do nothing’?”

Dyck first learned about UBI in 2019 from her Critical Issues in Work and Employment class taught by Dr. Pascoe-Deslauriers. For her final class project, she examined the research on UBI.

“When I heard about the CERB, I thought that it was interesting because it establishes a more generous basic income floor with fewer restrictions than our current Employment Insurance (EI) program, more like a UBI,” says Dyck.

“This project and CERB present us with a window for looking at whether or not supporting the unemployed through a more generous income floor acts as a work disincentive, and whether or not it enables people to engage in valuable and meaningful (and productive) activities that aren’t necessarily valued by the market. The pandemic – for all its trouble – has created a context where we can explore different social and labour market policy interventions, and which may allow us to design better safety nets for once this has past,” explained Pascoe-Deslauriers.

Dyck sent out her survey in November and has received more responses to her survey than she expected. She says she is excited to look at the data.

“I am particularly interested in people who have been in the workforce for a while and they suddenly get taken out of it. They are thrown out of their usual routine. They have all of this time on their hands, so what do they do?”

If you received CERB at any point between March and September 2020, are over the age of 18, and based in New Brunswick or Nova Scotia in the Tantramar Marsh region you are welcome to take part in the study. You also have the option to participate in a follow-up interview on your experience. To participate, please follow the link to the survey:
https://limesurvey.mta.ca/index.php/899843?lang=en