Government Spending During COVID
Giordana Ciampini/The Canadian Press
By the end of March 2020, COVID was starting to have a major impact on employment, healthcare and the economy. The Canadian government was faced with huge expenditures, spending massively on helping failing businesses, unemployed workers, and various sick benefits, as well as creating an effective vaccine and providing massive amounts of personal protection equipment (PPE).
As of November 30, 2020, the federal government had committed $322.3 billion towards fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. News media have been tracking down federal COVID spending and have found that at least a quarter of a trillion dollars of government expenditure is being used to support more than 100 different measures and programs.
Some measures included safe return to classrooms, support to Indigenous communities, and long term care funds. The more major examples of government spending include CERB, PPE, and COVID vaccines.
Canada Emergency Response Benefit, also called CERB, was introduced in April 2020 to help Canadians who had lost their jobs due to COVID or who were eligible for sickness benefits. CERB also helped Canadians pay their bills during the pandemic. On June 15, it was extended by eight weeks for Canadians who still couldn’t return to work safely. By early August, 8.5 million individuals had received help from CERB and more than 4 million had returned to work because of the help from the program. CERB cost the government at least $80 billion.
Over $8 billion was spent on PPE, including gloves, face shields, face masks, etc. Although widely used by the general populace, the most frequent users are healthcare workers.
Another major source of spending was COVID vaccines. Spending related to the vaccines also included needles, syringes, swabs, and gauze needed in order to inject the fluid; along with the infrastructure required to transport the vaccines. As of early 2021, the government spent at least $18 billion on various aspects of the COVID vaccines: research and development, contact tracing and testing, procurement, deployment, and administration.
Although the cost of nurses and doctors related to COVID is hard to determine, some equipment costs can be calculated. For example, Canada spent $35,000 to $50,000 on each ventilator used to treat COVID patients, and about 50,000 were purchased. $2.2 billion is also being invested for life sciences and vaccine manufacturing.
Canada has also spent over $14 billion for long term care and is planning to invest another $3 billion.
According to CBC News, the federal government has spent an average of $952 million a day fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.
For the next three years, $101.4 billion will be invested to stimulate economic recovery in a post-COVID Canada.
For the first time ever, Canada’s net debt is over $1 trillion as of April 19, 2021, after a $354 billion deficit due to the pandemic. Canada’s debt has grown quicker than any other developed nation, and experts expect it to keep climbing up to $1.6 trillion this year. The federal government will have incurred more debt over the COVID-19 pandemic than it did over the last 20 years combined. A recent report shows that without policy changes or tax increases, Canada will not post a surplus until the year 2070.
As of the 28th of October, Canada is still faced with high numbers of COVID cases, and government spending continues in effort to combat the pandemic.