We examine the effects of the Universal Child Care Benefit on the labour supply of mothers. The benefit has a significant negative effect on the labour supply of legally married mothers, reducing their likelihood of participation in the labour force by 1.4 percentage points and hours worked by nearly one hour per week. In contrast, the likelihood of participation by divorced mothers rises by 2.8 percentage points when receiving the benefit and does not affect hours worked. Moreover, the benefit does not have a statistically significant effect on the participation of common-law married mothers or never-married mothers.

We adopt a novel identification strategy to examine the heterogeneous effects of Canada’s COVID‐19 economic shutdown on hours worked across the earnings distribution. Early labor‐market analyses found that workers in the bottom of the earnings distribution experienced a much larger reduction in hours worked than workers in the top of the earnings distribution. Our analysis reveals a double liability of low‐wage work during Canada’s COVID‐19 economic shutdown: while workers in every quintile experienced a large reduction in hours on average, significant increases in hours were only present among workers in the bottom quintile. Implications for crisis income supports are discussed.

Income support programs introduced for workers during the first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns faced criticism for their theoretically negative labour supply effects. We propose that these concerns about work disincentives are embedded in restrictive assumptions about work, and led to suboptimal design of crisis support policies. We describe a framework for analyzing alternative crisis income support programs predicated on more realistic assumptions of labour markets and human motivation. Our framework proposes that balancing efficiency, equity, and voice objectives should be the goal of crisis labour market policies. We argue that adoption of a basic income targeted toward low-income workers, in combination with Canada's pre-existing EI program, would have balanced efficiency, equity and voice better than the combination of the CERB/CEWS. A targeted basic income would have also been more effective at achieving stated public health objectives.

We design a hybrid guaranteed basic income and earnings subsidy for working-age Canadians that addresses federalism and work disincentive concerns associated with a conventional basic income by expanding the Canada Workers Benefit. We cost our program and propose a revenue-neutral financing model by consolidating provincial SA programs and eliminating several federal and provincial tax credits. We simulate the distributional effects of our program and financing on household disposable income across deciles and family types and discuss its impact on marginal effective tax rates and interaction with disability programs. Our program substantially reduces poverty rates among two-parent families and working-age singles and couples without children.

We propose mechanism for implementing a two-stage harmonized Basic Income Guarantee with federal and provincial components. In Stage One, the federal government replaces its refundable and nonrefundable tax credits with an income-tested basic income delivered through the income tax system. The reform is revenue-neutral. In Stage Two, each province decides whether to implement a provincial basic income guarantee that is harmonized with the federal one but allows province-specific basic income levels. The provincial basic income replaces provincial refundable and nonrefundable tax credits as well as welfare and disability transfers, and is also revenue-neutral. All social services and contributory social insurance programs remain intact. An illustrative calculation using Statistical Canada's SPSD/M model shows the financial feasibility of a national BIG of $20,000 per adult adjusted for family size with a benefit reduction rate of 30%.