MONTREAL — Pierre Céré makes an odd cheerleader for Justin Trudeau. A Quebec sovereigntist and longtime activist for the province’s unemployed, the 62-year-old is the antithesis of the current prime minister’s image-obsessed, conspicuously worldly brand of pan-Canadian liberalism. Yet in late November 2021, Céré delivered Trudeau an early Christmas present in the form of an 88-page encomium crediting the “audacious” federal government with saving the country from COVID-wrought economic collapse.

Céré’s La crise et le filet social: Pourquoi la droite n’aime pas la PCU (The crisis and the social safety net: Why the right hates CERB) is one of the first long-form treatises on the federal government’s COVID-19 relief programs. As we know, the federal Liberals responded to the crisis with a sustained torrent of cash in the form of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and the subsequent Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB). Combined, the programs delivered more than $102 billion over 21 months to workers affected by the pandemic.

So far, evaluations of the programs’ success have mostly fallen into ideological camps. Those on the right say Trudeau’s generous nanny-statism kept otherwise able-bodied workers at home, hobbled the country’s economic relaunch and enabled inflation. Many on the left, Céré very much included, believe the government’s response not only saved the lot of millions of workers—and, by extension, the economy—but also revitalized the country’s social safety net after decades of austerity-driven cuts.

“Many of us were even taken by surprise,” Céré wrote in French in La crise of the Trudeau government’s COVID-19 relief measures, presumably referring to those on Quebec’s (mostly sovereignist) left who for generations have considered the name “Trudeau” a word only somewhat less offensive than “tabarnak” or “Ontario.” (Céré turned down my request for an interview, claiming I used “subterfuge” to get him to talk to me nearly seven years ago.)

La crise’s villains are instead the right-wing types populating certain think tanks and lobby groups, as well as the province’s corridors of power—chief among them François Legault. CERB, Quebec’s premier said early on in the crisis, was a “disincentive to work,” “competition for employment” and a way to “pay people to stay home.”

Both CERB and CRB are over and done with, replaced by a suite of more targeted (and less generous) programs. Yet members of La crise’s designated villains remain unequivocal: Trudeau’s CERBian generosity continues to be a drag on the economy. “There is no question that the rise in inflation can be in part explained by the government’s quantitative easing,” Olivier Rancourt of conservative think tank the Montreal Economic Institute told me last week.

“The pandemic exacerbated the labour shortage, and the government programs made the problem even worse,” said Jasmin Guénette, vice-president of national affairs at the Canadian Federation of Independent Business—and, as it happens, one of those designated villains. 

It’s a frustrating debate, in large part because while it is fundamentally an economic one, its loudest voices are ideological proponents and opponents of government intervention. So I reached out to a couple of slate-grey, data-driven researchers, asked what the legacy has been of the federal government’s pandemic response, and came away with an even more frustrating answer: no one really knows. “That’s the million-dollar question,” University of Waterloo economics professor Mikal Skuterud told me. “To date, I haven’t seen any careful analysis of the impact of CERB and CRB.”

Part of the problem, Skuterud pointed out, is that the unprecedented nature of the programs—shoehorned into place in the midst of a pandemic—means there isn’t much to which we can compare them. “The hard part is knowing what the economy would have looked like if we hadn’t had CERB,” he said.

Another issue is the lack of data. “It’ll be years before we have tax-linked data, so we can know who got CERB (and who didn’t) and what happened to them before, during and after,” Jennifer Robson, associate professor of political management at Carleton University’s Kroeger College, told me. 

In the meantime, some of the data we do have is contradictory. Robson pointed me to Statistics Canada data that suggests the bottom 20 per cent of wage earners saw their per-household financial assets rise by about 35 per cent from Q1 2020 to Q2 2021, while the top 20 per cent only saw a 17 per cent per-household increase the same period—in line with the right’s argument that the poors took more than their fair share of the CERB and CRB booty. Yet other StatCan data, which includes federal benefits as well as provincial welfare and non-profit cash assistance, comparatively benefited higher incomes on a per-household basis. This data morass has allowed ideologues to parse it however they wish.

Still, some of the data poke holes in the right’s narrative. For instance, labour-force survey figures on jobless workers searching for employment suggest CERB and CRB weren’t disincentives to work at all. In fact, after plunging at the outset of the pandemic, job searches rose just as quickly, despite CERB being in effect. And job-search levels were actually above pre-pandemic levels by July 2021, when the CRB was in full swing. This would seem to lay waste to the right’s argument that the government was paying people to stay home. “I think workers realized that these kinds of emergency benefits are temporary, and that has a big impact,” Skuterud told me.

Meanwhile, it’s tough to say the Liberal government’s pandemic programs hobbled the country’s economy. Employment has largely returned to pre-pandemic levels, thanks largely to a prolonged and surprising bevy of full-time, higher-paying jobs. The economic recovery has actually laid bare the fugazi nature of worker wages in this country. Given our chronic labour shortage, which is particularly acute in Quebec, you’d think wages would have risen at a similar rate.

Except you’d be wrong. Average hourly wages in Canada rose a grand total of $1.22, to $30.49, between March 2020 and December 2021, according to Statistics Canada data. While some saw decent increases—sales-service support employees, for example—wages in nursing, among the most in-demand professions in the country, went up all of $0.16 during this period. (Professional occupations in health apart from nursing actually decreased by nearly five per cent.) Let’s just say that if there’s something aggravating the worker shortage, it isn’t necessarily gold-plated government largesse.

As for inflation, Robson says it is folly to single out CERB and CRB as scapegoats, given how  through the Canada Emergency Business Account, the government doled out almost $48.4 billion in loans to nearly 886,000 businesses across the country. As well, the pandemic  engendered built-up demand, the release of which has caused widespread supply-chain crunches, which sparked runaway price increases in certain parts of the economy. This, by the by, is the textbook definition of inflation.

Céré is right about at least one thing: the Liberal government’s reaction to the pandemic was both novel and audacious. And while the long-term effects of showering the country with cash aren’t yet fully known, the right’s doomsday scenarios simply haven’t come to be.