By Huw Lloyd-Ellis, Queen’s University

In the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business (December 2, 2020), Patrick Brethour suggests that the increase in Ottawa’s transfers to private-sector households during the pandemic so far amounted to $7 for every $1 of income lost.

To calculate this number, the article compares the change in government transfers to the change in primary household income between the first and third quarters of 2020. However, these values from Statistics Canada represent quarterly flows, not stocks, meaning that such an analysis misses the employment losses and transfers in the second quarter, when both values were at their highest levels.

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