More than one million Canadians lost their jobs in March, due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent measures put in place by governments to limit the spread of the virus.
The good news is that Ontario health officials have now scaled back their predictions for the number of COVID-19 community cases in April from 80,000 to 20,000 and suggested that the province has reached its peak for community-spread cases (long-term care facilities remain on a different – and much more negative – course).
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The bad news is that Statistics Canada is reporting that the number of Canadian workers who believe they'll lose their job in April is more than one-third, or 34.5%.
According to results from Canadian Perspectives Survey Series 1: Impacts of COVID-19, which covers the week of March 22 to 28, more than one in three workers expressed worry that they might lose their job or main source of self-employment income in the next four weeks.
While the country's job numbers for the month of April will not be released for a few more weeks, all indications suggest that April will have as large, if not a much larger, impact on the financial security of Canadians than March did.
Locally, the City of Toronto is facing a budget shortfall in the billions, while real estate prices dropped for the first time in two years, and gas prices hit a 15-year low.
Another Stats Can report released on Friday shows that millions of Canadian workers are now adapting to working from home and, perhaps surprisingly, those with children under the age of 18 were “just as likely to report having good, very good or excellent mental health as those who usually work from home and those who continued to work at locations other than home.”
