There figures I've seen thrown around are $4,500-$4,800 a year. That's definitely not enough to live on without an other income.
I disagree that the CERB wasn't beneficial or did in the government's books. Out of the three main programmes launched by the government, only CERB served its function. The other two, the employer benefit and especially the landlord/tenant benefit were tremendously under utilized. CERB was the smallest out of the allocations so it didn't even spend all the money allocated to it and the other two didn't even cross the 10% (the landlord/tenant benefit was around 3%, a total bust as landlords weren't willing to fill the paperwork involved.) reimbursement level. All the remaining monies will get reabsorbed into next year's budget.
This bullshit song and dance routine that CERB recipients are somehow welfare queens and don't want to go to work is nonsense. I'm a specialized tradesmen, general contractor and subcontractor AND industrial cleaner. Businesses still aren't coming back. Out of the 7 medium sized businesses I cleaned daily/weekly, 1 has come back and promptly terminated services as they can't afford me at the moment. The others? All still closed/3 permanently. All of them shut down owing me money, and aside from going to small claims court for every single one of them to try and get my owed pay from, I'm probably never seeing a dime from them again. The dozen smaller ones, are mostly the same. Too cash poor to continue or reopen or are already permanently gone. On the trade side, everything is very slow. Due to Covid19 restrictions, maybe a fifth of the business has started back up but that's not enough to employ everyone. The fill in work I'd normally do in slow times is totally dead, fencing was a bust this summer as everyone cut back on non-necessary work and renovations are just very minor stuff for the most part. I fucking hustle every day for work and it just isn't there. As either self-employed or contracted I'm glad that EI is being changed to let people like me pay into the system, when I've always paid my taxes (I do not do jobs for "cash only") and had no safety net. I've gone out and busted my ass for minimum wage and can't get the hours enough to make it worthwhile.