The Fish Harvester Benefit and Fish Harvester Grant

The Fish Harvester Benefit offers income support to self-employed fish harvesters and sharespersons. This benefit covers up to 75% of income losses beyond a 25% threshold in the 2020 tax year. The maximum benefit is $847 per week for a period of up to 12 weeks, equivalent to that of the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy.

The Fish Harvester Grant provides grants to self-employed fish harvesters in order to address non-deferrable business costs. The grant program provides non-repayable support of up to $10,000, dependent on the level of the fish harvesters’ historic revenue.

This cost estimate was based upon Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey microdata for the 2019 calendar year. Within this dataset, individuals self-identifying as belonging to the Fishing, Hunting and Trapping class of worker were selected for inclusion in the analysis. It was assumed that this subset of survey respondents, when statistically weighted, would be representative of Canada’s fish harvester workforce. In order to account for seasonality, annual averages of each of the quantities of interest were calculated.

Individuals identifying as “employed”, “employed, absent from work”, “unemployed”, and “not in the labour force”, were all assumed to be eligible for the Fish Harvester Benefit.

The cost of the Fish Harvester Benefit was calculated based on the assumption that the total eligible count of individuals would receive the maximum benefit ($847) for the maximum allowable period of time (12 weeks). As this benefit is taxable, the average effective federal tax rate was then applied to the calculated total cost in order to account for the revenue the government would receive.

In the case of the Fish Harvester Grant, all self-employed individuals identifying as being “employed”, “employed, absent from work”, and “unemployed”, were assumed to be eligible.

The cost of the Fish Harvester Grant was calculated based on the assumption that the total eligible count of self-employed individuals would receive the maximum grant of $10,000.

All costs are assumed to be incurred within the 2020-2021 fiscal year.

The estimated net cost of the Fish Harvester Benefit is $271 million. The estimated cost of the Fish Harvester Grant is $90 million.

As is the case with any analysis based on survey data, the validity of the estimate is dependent upon the data being reflective of the population of interest, in this case the fish harvester workforce. Further, the granularity of the sector of the workforce of interest is only available at the three-digit NAICS level (114), so it is possible that other, though relatively small, groups of workers from the Hunting and Trapping NAICS (1142) are included. Both estimates assume that each eligible recipient would receive the full amount being offered under the measures; as such, these estimates represent maximum costs.

• Estimates are presented on an accrual basis as would appear in the budget and public accounts.
• A positive number implies a deterioration in the budgetary balance (lower revenues or higher spending). A negative number implies an improvement in the budgetary balance (higher revenues or lower spending).
• “-“ = PBO does not expect a financial cost