To help small business owners pay workers even if they’ve slowed down or stopped their operations because of COVID-19, we introduced the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy. And because we want this to help as many people as possible, we’re going to put in place more flexible rules.

We said businesses would have to show a 30% drop in revenues when comparing one month this year to one month last year - but that could be hard for some non-profits, start-ups, and new businesses. So to help, we’ll let them use January and February as reference periods.

If businesses use March to compare revenue, they’ll only need to show a 15% drop because many only felt the impacts of COVID-19 halfway through the month. And as for charities and non-profits, they can either include or exclude government funding in their revenues.