COVID-19
Government Finance Officers across Canada and around the world are at the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. Your professional association, the Canadian Association of Government Financial Officers (CAGFO) is here and available to help as best we can. We want to ensure that you and your colleagues are supported in your vital roles as you address the immediate concerns of your communities and your employees during this crisis.
The purpose of this page is to provide Government Finance Officers the tools and resources they will need to address the COVID-19 pandemic over the next few months.
Both upcoming and recorded COVID-19 related webinars are available here as part of our FREE Weekly Wednesday Webinar Series.
If you have additional content that would be useful for our members, please submit to office@cagfo.ca.
Please click here for CAGFO’s official response to COVID-19.
Resources
March 25, 2020 – Department of Finance Canada Introduces Canada Emergency Response Benefit (“CERB”)
The following is an excerpt from the Department of Finance’s release:
To support workers and help businesses keep their employees, the government has proposed legislation to establish the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB). This taxable benefit would provide $2,000 a month for up to four months for workers who lose their income as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The CERB would be a simpler and more accessible combination of the previously announced Emergency Care Benefit and Emergency Support Benefit.
March 25, 2020 – Ministry of Finance Introduces Ontario’s Action Plan: Responding to COVID-19
The following is an excerpt from the Ministry of Finance’s release:
The government’s action plan is a first step in its response to COVID-19 and includes $7 billion in additional resources for the health care system and direct support for people and jobs. It also will make available $10 billion in support for people and businesses through tax and other deferrals to improve their cash flow, protecting jobs and household budgets.
The following is an excerpt from the Prime Minister’s release:
The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, today announced additional new measures to support small businesses dealing with the economic impacts of the pandemic. These measures will help Canadian businesses protect the jobs that Canadians depend on, and pay their workers and bills during these difficult times.
COVID-19 Tracking Survey Results (April 6) Source: Leger\\ACS survey conducted for the Canadian Press.
Tips & Tricks for Working Remotely
Local Gov Life – SCV19 Episode 04 – Dealing with Your Own Stress: Coping Strategies in the COVID-19 World (recorded teleconference)
When a disaster hits, local government managers have the challenging task of providing leadership to the community – often while dealing with the crisis in their own home. Now, more than ever, local government managers must safeguard their emotional well-being as they deal with extreme personal and professional stressors. In this 30 minute, recorded teleconference, David E. Morrison, M.D., a consultant, psychiatrist, and founder of Morrison Associates, Ltd., offered guidance and advice about how local government managers can cope with stress during this global health crisis. Following his brief presentation, listeners had the opportunity to ask questions.
The remote finance team – why, how and how better (blog post)
Over the past decade, remote work has emerged as an increasingly attractive option for employers and employees. With the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work has become an immediate, unplanned necessity that finance departments the world over are scrambling to enable.
This sudden, forced change does beg some questions:
- Why did it take this crisis to get finance to adopt remote work?
- How can finance utilize tools and techniques already at the organization’s disposal to enable working remotely?
- How can finance bolster remote work environments and use this as an opportunity to make their business processes more efficient, effective, and reliab?
Improve your ability to work remotely: Understanding VPNs (blog post)
Given the explosion in demand for remote work, we wanted to explain a technology that many of us use, but few in finance understand well. If you are working from home and connect to the office, you likely use a VPN. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and is a technology that is as old as the internet itself.
While working from home you may have experienced applications running slowly or not at all. This can be frustrating, to say the least. As we have said elsewhere, a little technological insight can improve your ability to discuss your problems with IT and ultimately yield better performance and improve your ability to mitigate risk. That is our goal for this article.
Windows Security Basics for the Finance Professional (blog post)
Finance professionals interact with Windows security every day when they provide a username and password to login to their computer/network. Another common interaction occurs when they want to install a new application and are stopped and forced to call IT. Finance professionals can struggle when security prevents them from accomplishing necessary tasks. As we have argued elsewhere, it is useful to have a bit of insight into how Information Technology works so you can either:
- solve the problem yourself or
- better communicate with IT.
Remote Meeting Technology / Video-conferencing: Tips & Tricks
As many of us switch to videoconferencing for most of our work meetings, here are some tips to make the most of your office time online.