More than 7 million Canadians have applied for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit — but CBC News has learned that some of them shouldn’t actually be getting the $2,000-per-month payment.
And those receiving the money who aren’t entitled to it could be putting their own financial futures at risk.
One Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) employee said she deals regularly with people who aren’t qualified to receive the benefit but are getting it anyway.
She said she spoke with a senior collecting a pension who applied for CERB on behalf of herself and her two disabled adult children.
“I noticed all three of them, living in the same household, are getting two $2,000 cheques,” she told CBC News. (The second cheques are retroactive payments.)
“So, $12,000 all on the same day. None of them were eligible.”
CBC News is not disclosing the CRA employee’s identity because she said she fears punishment for speaking publicly about what she’s seen.
‘Laughing in my face’
To qualify for the CERB, an applicant must be a Canadian resident over 15 years of age who has been forced to stop working because of the pandemic. The applicant also must have earned a minimum of $5,000 over the last 12 months and must expect to make less than $1,000 a month while collecting the benefit.
In many cases, people who don’t qualify for CERB are being encouraged or even pressured into applying by family and friends, said the source.
“When I quiz them about it, there’s a variety of answers, from laughing in my face [to] trying to establish that there’s some loophole,” she said.
Few realize that they’ll have to pay taxes on the additional income and could see clawbacks of other benefits, such as tax credits or the Guaranteed Income Supplement, the source said.
Some inmates at a jail in Trois-Rivières, Que., have been sent CERB cheques, according to Radio-Canada. Correctional Service officers intercepted the payments when they arrived at the prison.
The federal government said it is aware of that report and maintains such errors would be caught later by CRA.
Ontario credit counsellor John Cockburn said he’s also seeing people applying for the emergency benefit who are not entitled to it.
“This is kind of just in its infancy right now,” said Cockburn, who works for the Sudbury Community Service Centre.
The risk of clawbacks
He said he fears that as the pandemic crisis continues, and as food and utility bills pile up, more people will apply because they feel a growing sense of urgency.
“I haven’t heard any stories of people getting CERB just for the sake of getting $2,000 to buy a new entertainment system,” he said.
Cockburn said he also worries about people doing themselves financial harm in the long run by accepting CERB payments to which they are not entitled.
He points to one recent case on which he was consulted — a man on a disability benefit who applied for and received CERB even though Cockburn said he shouldn’t have been eligible.
The man’s social services case worker found out and convinced him to return the money. If he hadn’t, the additional income could have affected his access to disability benefits and subsidized housing, Cockburn said.
‘The vast majority of Canadians are honest’
The federal government estimates it will spend $35 billion on the Canada Emergency Response Benefit. No one seems to know how many people may be taking advantage of the system.
One of the federal ministers in charge of the file told CBC News she’d heard anecdotally that some people have applied who should not.
“But I kind of reject that. I really think that the vast majority of Canadians are honest,” said Employment and Workplace Development Minister Carla Qualtrough.
Qualtrough did acknowledge the CERB benefit comes with an elevated risk of fraud.
The CERB application process involves answering just a handful of questions — and everyone who applies for the benefit will receive it, the federal government has said.
Claimants are asked to attest that they are telling the truth in their applications, but it will be up to the CRA to verify claims later and claw back funds as necessary.
‘We took the risk’
The federal government says its programs experience an overall fraud rate of less than one per cent — but Qualtrough acknowledged that making this benefit easier to access increased the risk of fraud.
“If you make something attestation-based, you are increasing the risk of fraud,” she said.
“We knew the risk was there, but it was calculated and we also knew we had to get the money to Canadians. So we took the risk and we’re going to work really hard at the back end to minimize what that’s going to mean for the government purse.”
“There’s just enormous political pressure for politicians to get money out the door,” said Kevin Page, president of the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy at the University of Ottawa and a former parliamentary budget officer.
Page said Canada has never seen anything like the scope and cost of the programs introduced in recent weeks to limit the pandemic’s economic damage.
He said that, given the size of the CERB program and the other relief packages, even a fraud rate of one per cent could cost the federal government billions of dollars.
‘There’s so much at stake’
“These numbers on fraud, they are going to be large, and public servants know … there’s so much at stake with respect to trust of these institutions like CRA or Service Canada. They have to go after and check these things,” Page said.
Qualtrough said there are various measures in place to guard against abuse of the system. Federal staff are using social insurance numbers to check for overpayments and cross-checking between programs to ensure people aren’t being paid through more than one program.
“There’s also just ways we can tell, based on people’s T-4s when we do the taxes next year, that if you are getting income during a time for which you’re also claiming you had no income, or you had less than $1,000 [in income], we can figure that all out,” Qualtrough said.
People walk past the boarded up windows of a pub in Ottawa’s Byward Market that remains closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic April 10, 2020. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)
National president of the Union of Taxation Employees Marc Brière said the CRA will follow up with people who don’t qualify for the benefit but receive it anyway, even if they claimed it in error.
“There’s a question of trust in this case … we want the money to be processed rapidly to go into people’s hands and [the application] is simplified, to say the least,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean there are not people at work doing verification as we speak and it will continue as time goes by.”
Qualtrough expressed sympathy for those low-income Canadians who could wind up making their own financial situations worse by claiming the CERB while unqualified.
“I absolutely share the concern for people who are in that dire a predicament that they [would] be prepared to take that kind of personal risk,” she said.
She argued her government has taken steps to help those Canadians, such as boosting the GST credit and the Canada Child Benefit.
She said she continues to believe the design of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit program followed the best approach.
“I also just am very confident in the honesty of Canadians,” she said.
VANCOUVER – Contract negotiations resume today in Vancouver in a labour dispute that has paralyzed container cargo shipping at British Columbia’s ports since Monday.
The BC Maritime Employers Association and International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 514 are scheduled to meet for the next three days in mediated talks to try to break a deadlock in negotiations.
The union, which represents more than 700 longshore supervisors at ports, including Vancouver, Prince Rupert and Nanaimo, has been without a contract since March last year.
The latest talks come after employers locked out workers in response to what it said was “strike activity” by union members.
The start of the lockout was then followed by several days of no engagement between the two parties, prompting federal Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon to speak with leaders on both sides, asking them to restart talks.
MacKinnon had said that the talks were “progressing at an insufficient pace, indicating a concerning absence of urgency from the parties involved” — a sentiment echoed by several business groups across Canada.
In a joint letter, more than 100 organizations, including the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Business Council of Canada and associations representing industries from automotive and fertilizer to retail and mining, urged the government to do whatever it takes to end the work stoppage.
“While we acknowledge efforts to continue with mediation, parties have not been able to come to a negotiated agreement,” the letter says. “So, the federal government must take decisive action, using every tool at its disposal to resolve this dispute and limit the damage caused by this disruption.
“We simply cannot afford to once again put Canadian businesses at risk, which in turn puts Canadian livelihoods at risk.”
In the meantime, the union says it has filed a complaint to the Canada Industrial Relations Board against the employers, alleging the association threatened to pull existing conditions out of the last contract in direct contact with its members.
“The BCMEA is trying to undermine the union by attempting to turn members against its democratically elected leadership and bargaining committee — despite the fact that the BCMEA knows full well we received a 96 per cent mandate to take job action if needed,” union president Frank Morena said in a statement.
The employers have responded by calling the complaint “another meritless claim,” adding the final offer to the union that includes a 19.2 per cent wage increase over a four-year term remains on the table.
“The final offer has been on the table for over a week and represents a fair and balanced proposal for employees, and if accepted would end this dispute,” the employers’ statement says. “The offer does not require any concessions from the union.”
The union says the offer does not address the key issue of staffing requirement at the terminals as the port introduces more automation to cargo loading and unloading, which could potentially require fewer workers to operate than older systems.
The Port of Vancouver is the largest in Canada and has seen a number of labour disruptions, including two instances involving the rail and grain storage sectors earlier this year.
A 13-day strike by another group of workers at the port last year resulted in the disruption of a significant amount of shipping and trade.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 9, 2024.
The Royal Canadian Legion says a new partnership with e-commerce giant Amazon is helping boost its veterans’ fund, and will hopefully expand its donor base in the digital world.
Since the Oct. 25 launch of its Amazon.ca storefront, the legion says it has received nearly 10,000 orders for poppies.
Online shoppers can order lapel poppies on Amazon in exchange for donations or buy items such as “We Remember” lawn signs, Remembrance Day pins and other accessories, with all proceeds going to the legion’s Poppy Trust Fund for Canadian veterans and their families.
Nujma Bond, the legion’s national spokesperson, said the organization sees this move as keeping up with modern purchasing habits.
“As the world around us evolves we have been looking at different ways to distribute poppies and to make it easier for people to access them,” she said in an interview.
“This is definitely a way to reach a wider number of Canadians of all ages. And certainly younger Canadians are much more active on the web, on social media in general, so we’re also engaging in that way.”
Al Plume, a member of a legion branch in Trenton, Ont., said the online store can also help with outreach to veterans who are far from home.
“For veterans that are overseas and are away, (or) can’t get to a store they can order them online, it’s Amazon.” Plume said.
Plume spent 35 years in the military with the Royal Engineers, and retired eight years ago. He said making sure veterans are looked after is his passion.
“I’ve seen the struggles that our veterans have had with Veterans Affairs … and that’s why I got involved, with making sure that the people get to them and help the veterans with their paperwork.”
But the message about the Amazon storefront didn’t appear to reach all of the legion’s locations, with volunteers at Branch 179 on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive saying they hadn’t heard about the online push.
Holly Paddon, the branch’s poppy campaign co-ordinator and bartender, said the Amazon partnership never came up in meetings with other legion volunteers and officials.
“I work at the legion, I work with the Vancouver poppy office and I go to the meetings for the Vancouver poppy campaign — which includes all the legions in Vancouver — and not once has this been mentioned,” she said.
Paddon said the initiative is a great idea, but she would like to have known more about it.
The legion also sells a larger collection of items at poppystore.ca.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 9, 2024.
