The Liberal Government of Justin Trudeau to the Rescue!

"I very much understand that many organizations were forced to make very quick decisions. And when we have to make decisions quickly, there is a chane that there are mistakes. When we'll arrive to audit the [financial aid] programs, what we'd expect to find is a mechanism to identify mistakes."
"And if there were mistakes, that there be a mechanism to rectify those mistakes, which includes having that money reimbursed if necessary."
"Making payments properly to Canadians is important. When we approach any audit, you have to look at the risk of fraud. As soon as we suspect an incidence of fraud, or we suspect fraud, it increases risk. In that case, it means it will increase our sample size or the work we will do."
Karen Hogan, nominee as Auditor General of Canada

"The capacity for abuse or opportunistic behaviour in this program is enormous."
"If you advertise that you're going to be approved -- no questions asked -- you're going to get pensioners applying for it [the Canada Emergency Response Benefit]."
Philip Cross, former Statistics Canada economist, fellow, Macdonald-Laurier Institute

"It's close enough that it's likely a timing issue."
"You probably could have caught that one out of a hundred that's trying to defraud the system. But the trade-off would be that 99 legitimate applicants didn't get their money for a month-and-a-half and therefore had to go to a food bank."
David Macdonald, senior economist, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

"Getting that help to the 99 percent of Canadians who needed it quickly and rapidly -- even if it means accepting that one or two percent might make fraudulent claims -- was the choice that we gladly made [as opposed to rigorously checking each application for CERB]."
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

A sign warns about the global COVID-19 outbreak in Toronto, Ontario. April 5, 2020. Steve Russell/Toronto Star

Well, isn't it a truism that when people are disbursing funds from a general account, not their own personal funding source, they exercise less judgement, are more profligate, and in this particular instance when a prime minister unrestrained by a Parliament that has been placed in abeyance as a response to a global emergency with a health pandemic laying people low and closing national business and trade infrastructure, leaving millions without employment, can play the saviour and receive plaudits from grateful Canadians while placing Canada deeply in debt.

Asked about the spectre of widespread fraud when the government rolled out its emergency benefits program, Justin Trudeau suggested to his questioners: just look at the unemployment figures, and most certainly they were sobering. Rendered unemployed by the pandemic a vast swath of Canadians faced economic ruin, unable to pay their bills, their mortgages, feed their families. Something had to be done, and planning for a massive rescue through borrowing to fund a plan to send out monthly cheques to the unemployed to keep them afloat, was it.

Sometimes, things simply do not compute. Last month's labour-force survey released by Statistics Canada had it that three million people lost their jobs while another 2.5 million were faced with working less than half their normal hours since the beginning of the pandemic; both totaled 5.5 million Canadians, alarming and shocking. Yet by mid-April CERB claims from 6.7 million people had been received by government; a million differential from the total for unemployed Canadians.

The Benefit is available to workers:

• Residing in Canada, who are at least 15 years old;
• Who have stopped working because of reasons related to COVID-19 or are eligible for Employment Insurance regular or sickness benefits or have exhausted their Employment Insurance regular benefits or Employment Insurance fishing benefits between December 29, 2019 and October 3, 2020;
• Who had employment and/or self-employment income of at least $5,000 in 2019 or in the 12 months prior to the date of their application; and,
• Who have not quit their job voluntarily.

Economists are of two minds over the discrepancy in numbers; one that the difference represents a statistical anomaly, the other that there are some Canadians taking advantage of a no-holds-barred open benefits scheme, the legality of their decision to declare themselves unemployed if they were not qualified under the conditions set out on applications. irrelevant to them. The gap in statistical numbers does indicate something is awry.

People who "have stopped working" and qualify for the financial aid, and have made application to register for the CERB, receive $2,000 monthly as long as they earned $5,000 within the previous year and did not leave their employment voluntarily. All political parties that form government had agreed that such an assistance program was well justified by a situation that evolved relentlessly destroying economies even as it took countless lives globally.

Despite which, a growing realization that government failed in its duty to due diligence in handing out taxpayer-funded resources has raised quite a few questions. Why it was that Employment and Social Development Canada saw fit to alert its employees to ignore any possible abuse, to approve payments even for those who had voluntarily left their employment, even those who were fired for cause; instructions that actually contradicted the rules of eligibility for the CERB. Employees in the Department claimed to have found 200,000 claims that should have been disqualified.

Anecdotal evidence of cheating abounds. People who have reported no income for years possibly working under the table, now routinely receive CERB, according to one source familiar with the system. A client of mortgage broker Ron Butler, preparing to buy a new house had received a CERB payment while fully employed, explaining that two relatives urged him to apply as they had, fraudulently. When the man's mortgage was cancelled because the real estate company reported the fraud to the bank, "His reaction was extreme disappointment", reported the broker.

Who went on to relate that to his experience other instances of questionable use of the program had occurred, as for example, a friend living in a $2.5-million house, with $3 million in liquid assets having closed her business during the lockdown, experimented by applying for the CERB, and a day later a $2,000 payment was deposited directly to her account. Indicating that irrespective of personal assets, eligibility for CERB is not ruled out. Much like the universal payment scheduled to go out under COVID conditions to all Canadian seniors receiving Old Age Security when only low-income seniors should be awarded that payment.

By April 19, 6.73 million Canadians had successfully made application for CERB; consequently $19.8-billion had made its way from government coffers to applicants' bank accounts; the number of applicants whose total figure has since increased to close to 8 million. The government rescuing the unemployed from defaulting on mortgages and making use of food banks. Now Canada requires a rescue from its incompetent government.

A cyclist rides past graffiti stating “People Over Profit No Jobs = No Rent in Toronto during the Covid 19 pandemic. More than 7.1 million Canadian residents have applied for the $2,000 monthly Canada Employment Response Benefit since April 6.