Canada’s COVID-19 aid payments amount to $15 billion

The report stated that if the estimated potential ineligibility rate of 15.37 per cent were applied to the full population, it would amount to $15.5 billion of payments that represent a risk of being ineligible. The report published by auditor general Karen Hogan on Tuesday was her first look into the $210 billion in payments made via the government's six COVID 19 aid programs during the epidemic. She said a minimum of $27.4 billion worth of payments made during the epidemic needed to be investigated.

Hogan said that he was concerned about the lack of rigour on post-payment verifications and collection activities. The Canada Revenue Agency and Employment and Social Development Canada need to act now to expand their post-payment verification plans to include all recipients identified as being at risk of being ineligible for benefits, and the department and agency need to carry out their plans and recover COVID 19 benefit amounts owed. Dan Kelly, the chief executive of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, said that the auditor general's numbers were not a shock, since the government, at the beginning of the epidemic, was focused on getting money out of the door to support struggling businesses.

Kelly said there was no question that there were some problems with the early version of the wage subsidy. The problems started to go away in the early months of the epidemic before the government started to listen and put in place a better approach. Brett House, an economist and fellow at the Ottawa-based Non-profit Public Policy Forum, said speed and scale were very important in the wage subsidy program. He added that the challenge is to create the infrastructure and platform with more diligence. Certain businesses with declining revenues were eligible to apply for CEWS, a program designed to cover part of the cost of employee wages. Some have argued that programs like CEWS could have a permanent role in the economy, kicking in during downturns to reduce the risk that temporary layoffs can lead to longer-term structural problems in the labour market.

House sees the potential for CEWS as part of an ongoing conversation about employment insurance reform. He said that job sharing has been a good tool to split full-time positions into more part-time positions to keep more people engaged in the workforce. It doesn't take long before getting back into the permanent workforce once people are out of work. It's not just a wage subsidy to keep people employed, but to keep more people engaged in the workforce beyond the six week point when someone is out of work, their capacity to get back in the workforce falls rapidly, House said. Michael Smart, a professor of economics at the University of Toronto, said that the auditor general's report as a whole was good news and bad news.