Pierre Poilievre rails about the money the Trudeau government spent during the pandemic. And there were problems. Max Fawcett writes that the auditor general has pinpointed:
$4.6 billion in payments to people who weren’t eligible for the programs they tapped, along with a further $27.4 billion that went to businesses or individuals that auditor general Karen Hogan says deserve further scrutiny. “I am concerned about the lack of rigour on post-payment verifications and collection activities,” she said in a news release.
But, overall, Hogan's report:
also speaks to how successful the federal government’s COVID-19 support programs were, given the speed at which they were deployed and the uncertain environment in which they were created and refined. As it notes: “Within weeks, many programs were up and running. Historically, programs of this size would have taken months, if not years, to roll out.”
That speed necessarily raised the risk of giving money to people or businesses that didn’t need it, and the $32 billion the report identifies as potential overpayments to individuals and businesses are obviously a problem. But they pale in comparison to the rampant fraud that took place in the United States, where an estimated 10 per cent of the $800-billion Paycheck Protection Program was literally stolen — along with as much as $400 billion from the $900 billion COVID unemployment relief program and another $78 billion in so-called “Economic Injury Disaster Loans.”
As Carleton University professor Jennifer Robson pointed out, the $4.6 billion in overpayments to individuals amounts to a four per cent overall rate — not great, but not that much different from the one per cent overpayment rate the Employment Insurance program reported in 2019. “I’m having a hard time seeing this as scandalous when the rules to get CERB/recovery benefits were so pared down, by necessity for speed/ease (which the AG acknowledges), and with consent of Parliament,” Robson tweeted.
She wasn’t the only one refusing to clutch her pearls on the subject. As Laval economist Stephen Gordon said in his own tweet, “If someone from the future had visited me in April 2020 and told me that two years later, the most pressing economic concern in Canada would be an overheating economy and inflation, I would have been ecstatic. That was the *good news* scenario in April 2020.”
Something to keep in mind when you hear Poilievre's complaints.
Image: The Tyee
