Certainly when it comes to CERB repayment, it was an unfortunate feature that at the start of the pandemic, Canadians were encouraged to apply for the CERB and receive that benefit if they needed it, and many of them have been pursued as a result of this, which is unfortunate. Part of this is that there was question as to whether they met the income threshold, which is to say whether they made $5,000 in the preceding 12 months or preceding year. If you're not making $5,000 in the preceding 12 months or one year, you have pretty low income. So if you're making $3,000 instead of $5,000 or there was some form of wage theft that happened that you were paid that amount but it wasn't correctly recorded on a T4 because you were working in sort of insecure employment....
To my mind, it's unfortunate that CERB recipients have really borne the brunt of trying to, after the fact, go back and change the rules in essence of this program. It seems to me that is the way this has unfolded. It didn't have to be that way, but that's the way it unfolded, and that's unfortunate.
On the other side, when it comes to the CEWS program, for instance—and this is very predictable—in the recent report that I did that looked at the most highly paid CEOs in the country, a third of them headed companies that received the wage subsidy. Here you have some of the best-paid people in the country receiving massive bonuses at the same time they're receiving federal support. Many of these companies were paying out dividends to shareholders or declaring profitability over this period. That is an unfortunate feature of that program, too. It was pretty predictable; we could have put constraints in place at the outset. None of this is illegal per se, but it's just the program wasn't designed in such a way that you could catch this early on.
Other countries did. Other countries restricted their wage subsidy programs to medium and small companies or to companies that weren't paying out dividends to shareholders and weren't paying extraordinary bonuses to CEOs. We didn't do that. I'm not sure how much of that money could be recovered after the fact. Clearly there's an attempt to recover it from CERB recipients, but there's really no attempt to recover it from large businesses.