Through the chair, thank you for that question.
I am concerned that they don't have an amount. They don't know how much they're owed or expect that they'll recoup, and at the same time, they're but money in pursuing people.
For that initial round of letters that were sent out in December of 2021—441,000 letters—we know they mostly went to low-income, racialized and indigenous people and people with disabilities, folks who lost their work. We know that about 75% of the CERB benefits went to those communities and to those individuals. Because CERB was broader than employment insurance, we know that racialized women working in precarious jobs were able to access CERB payments when they wouldn't have been able to access EI. When we talk about getting payments back, we're actually talking about communities who are already facing these multiple marginalizations.
I am a bit frightened as well that they're pursuing without the required amount of information. We asked people, “How is it going to impact you and how do you feel about receiving these letters or having to repay?” People used words like “devastation”, “traumatic”, “bankruptcy” and “going into homelessness”. There were real worries about not being able to care for their kids and having child welfare come in and intervene if people will not be able to appropriately care for their kids.
This is going to continue to be detrimental. I mentioned that in July there will be more clawbacks, but the fact that this will go on for several years, the fallout, this ongoing retraumatizing of folks, is very concerning.
At our end, we have been trying to get a copy of the letters to find out those similar questions and what they are saying about how much people owe. We're finding it so hard to find that information. Even when people are being dealt with on an individual level, it just makes it harder to get that broader assessment.
Like you, I feel very concerned and very worried. I don't believe there will be much to recoup from families who are already in debt and who already have accessed their lines of credit and their credit cards. They've collected rent arrears. There are student loans that people are still repaying. There's just nothing for people to be able to give back, so I really don't see this as a worthwhile pursuit, but we know that it's going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars for the federal government to pursue this action.