Thank you for that.
ISAC has also supported the CERB amnesty campaign. There are many situations across the country, but the one we are most familiar with is social assistance recipients who were actually advised by their caseworkers and the legislation that you have to seek all forms of income support possible. If you're on $700 a month, if that's your paycheque—$733 a month—and you are now being told that you have to pay back $14,000....
I think what we're hearing from the government is “we'll do flexible repayment plans”. Do the math on that. For how many years—and I mean years—is this person going to be paying $50 a month? When you live on so little, that's the difference between groceries right now and not having groceries. I don't know where they're going to.... My mother would say it's getting blood out of a stone, right? That $50 means more to them than the government, I think.
These were not ill-intentioned people. These are not the fraudsters. These are people just getting by, and we've seen the rising costs.
I also want to say that whenever you're dealing with low-income people and things are shuttered because of lockdowns, those free services are gone, so they need extra money for the drop-in centres and for transit that they may have not been able to get onto if they have a disability and were at risk. This is part of the increased costs of the pandemic that I think we're maybe forgetting and already normalizing.