Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I'd also like to thank our witnesses for having been able to appear on short notice.
Ms. Sarangi, I want to start by asking you a two-part question.
In the budget implementation act that we're studying, there are provisions to allow for the Canada workers benefit to be paid out in four installments over the course of the year. What I find interesting—I don't oppose it, but I find it interesting for reasons that I'll elaborate on soon—is that the government has said that, if the eligibility criteria change during the end of the year, it will adjust the final payment but it's not going to go after amounts that were paid out based on the previous year's income.
To me, what that says is that there's been an acceptance by the government, with respect to this program, that a certain amount of bad debt on a public program is acceptable. We haven't seen anything like that when it comes to CERB repayment, and you mentioned that in your opening remarks. We know there are a lot of low-income Canadians, who in good faith, sometimes at the behest of provincial governments, applied for the CERB during the pandemic when they were desperate. They haven't been able to get the compassionate, case-by-case approach that they've been promised by the government.
When it comes to the CWB, we have the acceptance of a bad-debt principle, but there is no acceptance of such a principle when it comes to the CERB. In fact, the government's going to throw a lot of good money after bad trying to get blood from a stone, from people who don't have the money to pay it back anyway.
The second part of this question is to notice that, with regard to the emergency wage subsidy program, there was well over $15 billion paid out that shouldn't have gone out the door to companies that were either making record profits, paying dividends, paying scab labour during the pandemic or repaved their parking lots three years earlier—for a golf club here in Ottawa, for instance. There's not even an effort to recover any of that money.
Could you take a moment to speak about the difference in approach across these three programs? How do you think Canadians would benefit, from a public finance point of view, if the government were willing to accept the principle of bad debt when it comes to low-income Canadians on the CERB program, as it has done for the CWB to some extent and as it has done completely when it comes to the emergency wage subsidy program?