This amendment and its sister amendment, NDP-4, are with a view to an issue that has come up again and again in respect of the wage subsidy, which is that a number of companies availed themselves of wage subsidy support but clearly didn't need it because they were paying massive dividends to their shareholders. We've seen the clawback of benefits from people on the financial margins, but these companies that were clearly in a position to reward their shareholders have not seen any kind of comparable effort or in fact any effort at all to recover public funds that they took and didn't need.
The point of these amendments is to ensure that there is an effort to recover money that went to companies that clearly didn't need that public support and that going forward there doesn't continue to be this phenomenon of companies being able to access funds, make a profit, and then pay those public funds out to their shareholders rather than reimbursing them to the government.
The mechanism is a lot like what was landed on with respect to executive compensation, but it would apply in this case to dividends as well. The proposal here is that it would apply retroactively to the beginning of the pandemic and the paying out of these benefits.