Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
This amendment simply stipulates that for folks who are being asked to repay CERB amounts, if they're already under the low-income measure, which is the measure that determines whether somebody is living in poverty or not, they wouldn't be entitled to repay pandemic benefits, up to the low-income measure. Any income they have above the low-income measure would be clawed back at a rate of 50¢ on the dollar. That would at least allow people to hang on to enough income to meet the poverty line, which isn't a lot of income but makes a big difference in people's lives.
When we talk about people who have committed fraud.... There's been a lot of talk about the FINTRAC report. Obviously, one of the features of the reporting out of FINTRAC was that in many of the cases that were identified there were people who were receiving CERB payments under a number of different names into the same account, for instance. These are people who are going to get well above the low-income measure.
Some of their victims don't. For example—and we talked about this example before—folks went into a seniors home, signed up a bunch of seniors and took 10% or 20% of their CERB payment. Those seniors were taken advantage of and they didn't realize what was going on. They're not necessarily in a position to repay the money. We're just saying that those folks who were taken advantage of should only have to pay money back on what they have above the poverty line so that they're not becoming homeless in order to repay that debt.
We heard from Campaign 2000 about the importance of a CERB low-income repayment amnesty. We know that this is affecting a lot of folks who are legitimately in a tough situation. I've raised, on many occasions, the situation of foster kids who graduated out of care in Manitoba. They were told by the provincial government that they had to apply for CERB and they got it. These are some of the folks who would benefit from a measure like this.
It was a huge oversight of legislation designed to structure Canada's recovery that those folks are getting left behind. This is an attempt to make sure that they're not left behind and that they are included in the fundamental recovery framework that the government is advancing.