Sure. I think it is true that those companies did need that assistance at a particular time in the pandemic. It's not about when they paid the dividends. They paid the dividends once they had come out on the other side. Those companies are now out on the other side, so I think they're very likely in a position to repay, even if that means getting some kind of financing in the market in the meantime in order to make taxpayers whole for some of the amount they didn't need.
Of course, this amendment doesn't cover share buybacks. That was something we looked at, but that was a complicated legislative amendment. It wasn't something that House drafters were able to do under the time constraints we had. Anyway, there were a number of questions about how that would be implemented. This is what we could develop for now. I mention this simply because there were other indications, like share buybacks, that those companies didn't need that money and that public money was used for other purposes. This doesn't reclaim that. Seeing as dividends are only a portion of what some of these companies were able to do with taxpayers' money, I think it's reasonable to ask that they repay that money.
I think of the Royal Ottawa Golf Club, for instance. There was some media coverage of them. They received about a million dollars in wage subsidy money, if memory serves—it may not be a million, but the article is out there—and they ended up with about the same in a windfall. They decided to repave their parking lot three years ahead of the plan in their capital plan. To me, that's pretty obvious. Even though they needed that money in the early months of the pandemic, they received that money and then had a pretty good season. Then they would be in a position to repay that money. That's why I think this isn't a lot to ask in terms of retroactivity.
Again, in keeping with the spirit of some of my comments from the last day, I recognize that one vote is not enough to pass an amendment at committee. If this could garner majority support by removing the retroactivity piece—well, I think that would be too bad—I would rather see the protection exist on a go-forward basis than not exist at all.
I am disappointed that the government, as I mentioned to the minister when she was here, didn't avail itself of the opportunity to put those kinds of protections in here, not just around dividends but also around share buybacks. These kinds of things are always much easier when the government is willing to do some of that homework. We're sharing a small drafting unit among 338 MPs, while the government has departments with inside legal counsel that can do a lot of their drafting. Some of these issues are complex, there's no question about it, but I just don't think that's an excuse for inaction.
I would like to see something productive come out of tonight's meeting that would at least shield Canadians against future instances of the kind of grab of taxpayers' money that we saw under the wage subsidy program, totally recognizing that.... I mean, look, a lot of this money was legitimately used. I'm not trying to say that there weren't a lot of companies that availed themselves quite rightly of the wage subsidy program. We were early advocates for that program. When the government announced the 10% wage subsidy program, we teamed up with the CFIB, not usually best friends of New Democrats, in order to call for a 75% wage subsidy, but all along, we also called for protections to make sure that this money wasn't going to be received by companies that were ultimately going to do well and then have no mechanism for getting it back.
This is at least trying to shoehorn that in there. We didn't have normal committee processes in the early days of Parliament, so there wasn't an opportunity for a party to independently bring an amendment in the way I am doing now. As I said, I'm interested in making more progress rather than less, recognizing that I can't do that as an individual member of the committee.
Certainly, if you have a concrete proposal for how we might make this amendment more palatable to a majority of committee members, I'm all ears.