I have to be honest with you: I wouldn't call it a lie. I would call it perhaps an exaggeration.
They would align what they were hoping to achieve as their target with what was happening with ArriveCAN to obtain their outcome. It was a stretch.
There's a very big difference between a stretch and a lie, in my opinion, but I never saw anybody nefariously lie so that they could get access to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Let's say they were loosely coupled.