There were instances in which a company did not give a subsidy to its employees but used the Canada emergency wage subsidy to offset the cost of their labour and to offset the ability of unions to negotiate proper and fair contracts, because companies were incentivized not to make those arrangements if they qualified for the Canada emergency wage subsidy.
There's an incentive there that I think the Auditor General is pointing to that has to be addressed when we're talking about how we investigate these companies moving forward and how we get them to pay this amount back that they were never entitled to.
How can we do that in a way that is responsible without looking at the issues that we're seeing in terms of very poor Canadians? My fear is that we go so far as to empower a claw-back—let's call it that—so great that it disproportionately harms those who are right on that margin of poverty who accepted it.
There's a balance that has to be struck here between what you just mentioned, between the requirement to ensure that Canadians get that return from companies and other folks who made ineligible applications and received funding, and the reality that companies and Canadians are facing a tough time still. Some of them weren't able to recover.
What would you say in terms of advice on being able to distinguish between those two groups? How did you distinguish between them in the audit?