Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I'd like to thank all the witnesses for being present here today.
I want to start by mentioning how concerned I am in regard to an audit like this, one that I think puts regular working class, middle-class Canadians in the crosshairs of the CRA, especially in light of our testimony from the commissioner last week in relation to my question about corporate tax avoidance.
We're facing a unique issue here where we have limited resources. We have finite resources, as much as we'd like to think about the CRA being able to do everything and all things. The reality is that it's a finite resource, and the folks who were able to administer these supports during that time did a remarkable job of getting supports to regular working-class, middle-class Canadians at a time when lots of folks were really nervous about what their tomorrow was going to look like.
I just want to back up for a second and remind folks that this was a time when our economy literally came to a standstill. We had folks who didn't know how to pay rent. We had parents who are now with their kids and couldn't go to work. We had serious interruptions in the everyday lives of Canadians. They were really scared of what they were going to do if they lost their jobs.
During that time folks may remember that this was one of the only lifelines for those who would otherwise lose their homes, lose their cars, lose so much, because they weren't getting paid. This critical support was important for thousands of Canadians. Yes, some folks made mistakes. That is a true fact. Many made mistakes, but these in many ways were the honest mistakes of folks who were scared.
With the limited resources at the CRA, we can't avoid the fact that we have billions of dollars—billions—in corporate tax avoidance. We talked just last week when the CRA commissioner was here about the numbers: $4 billion to $7 billion in lost revenue between 2014 to 2018 in corporate tax avoidance. That's money that should be going to schools, hospitals, roads, our public health care system—real things Canadians rely on. When we're talking about the efficacy and efficiency of our CRA system and the systems that Canadians should be trusting, these are some of the questions Canadians have.
When I go and talk to folks about what's the most important thing on the CRA's agenda, yes, the CERB payments get brought up, for sure. Some people, of course, took those payments when they weren't eligible to. Our tax laws should permit fairness in that. The Auditor General made mention of the importance of making sure there's tax fairness, but where's that fairness when it comes to some of these corporations that are gouging Canadians out of billions of dollars?
I just want to put that on the record here today. What we're really talking about is trying to recoup funding that Canadians are owed, and some of the biggest losses are by corporations that avoid paying their taxes.
I asked the CRA commissioner last week about how we can prioritize this, particularly because the CRA was already doing so much work. This was during 2014 to 2018 when there was a capacity issue of trying to get that tax avoidance going—then COVID, and now this. I'm concerned about the capacity here and how CRA will actually be able to do the work of making sure that all of these cases can be reviewed. If it becomes a question of which ones we have to prioritize, I say we go after the ones where the opportunity costs are greatest, and that's with corporations.
We talked about the opportunity costs here. I'll ask a question maybe directed to the CRA about some of those opportunity costs. My question, of course, would be to Commissioner Hamilton. You might remember, during our meeting just last week, you acknowledged that there's an opportunity cost to where the CRA applies its limited resources, and that corporate Canada is dodging billions of dollars in taxes every single year.
How do we actually square that circle? How do we focus on both recovering the pandemic benefits, while also making sure that, with these corporations that have largely benefited during this same time—when regular working class and middle-class folks were suffering—we have the kind of capacity the CRA needs to do its job in a credible way that Canadians can trust when considering both cases? There's one where we have billions of dollars in tax avoidance in this area. The opportunity costs of going after that would be great for Canadians. This is versus going after little old ladies who may be over their limit.
When the New Democrats fought for this plan, we fought to actually use the tax system to be able to do this, a much easier system in the model of our “guaranteed livable basic income” work, making sure we used the existing tax system to recoup some of those funds. Those would have been good solutions, and now we're dealing with this.
I digress in some ways.
Commissioner Hamilton, how has your department been monitoring, since 2018 to 2022, some of the corporate tax avoidance?