Madam Speaker, these hard-working Canadians are not asking for more time to pay back these benefits. They did nothing wrong. For them, the CERB payments did exactly what they were designed to do. They allowed them to keep living in dignity while working as much as they could under the circumstances.
On the other side of the coin, many large corporations received millions in wage subsidies to keep workers on the payroll. That is exactly what the wage subsidies were meant to do. What they were not meant to do was enrich shareholders with generous dividends. Unfortunately, at least 68 companies did just that. Imperial Oil, for instance, received $120 million in government wage subsidies while paying out $324 million in dividends. There is very clearly a double standard here.
The government is demanding that low-income workers who struggled through the pandemic repay the money they received even though they followed all the rules. It is not, however, asking the same of big corporations that used taxpayers' money to pay massive dividends to their shareholders.