Finance committee  If I understood the question, Mr. Chair, it's whether an employee.... I wasn't sure about the assumptions behind the question. Is this the situation where an employee is rehired by an employer who is accessing the wage subsidy?

Finance committee  Of course, if an employee was in a situation where accepting a job with the wage subsidy would provide them less, then I guess they wouldn't necessarily have to accept that job if they were in a worse position. If they did accept that job—say they were better off with the wage su

Finance committee  Perhaps I will begin, Mr. Chair—unless you want to go first, Cliff.

Finance committee  I was going to begin by saying that, of course, speed and effectiveness are the key criteria. When you look at these things, we're lucky in that we have a system in the Canada Revenue Agency and Service Canada that is equipped to deal with these programs and that has the nimblen

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, perhaps I could ask my colleague Frank Vermaeten from the CRA to answer that question. They've been working very hard to stand up this system.

Finance committee  It's Andrew Marsland from the Department of Finance. The question does identify a particular challenge in terms of non-profits and charities. The government indicated yesterday that it will work with this sector to ensure that the definition of revenue is appropriate to these s

Finance committee  It's Andrew Marsland, Mr. Chair. The member raises a very good point about new firms. The backgrounder we released yesterday notes that the first rule is to compare month over month, year over year, so March 2020 to March 2019 and so on. We did note that for employers establish

Finance committee  I'd make a couple of comments on that. The first one is that the measure itself, as announced yesterday, is targeted at those businesses that are suffering significant challenges, whose revenues have severely dropped because of the current crisis. The second one is that the meas

Finance committee  Perhaps I'd make a number of observations. Obviously, I can't comment on policy decisions, but there are number of considerations. As was identified, a key issue is the extent to which you can piggyback on existing systems such as the GST credit, which has the advantage of having

Finance committee  About 2.6 million Canadians withdrew about $30 billion from their registered retirement investment funds in 2017. That's the last year for which we have data. Of those, about 1.3 million, or about 48%, withdrew the minimum amount, so one would expect that the number of beneficiar

Finance committee  Yes, they are taxable, in line with other income support measures, such as employment insurance.

Finance committee  My understanding is that once the portal is up and running and applications are made, the payments will follow quite quickly. Perhaps Mr. Vermaeten would like to comment on that.

Finance committee  The number of beneficiaries of the GST credit, we estimate to be about 15.5 million adults. That would include both single individuals and couples. The payments with respect to that would be going out, I believe, on April 9.

Finance committee  It is, thanks to CRA, yes.

Finance committee  Yes. That will represent a top-up to the scheduled May payment of $300 per child.