Last week, a federal court released a decision chastising the Canada Revenue Agency for its handling of a man’s claim to pandemic-era benefits offered to support workers during COVID.
The taxpayer sought the court’s involvement because he has been stuck in an “endless merry-go-round of costly judicial reviews and subsequent reconsiderations” with the CRA over his entitlement to the benefits, Justice Andrew Brouwer wrote.
Specifically, the taxpayer has had to fight the CRA for years over decisions denying him entitlement to the benefits, despite the agency acknowledging on a number of occasions its decisions were unreasonable or lacking justification.
This case is but the latest illustration of the problems with Ottawa’s COVID benefits, including the Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB) and Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB).
One problem was with how the benefits were paid out. The CRB and CERB broke with a 42-year tradition of administering benefits through the mechanism of refundable tax credits.
With benefits such as the HST/GST rebate, Ottawa applies the benefit against any income tax payable and then refunds any excess. By contrast, CERB required a separate attestation and was paid out outside of the tax refund process.
Another problem was with the eligibility rules themselves.
The rules were built around simplistic ideas of income, employment and timing that bear little resemblance to precarious work, informal earnings, fluctuating hours or survival strategies at the bottom of the labour market.
A further problem was how the benefits’ rules were communicated.
Ottawa communicated its rules vaguely, encouraged speed over accuracy, told people to attest, not to calculate. Only retroactively were recipients told that what mattered was a set of technical distinctions that no one had explained clearly — or consistently.
For example, when Ottawa launched CERB in early 2020, the eligibility rules required applicants to have earned at least $5,000 in the previous 12 months. For the first three weeks of the program, the CRA’s call-centre agents were given incorrect guidelines, and told callers eligibility was based on gross income rather than net income.
Such problems contribute to the fourth, and perhaps most galling, issue: the CRA’s aggressive pursuit of repayments in the pandemic’s aftermath.
As the federal court case demonstrates, the CRA has been willing to spend extraordinary public resources chasing relatively small sums from people living on the very margins of economic security.
These efforts point to politics over sound policy; they suggest Ottawa feels a need to reassure a skeptical public that someone is being held accountable for mispayments.
But this approach reduces Ottawa’s own systemic failures to a question of individual behaviour. And unfortunately, some media have fallen into the trap of framing the issue in these terms.
A recent CBC article, for example, asserts many benefit recipients acted in good faith in claiming the pandemic-era benefits, and therefore now deserve absolution.
But this isn’t compassion. It’s condescension.
Low-income people were not confused because they were careless. They were “confused” because the program was incoherent.
That is why calls for to forgive benefit mispayments miss the mark. Forgiveness implies wrongdoing. It reinforces the idea that people should feel lucky not to be punished for a mistake that was never really theirs. It leaves untouched the deeper question of whether the state acted reasonably, proportionately or fairly.
If there is to be any resolution here, it won’t come from kinder language or more flexible repayment plans. It will come from abandoning the false premise that Canadians erred in claiming entitlement to these benefits in the first place.
Until that changes, Canadians will remain on a “merry-go-round” of injustice, arguing about who deserves mercy — while ignoring a government that requires accountability.
Clarification, March 10, 2026 9:41 pm: This op-ed has been updated to remove the name of the taxpayer at the centre of the federal court case.
