Federal government annuls CERB repay for self-employed recipients
Posted February 9, 2021 1:54 pm.
Last Updated February 10, 2021 10:07 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It’s a reprieve for more than 400,000 self-employed Canadians who got letters from the Canada Revenue Agency (C-R-A) last year telling them they’d have to repay federal emergency benefits.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says anyone who applied for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) based on their gross, not their net income, won’t have to repay the money.
“When we rolled out CERB last March it’s because people needed help in the face of a global, once-in-a-generation crisis,” Trudeau said Tuesday.
“The pandemic isn’t over and neither is our support.”
He says his government wants to make sure everyone gets back on their feet.
Trudeau also says those who received emergency benefits and made up to $75,000 in taxable income won’t have to pay interest on 2020 tax debt until next year.
Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough says it’s not yet clear how many of the roughly 400,000 self-employed Canadians who got letters are affected by the reversal.
“We will have a better clarity on the number of people who are impacted by this when people file their taxes,” Qualtrough said.
“We have a sense of a possible range, but it’s really difficult right now because so many haven’t filed their 2020 taxes.”
Qualtrough says the tweak announced Tuesday was meant to address a specific problem.
“We are dealing here with a subset of the nine-million Canadians who applied for CERB who legitimately and honestly relied on misinformation we provided,” the employment minister admitted.
“That’s the problem we’re solving here today.”
Hundreds of thousands of Canadians who’d applied for the benefit last year were originally left confused by instructions from C-R-A about how to calculate whether they qualified for the benefit.
The Trudeau government sided with NDP demands to make the new Employment Insurance payments equal to that of the CERB of $2,000 per month.
In mid-December, some 441,000 people received letters from the C-R-A, questioning their eligibility for the CERB, and warning they may owe back some of the payments.
Groups that support them warned repayment efforts could lead many to become homeless and asked the government to grant amnesty for any of these youth who received the CERB.
Ottawa announced the CERB extension and introduced the benefit’s replacement on Aug. 20.
