The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) headquarters, the Connaught Building, is pictured in Ottawa on August 17, 2020.
Sean Kilpatrick / The Canadian Press
The Canada Revenue Agency relies on a clause in an emergency bill approved by Parliament on a single day in April as the legal basis for announcing the names of all companies that received the federal wage subsidy that week.
The agency plans to update information on Canadian Emergency Wage Grant recipients (CEWS) as the program continues into the New Year.
However, the database does not show the amounts received by each company.
Both the names and the amounts would have been private under federal tax law, preventing the government from disclosing tax information.
But C-14, a pandemic-related bill approved by MPs and Senators on April 11, included an exception to the Income Tax Act for names. The legislation states that the government “may communicate or otherwise make available to the public the name of any person or partnership making an application in any manner the Minister deems appropriate [for the wage subsidy]. ”
Katherine Cuplinskas, a spokeswoman for Treasury Secretary Chrystia Freeland, said in an email Tuesday that the government had been working with the federal data protection commissioner on developing the wage subsidy register. Ms. Cuplinskas said the database balances transparency with the protection of personal information.
Ms. Cuplinskas also noted that the legislation that approved the CEWS, including the new disclosure requirement, “was unanimously approved by all MPs from all political parties”.
Some political parties are also included in the CEWS recipients database. At the beginning of this year, the Québécois bloc sharply criticized other federal parties for accepting the wage subsidy. The Conservative Party initially accepted payments, but then vowed under new chairman Erin O’Toole in September that it would stop and repay the funds.
Conservative Party spokesman Cory Hann told The Globe and Mail Tuesday that the party has only received more than $ 1 million in CEWS payments but has not yet started returning the money.
“We are determined to repay it. We are ready to start immediately if other parties do the same, ”he said in an email. “Erin O’Toole believes the wage subsidy was designed to help businesses survive and not subsidize political parties. … At the same time, it was very clear to Erin O’Toole that he would not allow the Trudeau Liberals to use taxpayers money as an unfair advantage, especially as they were trying to orchestrate an early election. “
The Liberals said in September they would no longer take the CEWS, while the NDP and the Greens planned to continue accepting the wage subsidy. Only the Conservatives have promised to repay it.
In an update on Tuesday, Liberal Party spokesman Braeden Caley said the CEWS had helped the party employ 80 people. While official amounts are disclosed in the party’s statements, he said the party received wage subsidies of $ 1.25 million from mid-March to late August.
A Green spokesman said the party received $ 361,853 from March through August. The NDP is in the database, but a party spokesman was unable to immediately provide an updated All Tuesday.
According to the CRA, more than 368,000 companies, nonprofits, and charities have received the CEWS, and the program has paid out more than $ 54 billion since April.
Many large publicly traded companies have disclosed their CEWS payments through public reports to shareholders.
The searchable database has a heading entitled “Information for Employees” in which the Agency encourages employees who believe that a CEWS applicant is misusing the grant to report suspicious activity to the credit rating agency.
Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa and an expert on data protection law, said in an email that if data protection laws are strictly interpreted, the names of publishers do not contain identifiable information because the government does not disclose the names of certain employees. Prof. Geist said the government could have gone further in its disclosure, but wrote: “… the government might have considered a threshold that exempts small businesses from disclosure and limits that public disclosure [of dollars received] to larger companies that have benefited from greater support. “
Kevin Page, former parliamentary budget commissioner and president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Financial Studies and Democracy, said in an email that Canadian companies are aware that the government may disclose information about the subsidy. He noted that coronavirus-related payments to businesses, including dollar amounts, were disclosed in the United States.
Mr. Page said it was understandable that many companies would not want to disclose such information. However, he said that greater disclosure would improve the ability of the public and parliamentarians to scrutinize the wage subsidy program and could speed up the scrutiny and review process. “Increased transparency promotes trust,” he said.
Parliamentary Budget Commissioner Yves Giroux, a former deputy commissioner of the rating agency, said that while the agency must comply with the confidentiality provisions of the Income Tax Act, he would have liked an exemption for the CEWS amounts in addition to the names.
“I personally believe that the amounts should be released, as is the case with many corporate subsidies,” he said on Tuesday.
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