The human mind is, for the most part, a wonderful and miraculous thing. But when it comes to storing and processing memories, it leaves a lot to be desired. “Remembering is an act of storytelling, after all,” Robert Nash, a psychologist at Aston University in the UK, wrote in one piece for The conversation in 2018. “And our memories are only as reliable as the most recent story we tell ourselves.”
This is worth keeping in mind as we review a new report from the Auditor General of Canada on federal spending during the COVID-19 pandemic. It details $4.6 billion in payments to people who were not eligible for the programs they took advantage of, along with another $27.4 billion that went to companies or individuals that Auditor General Karen Hogan says deserve further scrutiny. “I am concerned about the lack of rigor in post-payment verifications and collection activities,” she said. said in a press release.
These are important concerns and deserve serious attention and investigation. The lack of real-time payroll data, in particular, is a glaring weakness in the system that prevented the federal government from collecting better data and more accurately distributing personalized benefits.
But this kind of focus on granular details risks missing the big picture and the bigger story. After all, the report also speaks to how successful the federal government’s COVID-19 support programs have been, given the speed at which they were implemented and the uncertain environment in which they were created and refined. as what grades: “In a matter of weeks, many programs were up and running. Historically, programs of this size would have taken months, if not years, to implement.”
That speed necessarily increased the risk of giving money to people or businesses that didn’t need it, and the $32 billion that the report identifies as potential overpayments to individuals and businesses is obviously a problem. But they pale in comparison to the rampant fraud that took place in the United States, where literally 10 percent of the $800 billion Paycheck Protection Program was stolen, along with as much as $400 billion from the $900 billion COVID unemployment relief program and another $78 billion in so-called “Economic Injury Disaster Loans.”
As Carleton University professor Jennifer Robson pointed out, the $4.6 billion in overpayments to individuals represents an overall rate of four percent, not very high, but not much different from the Insurance program’s one percent overpayment rate. of Employment. reported in 2019. “I find it hard to see this as outrageous when the rules for getting CERB/recovery benefits were lowered so much, out of a need for speed/ease (which the AG acknowledges), and with the consent of Parliament,” Robson tweeted.
She wasn’t the only one refusing to grab her pearls on the subject. As the Laval economist Stephen Gordon put it in his own cheep, “If someone from the future had visited me in April 2020 and told me that two years later, the most pressing economic concern in Canada would be an overheating economy and inflation, I would have been thrilled. That was the *good news* scenario in April 2020.”
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We would do well to remember how monumentally uncertain that moment felt for everyone. It will surely be tempting for some to point to the government’s surprise and awe approach to COVID-19 and conclude that it somehow failed to anticipate or prevent waste and fraud, or is solely responsible for the inflation we are dealing with. This day. But the alternative scenario they were trying to avoid – a massive economic depression and deflationary spiral – would have been much, much worse than anything we are facing now.
Nor should we allow today’s conservatives to put the words of their 2020 counterparts down the memory hole. After all, it was the Conservative Party of Canada that pushed for the increase of the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy from the initial level of 10% to 75%, which surely contributed to the $15.5 billion in possible overpayments to companies identified by the auditor. general.
As then leader Andrew Scheer told the House of Commons in a March 2020 emergency debate, “There will be many Canadians who have never turned to the government for help before who will now turn to the government. We need to make sure we find a way to give them that support and help keep people in their apartments and homes and be able to put food on the table.”
We should continue to chase egregious overpayments, but also remember: generous support averted a much bigger disaster, writes columnist @maxfawcett. #opinion #pandemic #CERB #cdnpoli
In general, the government did that, with, it should be said, the full support for of his fellow parliamentarians in both the House of Commons and the Senate. As Senate Conservative leader Don Plett said in his own speech to the Red Chamber: “Few of us could have imagined being where we are today, but here we are. We are in this together, and together, with God’s help, we will get through this.”
That feeling of togetherness is long gone, of course. But as conservative politicians and pundits comb through the GA report for ammunition, we should at least hold them accountable for the facts of the matter. Federal government spending did not, as they have repeatedly claimed, cause the inflationary fever that has gripped economies around the world. And while their COVID-19 relief programs were vulnerable to waste and fraud at the margins, they did a good job of getting money quickly to people who needed it.
We should continue to clean up any mess that arises out of that sense of urgency. But we must also remember that we avoided a much bigger disaster in the process, and that it was the government that made that happen. That is the overall story of the pandemic, as much as some people keep trying to pretend otherwise.