Trudeau Begins Tax Crackdown

Justin Trudeau begins tax crackdown and his Liberal government has launched a massive investigation into Canadian tax filings.

CRA’s is going after employers who have been using the Canadian Emergency Wage Subsidy program.

This goal of the program was to help business owners pay employee wages during the pandemic.

Although this may be true, Trudeau now intends to punish small business owners that cheated the system. At the same time, big corporations draw little if any inquiries from the government.

On the whole, Trudeau is going after small business owners on a massive scale. Despite the bankruptcy of thousands of small businesses, Trudeau intends to punish those that didn’t follow the rules.

Even worse, Trudeau and the CRA have setup a webpage for Canadians to snitch on each other.

According to the government, the $54 billion in wage subsidy payments have offset half the negative economic effects of the pandemic on the unemployment rate. But, this statistic is hardly reliable.

With this in mind, Trudeau’s decision to award $912 million in federal contracts to the WE Charity, which he has close family ties, gets swept under the rug.

This is not fair at all. Clearly the playing field is not level.

At the same time, Canadian citizens that received the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) should expect the same treatment.

The CRA has sent more than 400,000 letters asking CERB recipients to verify they met the eligibility rules. Not surprisingly, from the get-go confusion over eligibility has lead to a lot of frustration. Canadians feel cheated because the rules were unclear and have changed several times.

Conclusion

Simply put, the rules about CEWS and CERB were not clear from the start. And now many Canadians will have to repay their emergency benefits with a penalty! Ouch!

Indeed, the economic hardships faced by Canadians are real. And the pandemic is far from over. Unfortunately, more hardship lies ahead at tax time.

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