Records show Liberal MP Lisa Hepfner’s (Hamilton-Mountain, ON) husband has to repay Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) cheques he was prohibited from receiving, according to Blacklock’s Reporter. “These were really complicated programs the government was rolling out,” said Hepfner at a House of Commons Ethics Committee meeting. “The government was rolling out these programs to help Canadians.” Hepfner said in an ethics filing her husband Michael Aitkens had to make a CERB repayment to the Canadian government. She did not reply to questions. Parliament passed the Canada Emergency Response Benefit Act in 2020 to provide $2,000 monthly cheques to jobless tax filers facing foreclosure or eviction. The CBC ordered most employees to work from home at full pay at the time. “Less than 20% of employees — mainly those involved with essential operations such as news presentation and news gathering — reintegrated into our offices,” said CBC management. Hepfner did not disclose how much Aitkens was ordered to repay. Records showed more than 1.1 million Canadians who improperly claimed CERB cheques were ordered to repay $2.1 billion to date. Benefits were often clawed back from claimants who had income and did not need COVID-19 relief. She indicated they owned rental properties in Hamilton and St. Catharines, ON. She was working as a television reporter with CHCH-TV at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. While working there, she said she was covering the COVID-19 pandemic every day. “It was critical,” she said. “We were in an emergency.”At the time, she said she was on the other side. She was a journalist. “I was mostly tasked with covering those daily news conferences,” she said. “I have to say from my perspective, the information was clear.”With CERB, she acknowledged there was plenty of information. “These were really complicated programs the government was rolling out,” she said. Canadian government managers said at House of Commons Public Accounts Committee meetings in 2021 they warned cabinet speeding up processing of COVID-19 benefits would result in overpayments at taxpayers’ expense. “We knew,” said former employment deputy minister Graham Flack. Since employees knew, Flack said it was not an error. He admitted it was a known design criteria. “We knew when we were launching the benefit that it was not possible in the time we had to have real-time reconciliation,” said Flack. This ordeal comes after a former Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) employee was charged by the RCMP's Provincial Financial Crime Team in August for an elaborate embezzlement scheme involving about $20,000 in fraudulently obtained emergency benefits.READ MORE: Former CRA employee charged with embezzling $20,000 in emergency benefitsFormer CRA employee Melissa Jensen Webb was facing an array of serious charges such as fraud, unauthorized access to a computer and accessing confidential information.Webb is alleged to have exploited her position as a full-time CRA employee in Alberta, capitalizing on her inside knowledge to orchestrate the scam between 2020 and 2021.
