Canadian finance news — if you received CERB and weren’t eligible, the official advice is brutally simple: buck up, face the music, and pay it back. Sell your valuables. Purge room by room. DIY everything. But here’s the problem nobody in Ottawa wants to say out loud: that advice only works for the lucky few. Most Canadians caught in the CERB repayment net were already living in poverty — and you can’t squeeze blood from a stone.
By Maplestime Finance Desk | Toronto, Ontario | September 19, 2026
Sources: Canada Revenue Agency, Toronto Star | Last updated: September 19, 2026
Key Takeaways
- Financial advisor Lesley-Anne Scorgie’s advice to ineligible CERB recipients: sell belongings, cut spending, “buck up” and repay
- That advice only applies to a tiny sliver of the people CRA found ineligible
- Most people who applied in the pandemic’s early panic were already living in poverty — with nothing to sell
- Confusing and contradictory government rules caused much of the ineligibility, including reversed self-employment rules and missing T4s
- The only realistic answer for the vast majority is a CERB amnesty
The “Buck Up” School of CERB Repayment
On May 30, 2022, the Toronto Star published a contribution from financial advisor Lesley-Anne Scorgie entitled: You received CERB and shouldn’t have. Now you have to repay it. So, what are your options if you really can’t afford to?
Scorgie’s tough-love advice to CERB ineligibles is basically to “buck up” and face the music. After getting clear on the amount you owe and your repayment schedule, start making plans: sell your valuables and belongings, collect debts from friends and family, do things yourself that you’d normally pay others to do, and stop spending as much.
The language is pungent: “Go room by room and purge… do some extra work… DIY everything you possibly can. Nails, cleaning, delivery fees… Cash in your loyalty points… Speak to an insolvency trustee…”
For people who clearly knew they were ineligible for CERB, cashed in anyway, and blew the proceeds — this is undoubtedly great advice. Perform a belt-tightening lifestyle makeover or face the consequences. It’s hard to disagree.
Why That Advice Fails Most Canadians
Too bad Scorgie’s pointed advice only applies to the tiniest sliver of people the CRA found ineligible for CERB.
The reality is that most Canadians who applied in the panic of the early days of the pandemic — only to be told later they didn’t qualify — were people already living in poverty. They don’t have possessions of real monetary value. They don’t have excess clothing or household items to sell. Loyalty points are accumulated buying basic necessities like food and hygiene products, then spent on the same because the hydro bill is due.
It is an elaborate and misguided fiction that people in poverty have a resource-laden lifestyle. Say it again: people living in poverty in Canada don’t have the resources to repay CERB.
Related: Concrete Steps to Tackle the Affordable Housing Crisis in Canada
The Government’s Own Rules Caused This Mess
Remember how confusing the rules were when they first came out? Remember government staff advising people to apply anyway, even when they might not be eligible? Remember the self-employment rules that got reversed? The partial relief for students who should have applied for the Canadian Emergency Student Benefit instead? The GIS clawback that only recently got overturned?
If the government could decide it was wrong to force struggling seniors to repay CERB, why not everyone struggling in poverty?
Consider how people actually ended up “ineligible”:
- Missing paperwork: In the first blush of the pandemic, many workers never got T4s from employers who closed up without fulfilling their responsibilities. No T4? No Record of Employment? Ineligible.
- Missing T4As: Others collected qualifying honorariums but were never issued the T4As they needed — quite legally, and with CRA’s blessing — to establish eligibility. They are eligible, but CRA thinks they aren’t.
- Forced applications: A significant number of income and social assistance recipients were forced to apply for CERB on the off chance they “might” be eligible, only to get the bad news later. In some jurisdictions, those payments were summarily clawed back from provincial assistance — leaving recipients in a deeper hole, with the federal CRA also wanting its cut.
- Rent hikes: Subsidized renters across Canada saw rents rise by $600 a month — 30 percent of the $2,000 monthly CERB — because rent-geared-to-income means exactly that.
And many people simply couldn’t worry about whether they qualified. It was a pandemic killing thousands. An already uncertain existence made terrifying. Who wouldn’t grasp at anything offering some measure of security?
The Case for a CERB Amnesty
For the vast majority of ex-CERB recipients living in poverty, the real answer is a CERB amnesty.
Scorgie’s approach absolves the federal government from fixing the mess caused by its unclear and inconsistent communications, and absolves provincial and municipal governments of their responsibility in requiring ineligible social assistance recipients to apply. The implication is that everyone who wrongly received CERB is either dishonest or made a punishable mistake.
If we as a society continue to allow the depth and breadth of poverty in Canada to exist, then at the very least we must stop blaming the victims for being victimized. It would seem we have given up on a “just” recovery — settling for recovery just for some.
Maplestime will provide updates on CERB repayment and related federal programs as announcements are made.
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Should Ottawa grant a full CERB amnesty for Canadians living in poverty — or is repayment the price of a program that was always going to be messy? Tell us in the comments. And share this with every Canadian still staring down a CRA repayment letter.
