An abuse of our goodwill

Canada’s big three telecoms — Bell, Rogers and Telus — have handed out at least $5.5 billion in dividends while scooping up more than $240 million in federal pandemic support.

If they could find so many billions to give to their shareholders, surely they didn’t need the hundreds of millions they took from the government (a.k.a. Canadian taxpayers).

The telecom companies use of the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy, as reported in the Star on Tuesday, follows previous news that some long-term-care operators saw fit to pay dividends to their shareholders during the COVID crisis that exposed their dreadful care of residents while they also took government support.

In fact, dozens of publicly traded Canadian companies, from auto-parts maker Linamar to furniture retailer Leon’s, have seemingly had the government help to sponsor dividend payments to shareholders in the midst of a health and economic crisis.

It’s galling.

This can’t help but feel like big business taking advantage of a government aid program that was rushed out the door without the fine print that could have prevented such an outcome.

We should be able to expect more from Corporate Canada. And from Ottawa, too. Clearly the government needed to include restrictions, as other countries with similar programs did, to ensure that employees, not shareholders, were the beneficiaries.

The Trudeau government was right to get money out quickly last spring to both individuals and businesses. And perhaps it didn’t expect many companies to find ways to qualify for the wage subsidy at the same time they were in a financial position to provide such things as dividend payments, stock buybacks and executive bonuses.

After all, the program introduced last April was aimed at helping companies that had significant drops in revenue survive the pandemic and keep paying their workers’ salaries.

Yet Bell and Telus actually announced increases to their annual dividend payouts, while Bell and Rogers laid off workers — and they still all qualified for significant government aid.

All this comes at a time when low-income families struggle to pay their high telecom bills to the point that the City of Toronto is working on creating a public internet network to provide quality internet in some disadvantaged communities.

The telecoms, the big for-profit long-term-care operators and the other corporations, naturally, say they’ve done nothing wrong. It’s quite possible, most likely even, that they haven’t broken any rules. But there’s the legal thing to do and there’s the right thing to do, especially at a time of national crisis, and as ordinary Canadians easily understand, those are not necessarily the same things.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said his government will look at whether companies that received supports “perhaps profited in ways that (are) not right.”

Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith wants more than that and has put forward a private member’s motion calling on the government to recoup wage subsidy funds from dividendpaying companies. He says these companies have “abused the goodwill of the federal government.”

It’s more than that. They have abused the goodwill of Canadians who have every right to expect that businesses indirectly receiving their taxpayer dollars in the form of pandemic aid are in real need. Now they find out that some of the biggest beneficiaries are companies enjoying healthy profits.

The theme of big business looking after itself and coming off rather well for it in the pandemic, rather than behaving as Canadians might hope good corporate citizens would, was first illustrated by grocery stores.

Canada’s largest grocery chains had a massive surge in revenues early on as people stocked up on supplies, and they continue to do very well. And yet Loblaws, Sobeys, Metro and Walmart choose to end the $2 “hero pay” raise for front-line staff at the first opportunity.

The grocery giants stripped that extra money from their workers not because their business depended on it, but because they could get away with it.

And now we see that telecom giants and other big corporations applied for the emergency wage subsidy, not because their survival depended on it, but simply because they could. That’s disappointing on all fronts.

Clearly Ottawa needed to include restrictions to ensure workers benefited