Government should apologize for carbon-tax rebate debacle
The Alberta government is taking its slogan, “Making life better for all Albertans,” one step further.
It’s making life better for all Albertans, even for those who unfortunately are no longer alive.
The government unveiled Wednesday a piece of legislation that would, among other things, fix a heartless glitch in its carbon tax program.
Under that glitch, officials had been sending out letters to families demanding the return of tax rebates after a family member died.
We’re not talking about a lot of money, maybe $100 or less, but you can imagine the outrage families felt when, while dealing with the death of a family member, they’d get a letter from the Canada Revenue Agency insisting the money be repaid.
This is not the fault of the folks at CRA, by the way, who are responsible for sending out the rebate cheques on behalf of Alberta.
They’re just following the rules set out by the province.
It’s the fault of the Alberta government that introduced a carbon tax system that paid lowerand middle-income Albertans a rebate upfront, even before they spent much money on the tax.
Those Albertans began receiving rebates in January of around $100 to cover them for the year.
But the government never asked itself, “Hmm, what happens if we prepay people a $100 tax rebate in January that covers them for the year but they die in, say, February? They’d ‘owe’ us money, right?”
Finance Minister Joe Ceci admitted to reporters Wednesday the question never crossed his mind or the minds of government officials.
“It wasn’t anticipated,” he said rather sheepishly.
So, that left bureaucrats at the CRA having to collect the money “owed” by the deceased. They began sending out letters, about 4,000 of them.
That led to understandable outrage by family members such as Darlene Piche, who was dealing with the death of her 74-yearold mother when she received a letter in March demanding a repayment of the $100 that had been paid to her mother in January.
“I was dumbfounded. And then my dumbfoundedness turned to anger,” said Piche at the time.
“And all I could think was, ‘How can you people do this?’ To have that insult added to injury. I already have enough on my plate and then I have the government coming after me.”
Opposition MLAs had a field day kicking the government around the legislature as more stories popped up almost daily of widows and widowers being asked to rebate the rebates.
Even after Ceci declared in March, “We’re going to try and fix this so that it doesn’t happen in the future,” letters kept going out.
Ceci personally phoned families to apologize. But that wasn’t enough.
In April, Notley tried to assuage the public anger by saying, “We’ve made it very clear that those rebates are not to be clawed back.”
The government put the responsibility at the feet of the CRA, but the blame rests with the province.
And on Wednesday, the government took steps to clean up its mess.
Family members of deceased Albertans will not be asked to send back any rebate money. And those that have already sent back the money will receive a new rebate cheque for the same amount.
And those cheques might also come with a letter from the Alberta government explaining what happened, and offering an apology.
At least, that’s what Ceci is thinking of doing, but he is waiting to see what kind of explanation letter the CRA might send out to families.
“There’s nothing wrong with saying this is not going to be happening again,” said Ceci. “We had an unintended consequence. We’re fixing it today.”
Ceci should make sure every Alberta family that received a clawback letter will get a letter of apology from the province.
It’s the least it can do after making life worse, not better, for Albertans who lost a loved one this year.