OTTAWA - The Canada Revenue Agency may be boasting that it has clawed back a billion dollars in tax revenue, but Timmins-James Bay MP Charlie Angus says the money is being squeezed from young families and single moms. Angus has been appalled by the relentless targeting of working-class mothers by CRA investigators and the unfair denial of child tax benefits that are badly needed by these families.
Angus says the treatment of many single moms is nothing less than organized harassment to deny them and their children their child tax benefits.
"I have seen families have their benefits cut off at Christmas. I know moms who are audited again and again with increasingly outrageous demands to prove that they actually have children. This is nothing short of harassment."
Angus says while the government is going relentlessly after working class families, they are giving an easy pass to millionaires and billionaires holding money in offshore tax havens.
"In the last five years, the CRA has clawed back over a billion dollars in benefits from ordinary working families and children. At the same time, billionaire friends of the Prime Minister who have been named in the scandals of offshore tax havens get a free pass. The CRA needs to reconsider its priorities."
Angus said this kind of targeting of the most vulnerable is not acceptable. "The CRA can't or won't go after the big fish, so they go after people who don't have the resources to fight them. It's not right."