On April 11, 2020 new legislation relating to the 75 per cent Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (“CEWS” or “75% labour grant”) was introduced and passed by the House of Commons. In addition to the legislation, the government has also released a revised backgrounder which can be found at the following link:
The legislation is generally consistent with the April 8th backgrounder, but we want to highlight two new measures that were included:
– The revised backgrounder states that special rules for the computation of revenue would be provided to take into account certain non-arm’s length transactions, such as where an employer sells all of its output to a related company that in turn earns arm’s length revenue. As well, affiliated groups would be able to compute revenue on a consolidated basis.
– The government is also announcing that, in order to provide certainty to employers, once an employer is found eligible for a specific period, the employer would automatically qualify for the next period.
We are studying the detailed legislation to implement the 75% labour grant and how they would apply to various situations, more to follow