A retired judo coach was almost forced to sell his house to be able to support himself after being deprived of his federal old age pension for more than a year, but his case was unblocked after the intervention of the Journal.
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“When you’re in a bind, you have to make a decision. And it takes a minimum of money to live,” thunders Marcel Bourelly, 86 years old, in an interview with The Journal.
The former technical director of the Boucherville judo club, who now lives in Costa Rica with his partner, started having problems with Services Canada in the summer of 2024, supposedly because his accountant at the time had checked the wrong box on a form.
As of January 2025, he has not received a single penny. Despite all his efforts, it was impossible for him to know what was happening in his file.
He therefore hired another accountant who made representations on his behalf to Services Canada and the Revenue Agency, but to no avail.
“They sent us a form by mail only to have it sent back by faxwithout anything being written on it,” quips accountant France Chapleau.
Throughout this time, Mr. Bourelly was deprived of his main source of income, which amounted to approximately $700 per month. “We also receive [de] small amounts from Quebec, and a small pension from France where I worked for a few years, but that’s all,” explains the former judo coach.
Like magic
The situation mysteriously resolved just a few days after The Journal asked questions to Services Canada. Mr. Bourelly received a payment of $10,486.83 into his bank account.
However, the government has not specified why it is requiring documents from taxpayers that it already possesses before starting to process a file.
It’s going bad
The happy outcome of Mr. Bourelly’s situation does not change the fact that tens of thousands of seniors in the country are currently deprived of their pension because of computer glitches in the Cúram system which slow down the processing of files.
In 2017, the costs of deploying this IT solution were estimated at approximately $1.75 billion. The government now forecasts a total bill of $6.6 billion, an amount that has almost quadrupled compared to initial forecasts.
