I think we've been very lucky here in Canada. We obviously saw shortages on the grocery store shelves early on last March. I think we saw some more in the fall, certainly where I live, with the second wave of the pandemic. I think Canadian companies have done an incredible job of keeping that food supply going, but it has been a Herculean effort.
As I said, food processing is a manufacturing business. You think of the equipment, the quintessential assembly line. When you have people who stand near each other on that assembly line, to accommodate social distancing you can put fewer people there, which means you have to slow down production. We have seen companies overcome this by adding other shifts. They're less productive on any given shift and have had to try to find new workers to work different shifts, adding an overnight shift, for example.
We also saw companies do things such as streamline their product line. If you were a chicken processor who perhaps previously offered 40 different products, you may have had to streamline that down to 20 to increase the efficiency of what was going through.
At the end of the day, it has added to worker bonuses, changes to the actual configuration of the plants, additional PPE and cleaning. As I said, last year we estimated it was $800 million. I'm guessing we're getting close to $1 billion just in the cost of trying to keep our workers safe while they're at work.