Well, if you'll allow me, I will respond not as the deputy minister of international trade, but as the former deputy minister of public safety, because I was there then.
I would make a couple of points. At the beginning of the pandemic, the atmosphere was quite chaotic. Decisions were being made very quickly. The government recognized that important measures needed to be taken to protect Canadians and to support them, and it was making those decisions on an almost daily basis. Here, I'm referring to things like border policy and economic supports for Canadian individuals and Canadian businesses.
I think that would have been true for the Department of Global Affairs, which at the time was dealing with an airlift of people who were living in Wuhan to begin with, but otherwise Canadians who were living around the world. It was a massive and very convulsive effort for the department to undertake at the time, in addition to communicating generally about COVID policy and the risks of travel.
Many departments were working collaboratively to deal with the situation and to come up with advice and implement new policy, so at the time it was quite inordinately busy, I would say, and very difficult for anyone to have a bird's-eye view of all the things that were going on.