When we get out of this—right now everything is about liquidity and I hope we can turn the tide. The more I hear people saying that it is going to be a whole year, I am extremely worried about the effect it's going to have on the world economy if we shut down the economy for a very long period. Assuming that we can get out of this after the spring and start coming back, which I don't think will be fast but there will be a pickup, in the summer, that's the time when we have to start putting in place some policies. The most immediate one, in my view, is health capacity.
If we want to avoid resurgence of the pandemic next year, we need to do several things. We need to make sure we have enough protective gear and equipment. We need to have enough beds available, makeshift hospitals, etc., for any increase in illness. Hopefully, we might have a therapeutic drug. In fact, there's some discussion that there is one, but we should be investing along with other countries in trying to find that. If there is a drug found, we should make sure it's available here in Canada. We also need to do much more testing than we're doing. There are laboratory tests in Germany that are very successful. There's a big concern about making sure we don't have incorrect negatives and things like that. We do need to make sure we have broad testing.
Hopefully, the response in the fall can be not shutting down the economy but dealing with those people who get sick right away and being able to quarantine them, and because we're testing, we can make sure that the spread is limited without having to shut down the economy. I think that should be the goal of governments in the fall, to do everything we can to make that possible.
After that point, we should really ask ourselves if how we've run our health system was basically the cause of disabilities that led to this problem. That's what I mean by investing in health capacity. We need to look at our health system very carefully because, frankly, we're not the only country but we were not prepared for this kind of problem and from now on we should know what to do. Even though we had experience with SARS and H1N1 and things like that, we hadn't undertaken activities or decisions to make sure that we have that capacity.
With regard to education infrastructure, those are things that help with growth in the economy. Those are things I was mentioning in terms of a smarter government. We have to be very careful not to undertake wasteful programs, business subsidies, and end up keeping low-productivity firms around. There's a whole bunch of things that we need to look at because, frankly, the substance is going to change. Also, we're going to be going through a major technological change with artificial intelligence and various other things that we want to be part of. Those are things that we need to create great opportunities for Canadians to build on and grow. In fact, frankly, it's the private sector that's going to drive this economy.