I think there would have to be some rough justice no matter what you do. We have data on the typical margins in the retail sector, for example, versus manufacturing, etc. What could have been done perhaps is to have some differential rules around that. For example, you might say 10% on the retail side, 15% or whatever. I'm not quite sure of the number; I haven't tried to do these kinds of calculations. It may be that some sectors tend to have much lower margins; they have a lot of fixed costs that are not subject to the wage subsidy. You may want to have some differentiation with respect to that.
The other approach is to take a more expansive view. Instead of just subsidizing wages, subsidize some of the other fixed costs. The intent of the wage subsidy program, and why I like it, is it keeps individuals attached to their companies and may actually keep them working. In fact, I'm on the board of a charitable organization. We were talking about this earlier on. Their people are still working, but they're getting [Technical difficulty—Editor] revenues, as you could kind of expect—not yet, by the way—but they do have some other expenses they have to cover and things like that. In some ways, if I look back at it, probably I would have tried to take a more general approach on costs rather than simply looking at wages, which is why the idea of the GST refund is not a bad idea, because it's very general. It goes to the whole [Technical difficulty—Editor] regardless of the type of cost structure of the firm. The problem with it is that not all firms have to pay GST, or pay much less compared to others, so I think we may need to look at that very carefully.
Also, we may need to do much more averaging over a six-month period or give a choice between, let's say, March, but maybe use more of an averaging, because I think there's going to be some unfairness. There may be, for example, firms that don't collect that much money in March and April, but then have a lot coming in June. In the charitable sector, they tend to get a lot of donations before Christmas, so they may not actually have that much of a reduction in revenue if you use that as [Technical difficulty—Editor].
Those are a couple of ideas anyway.