Thank you very much, Ms. Koutrakis, for your excellent questions.
With respect to how governments can work together, this may touch on your second question to some extent too. There are many groups of people who are particularly vulnerable during COVID-19. I'm thinking about people with disabilities, families living with children with autism, for example, and people struggling with mental health issues. This is one area around which we can really have a terrific federal, provincial, territorial and local response if we work together around helping some of the particularly vulnerable populations.
For example, as we were saying, the charitable sector is struggling a lot. The announcements today were fantastic, and it would be nice to be able to build on those announcements for the charitable sector and to extend them.
Here are some examples of what could be done for vulnerable families. It would be very helpful if the governments could work together to provide some guidelines for safe volunteering and safe assistance to vulnerable people, because governments at provincial levels, and federally as well, are now calling for volunteers. That's essential right now, because the donations to voluntary organizations are dropping, but people are worried about doing that. How can we help vulnerable families and vulnerable individuals through safe volunteering? So there's a health aspect. In terms of what the federal government might do, the CERB could be extended to people caring for individuals with severe disabilities. That would take the pressure off a lot of the respite services that are struggling right now. Those are a few.
We haven't talked about the private sector role at all in this. It would be really nice for all governments to engage actively with the private sector, as they've done on the health side, in trying to get some private corporations to pair with charitable organizations and the charitable sector, to work together as a real “team Canada”, where you might have a pairing of a charitable organization with the private sector, or even to match the donations of Canadians. We might want to give some special tax credits to Canadians.
Those are some areas around which we can really model some excellent federal, provincial, territorial and local co-operation.