I certainly think that rent, in both the commercial and the private sectors, is going to become an increasingly big issue if the public health necessity of the lockdown continues.
Certainly there is the question of deferral of residential mortgages, deferral of rent payments and protection against evictions if rent is not made for individuals in several provinces at this point. The question of whether businesses, particularly in certain retail settings, can defer rent could be an important one. I suspect that as this drags on, what will become clearer is that it will become a question of not just whether interest rates are appropriate or whether deferrals are appropriate. It's not as if individuals or small businesses are storing up three or six months' worth of rent in a bank account and in September they'll be able to open up that bank account and pay off what they owe; rather, it's that people will get behind in their rent, whether it's personal, corporate or retail, and they won't be able to make that money back. We won't be able to restart the economy just by pushing a button and getting everyone back to work on a certain date, June 1 or July 1.
I think there's going to be a much longer tail on this situation. Particularly for individuals with mortgages, individuals with rent, and small businesses that have their own rents as well as debt that they pay in terms of holding inventory or lost inventory, we will likely see a large uptick in bankruptcies and the need to rapidly renegotiate debt, as opposed to simply deferring it.
At this point, we're at the deferral stage. I think a month or two from now we'll be further along, and we'll be at the renegotiation and bankruptcy stage. My fear is that the current bankruptcy process, whether for personal or corporate bankruptcies, particularly in the current setting, may not have the capacity to deal with what we are likely to see in private small businesses.