Thanks, Peter, for those couple of questions that I think you've thrown my way.
First of all, if the emergency wage subsidy were extended to municipalities, it would allow us to bring many of our workers back to work and use them in other ways throughout the city. As we all know, this pandemic has led to many social issues within the city. Seniors are not able to get food as they are unable to leave their homes, for one issue. The homeless issue is just picking up like we've never seen it before and, as you know, we have opened up some of our ice rinks to allow the homeless to come in and have a safe and warm place to stay, while being able to keep the social distancing that we all know is so important. Being able to bring our staff back would relieve so much pressure on those two fronts alone, and allow us to do even more than we're doing.
This is what I would propose for how this could be managed within the federal government. Given that the cities, for some many years, have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars towards the UI program, without really any of that money being taken out of the bank, so to speak, from the municipalities' employees over so many years, that could be harmonized, in my view, with the emergency wage subsidy. That could allow us to bring our staff back and put them to work doing the good work that needs to be done in the city.
If the government would harmonize somehow those two benefits for an extra 20%, that would allow us to bring our staff back to work, instead of their being home collecting 55%, and we could start down the road of doing even more in our communities. That is how I would propose that the government could look at this.