When you think about models of basic income transfers, if we had time to implement such a thing, of course, we're smart people, we know how to figure out administrative systems, you could perhaps find a way to implement that. That's not really a barrier when you're thinking about a long-run kind of program that you might think about and have a couple of years to put in place.
That wasn't the situation we were in here. Here we were in a situation where Canadians needed income as soon as possible. In looking at the decision that was made to use the application-based system of the emergency relief benefit through the CRA, my understanding is that was as fast as things could be done. There was no “send money now” button sitting on anyone's desk.
If we had used, for example, the 2018 tax filer database, well, first you'd have to reverse engineer that database to send money in the other direction. Second, you'd have to at least clean it up a bit because some people have died, unfortunately, some people have been born, some people have moved, there's banking information. All those things, when you're doing them 30 million times, take time to do.
There was a choice made that the emergency relief benefit was going to be faster than doing it through the existing tax database. I think the proof is in the fact that they did get this money out by early April and a lot of Canadians benefited from it. I think a lot of Canadians are happy with that.