Thank you for the opportunity.
I actually am not in favour of a basic income. I don't think CERB should have been the template. A lot of people think CERB was the portal through which we got a cheque for $2,000, or some amount of money, cut to everybody. They saw it as a portal to basic income. I don't think you could have a more misguided approach to what CERB was about.
CERB was about disincentivizing people from going to work so they could stay at home and contain the contagion. That was why people were given money. In a recovery, you don't want a system where you're throwing money at people universally. You're trying to get them back to work, particularly in the era of population aging.
This might take us six months, 18 months or it might take us 24 months to get through this health crisis. We are in a health crisis still. Once we get to the other side of it, we don't know how much of the ecosystem of business will have been destroyed, will have been blitzkrieged, by COVID because it could not withstand the lower volume of business. We don't know how much of the economy will be left standing.
The last thing in the world we want to do is encourage people to stay at home. We need people to contribute, because even a basic income requires people working and paying taxes so they can redistribute income.
This is why I believe in investments, and significant investments, in child care, not as in warehousing children so mommy can go back to work, but child care that permits the maximizing of the potential of preschoolers so that everybody enters school learning ready, and that supports learning throughout the course of school-age children's lives so that everybody can graduate and have the best opportunities to develop their skills and get a job. This is much more important to me than a basic income.
I'm sorry that you have misunderstood all of those shows that I've been on talking about basic income, because I really am not a supporter. I've been super clear about that all the way along.