As I think I said in my opening remarks, the single most important thing is actually health policy, because what we're really trying to do here in terms of accelerating the recovery is to get both businesses and households comfortable with the idea that economic activity can resume without everyone getting sick.
It's about things like whether we have the right mask policy in place, for example. A major employer who we just had on one of our conference calls, a major real estate employer, had a policy that people using their bathrooms in their office towers had to have a mask. They were told by that province that masks weren't mandatory and that they basically couldn't impose them.
I think we need to have national policies designed to put us on a common footing. That's the most important thing.
One other thing that I don't read a lot about in Canada is that there is an international race not only to develop a vaccine but to get your hands on it first. I think one of the most important things we're going to do, again in the health area, is to make sure that.... It's going to be every country for themselves here, and that's not just a Donald Trump phrase. We're going to have to make sure that Canada is not waiting for the other billions of people around the world to be vaccinated while we're at the back of the line. That has nothing to do with banking, but in fact this recession has nothing to do with banking either and has everything to do with health policy.
I would add one other point. We've talked a lot about extending credit, but actually, a lot of small businesses don't want to borrow. They're in debt already. They don't want to put any more money on the debt side. If we have a hole in our financial system, I would say that it's more on the equity side. I think we need to come up with innovative ways for small and medium-sized businesses to actually have better access to pooled equity funds, because that's what they really need. They need more equity and less debt.
I would even go so far as to say that we also need to think about when they exit that and try to go public. Our public equity markets have really shrunk in terms of new issuance. We've seen that almost disappear. In the heydays of the income trusts—and I know that was a bad word in Ottawa—we had a lot of companies using that vehicle to go public, and that was a way for the owner to cash in. It may have been a flawed way in part and need rethinking, but I do think we have to think more broadly about not just big companies but smaller companies and getting more equity to them.