Thank you for that, Mr. Chair. My right ear will take some time to recover, I think.
Ms. Speevak, thank you for your very detailed presentation. I wish the minister had been as forthright in laying out the timelines for the course of the last few months. It's very useful.
Of course, we hope that you and your family will continue to be safe and healthy in this pandemic.
We've learned a lot of things from this first meeting. We've learned that WE would be getting, as part of its benefits, up to $43 million out of this program. That's something that people were unaware of before this meeting. We've also heard that the proposal from WE came in exactly the same day as the Prime Minister made the announcement of the student grant program, even though public servants admitted they didn't have the details of the announcement. These are facts that we're going to have to delve into more deeply.
As you pointed out, Ms. Speevak, the alternative would have been to put more money into the Canada summer jobs programs, and of course the number of positions has been reduced, and that's something the government is going to have to answer. Why did it divert money that should have gone to providing jobs around the country through the Canada summer jobs program, which has had a massive funding shortage during this pandemic, instead of into this program that obviously is extremely controversial?
You mentioned earlier in your testimony your concerns about the volunteer provisions—the paid volunteerism and the fact these salaries or wages are actually below minimum wage right across the country. Is part of your concern the liability issue? We're not talking about volunteers. We're talking about students who are being paid less than minimum wage, which brings with it a whole range potentially of liability issues.