Thank you, Mr. Chair, and it's my first opportunity to weigh in on the topic du jour of our WE scandal.
I want to first of all thank the public service for all the work over the last number of months. It's been extraordinary. My own personal frame on this is that the WE scandal is troubling, but when you think about all the things that were rolled out and the pace at which they were rolled out, inevitably there was going to be one major, giant snafu, and this is it, and it's at an ethics level, it's at a program level, it's at a lot of different levels. However, I want to set it aside because I think, as a sometime guest to the finance committee, I want to concentrate on what we do now with the urgency that the days of summer are dwindling. How do we get the jobs for students?
Although I'm very supportive of the public service and would love to ask Mr. Aylward more questions, and I may get time to do that, I want to go to Mr. Mandryk.
Let me go back to the Canada summer jobs program. Several of my colleagues in committee have said they didn't know whether there was capacity. I'll share my own experience and then ask you for a response.
I've talked to my colleagues in the Green caucus, Paul Manly and Jenica Atwin. We all estimated unfunded possible jobs at a large number. For instance, we had employers who asked for 16 positions over the summer but were granted four because of budget constraints, or they asked to have students for eight weeks but there was only money for four weeks.
In our back-of-the-envelope estimates, each of us would have about half a million dollars' worth of existing approved employers in the Canada summer jobs program and the potential to get those students those jobs fairly quickly.
You've already said you favour using the Canada summer jobs program. In terms of delivering jobs for students, could you suggest whether there is anything comparable to the Canada summer jobs program at this last moment? Are any of the issues of concern that you raised about the proposed WE Charity approach—whether the jobs are real, whether there are any employment issues—issues that you've seen at all with Canada summer jobs?