I think it's important not to talk about WE; it's more about what we were trying to achieve.
Our goal was to find a way to have an approach to national service during a time of national crisis. We saw that there was a combination of the opportunity for students to be engaged in something that would enable students also to be doing really meaningful work in a summer when so many jobs wouldn't be available. Finally, we thought the idea that they could have some incentive was going to be important, both to make that happen but also to recognize that they weren't going to necessarily have money from jobs this summer because of the pandemic. That was the goal.
The decision on how to administer it was very much taken in the course of Employment and Social Development Canada's review of how to deliver it. As I understand it, what they were trying to consider was whether the public service was capable of delivering, in a very short time period, this program that would make a difference for students. They concluded that a better way to do it would be with an outside organization that had those capabilities already so that we could move quickly. That was the goal. That was the recommendation that came back to us, which, of course, was satisfying our overall goal.
It's very important to put this in the context of what we were facing at that time. We were thinking about multiple programs to support different populations. We were thinking about people who were off work and people who were maybe having more expenses, like seniors. We were starting to contemplate people with disabilities and the challenges they were facing. Students were central to us because there are hundreds of thousands of them who wouldn't have jobs or wouldn't have opportunities if we didn't find some sort of way to deal with that.