I was just on a roll, too.
Mr. Chair, I hope you'll indulge me with the few seconds that we lost there.
It wasn't much more than a year ago that the coronavirus was first on the international radar. Obviously, as we got into March and April of last year, it became the only thing anybody was talking about. In those early days, I remember taking calls from people who didn't know where their next paycheque was going to come from or were worried about losing their home, and from businesses that were worried about keeping the doors open or workers on the payroll.
I'll give a quick summary of some of the main programs that people may be familiar with. CERB helped almost nine million people so far. The student CERB helped hundreds of thousands more. The wage subsidy is keeping over four and a half million Canadians on the payroll. CEBA and the regional relief and recovery fund together supported nearly a million businesses.
Although I hear a lot about the quality of life that people were able to maintain because these supports were coming in, I'm wondering if you have any quantitative data on the actual impact of these measures. Where would we have been had these measures not been advanced in a timely way to help keep people and businesses afloat during the emergency?