I agree with your assessment. The government has been moving to fix, based on feedback, in real time. I don't fault government for not getting these programs out. I fault it for the slowness in some of them, but I don't fault it for not getting them all right the very first day. This is a new emergency and there has been an open avenue and lots of dialogue happening—far more than was the case prior to the pandemic.
That effort has slowed completely. New businesses were promised by the Prime Minister in May 2020 that they would be given access to government support programs, and there's not been a single movement on that to allow small firms to access CEBA, CERS, the wage subsidy, or HASCAP. That needs to change. New businesses with $500,000 or $600,000 in investments to start up a restaurant came on stream in April, were shut down, opened for a couple of months, then shut down again. They've been ineligible for every single one of the federal programs, and while there's been talk about fixing that, there's been no action at all.
There are other program failures: with the rent subsidy, for example. One of the requirements to use the rent subsidy program is that as a business owner, you have to pay your entire rent bill. Let's say your rent is $10,000 a month, and the rent subsidy is going to deliver you $4,000. That's great; you're happy to get that. It will help you address some of the gap, but if you don't have the $6,000 to pay your landlord you cannot use the rent subsidy in its current structure. We've raised this with government. Even landlords are saying to allow the tenant to get the $4,000 and pay them with that, because it will reduce the debt they're experiencing. There's been no movement on that.
Just yesterday the government fixed a couple of small details of the rent subsidy—some of the problems we were facing with comparator months—but there are a lot of gaps there. The same problems exist with the wage subsidy. Tons of businesses have slipped though the cracks in the CEBA loan program. Some of them are too small, so the micro-sized businesses have been squeezed out. There is a list as long as my arm of businesses that unfortunately, while anxious to get some of these useful programs, cannot because the rules don't allow them to do that.