Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much to our witnesses. We deeply appreciate your coming forward today. You're all very eloquent. We hope that you and your families are staying safe and healthy during this deadly and tragic third wave that is sweeping across our country.
I have a lot of questions. I'll start off with Ms. Brayiannis, Ms. Morse and then Ms. Clemence and Ms. Hodson. We really appreciate your testimony today.
Ms. Morse, when you talked about teachers having to buy their own protective equipment in a country as wealthy as Canada, it just made my heart sink that we're subjecting teachers and students to this kind of situation.
As you're probably aware, the strongest criticism of the budget that was released yesterday is the fact that Canada's billionaires, who have massively profited from this pandemic—nearly $80 billion in increased wealth—aren't subject to any sort of taxation. The wealth tax that other countries are adopting is not being put in place in Canada.
At the same time as we're seeing that billionaires aren't paying anything remotely close to their fair share, we're seeing that the government is looking to curb, starting within a few weeks.... In just over nine weeks, we will start to see, effectively, dramatic cuts in the Canada recovery benefit, in the Canada emergency wage subsidy and CEBA. The government is basically presuming that in nine weeks we'll be out of this and that it can slash all the supports that should be put in place to support small businesses, students and teachers across the country.
Is that a wise course of action? Given the size and scope of this third wave—greater than the other two—the increased death toll and hospitalizations, does it make sense that the government, in a little over nine weeks, will start to slash benefits and end them all in September of this year?
I'll start with—