Obviously, housing is technically and constitutionally a provincial and territorial jurisdiction, but as Mr. Kershaw, Mr. Tremblay and I have already indicated, monetary and fiscal policy, which is squarely within national-level government, plays a huge role.
There's one thing I want to say about all of this.
First of all, I understand why the Bank of Canada set interest rates low and engaged in quantitative easing. Every government did that at the start of the pandemic to kick-start their economy or to keep the economy going. That's super-important, but then you need fiscal policies to protect the most vulnerable. You have your monetary policy. I'm not quibbling with that; I'm not going to take on the central Bank of Canada right now, but I would say we should look at the fiscal policies that could be supporting tenants and at what the national-level government can do in that regard, recognizing that landlord-tenant relations are provincial matters but also recognizing that the federal government has the spending power and can rightly use that spending power.
I mean, the federal government could in fact do something around rent relief for the 250,000 households that are in arrears. It's diddly-squat money in the big picture. It's like $300 million of rental arrears, or something like that. The national-level government gave banks $750 billion to protect mortgages, which I'm not quibbling with either. I want people's mortgages to be protected. I think that's super-important.
I don't think during a pandemic it makes sense to be drawing bright lines, and it seems there's some inconsistency around that. The federal government didn't draw a bright line around health care and what was federal jurisdiction and what was provincial jurisdiction, nor should it have. I wanted my federal government to get in there and get ventilators. Who didn't, right? Similarly, I don't see why they have to draw a bright line with renter households. They didn't with commercial rentals. There's a program, a good program, an important program, for those who can't pay their commercial rent leases, so why is the bright line where renter households—