Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to thank our witnesses for their willingness to come and participate in our committee this morning. Obviously, we appreciate your knowledge and experience and the things you hear on the ground that you can share with us. It means we can end up with a quality report that helps us structure the reaction to COVID-19.
In the first two presentations this morning, I heard a fair amount about the fact that indigenous businesses were excluded from a number of the original programs that were announced by the government. In fact, even since those adjustments were made, there have been large and long delays.
I personally was involved pretty substantially in advocating for the inclusion of indigenous limited partnerships in the CEWS program. I had the opportunity to advocate for that with the Minister of Finance and also with the Minister of Indigenous Services. Ultimately, the work that many of you did, and hopefully some of the work that we did, resulted in some success through that advocacy.
I will start with Ms. Bull.
Can you expand a little bit on the impact and frustration that the original exclusion from CEBA, CEWS or some of these things caused to indigenous businesses? There was that original exclusion, and now there's a long delay, so there has been a long period of uncertainty and frustration that I am hearing about from businesses in indigenous communities. Could you maybe just expand on the impacts that you're hearing about from your people on the ground in your communities?