Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I want to thank all of the witnesses for coming today. Your presentations have certainly given us a lot to think about.
I think the big question is, what will this government learn from the pandemic? Will it continue to use it as a tool to hypnotize the masses, or will it abandon its global initiatives and focus on Canadians?
Those of us with secure jobs or fixed retirement incomes, minus the stress of investment depletion, will weather this storm for now, but printing billions of dollars a week to cover the Prime Minister's daily cuckoo clock appearances will hurt us for generations to come, and those people working for businesses teetering on the brink will need to make wage concessions that the public sector would be appalled by, so we need a plan. We can't make the same mistakes again.
Health and social distancing decisions made for high-density communities are necessarily different from those for communities that are more sparsely populated. Supplying funds to help small business owners adapt to this new reality would have been much better received than having them watch their clients all flock to big-box stores for their purchases. The most common theme we've heard throughout this nightmare has been the concern over both the lack of any federal government plan to reopen Canada's economy and the lack of any plan to build and support Canada's future economy. Let's call that a 10-year plan for the economy of the future.
This Liberal government is devoting huge resources to so-called “green economy businesses”. We've just heard from Mr. Balsillie how we really should be thinking about and concentrating on our core values. Regardless of the damage that it does to these other economic sectors, they fail to recognize—