Thank you, Chair.
I'll be directing my questions to all the witnesses.
I'll just start by saying that this might be a rare day, I hope, when Conservative MPs and union leaders can agree on things. I have to say, in watching this unfold, that we are asking ourselves a fairly significant question as a country right now, which is, how do we pay people who are providing food to a population that's on lockdown during the middle of the pandemic when we're asking people to put themselves and their families in danger of the very thing that we're locking ourselves out against?
I don't think we've answered that question very well, frankly. I have to commend my colleague Mr. Erskine-Smith for taking the initiative on this particular study, because we have to get this right.
I'm going to start my questions just by asking some exploratory “what happened” questions from your perspective. I know that in the middle of April my colleagues and I put out a statement calling upon the government to issue, at bare minimum, guidelines for personal protective equipment for various industries across the country so that they could be part of the planning process for distribution and prioritization of PPE.
Were you contacted by the government, as union leaders, at any point over the last couple of months in terms of developing guidelines and/or suggesting standards by which employers should be providing PPE or PPE-secured environments for workers in the grocery sector?
Maybe I'll start with Mr. Dias.