Thank you for your question, Mr. Dreeshen.
You mentioned something interesting when you were talking about trucking. I can tell you that we have learned nothing from trucking. Of course, trucking companies are doing their work properly and have established a structure to protect truckers. Nevertheless, that took a huge amount of time and was extremely difficult. The companies needed to be constantly reminded to establish safety procedures for their people. Even today, truckers often have difficulty finding places where they can go to the toilet or have a shower.
The situation has been resolved, but it took a lot of weeks. François Laporte, the president of Teamsters Canada, had to give a lot of interviews in order to put pressure on the system.
I believe that the government, and the industry too, needs some crisis management, a continuity plan—a contingency plan, if you like. The continuity plan must be done before a pandemic, or between pandemics, not right in the middle of a pandemic, when we are already going through a difficult situation.
As for the safety measures that were established, retail businesses and grocery stores did a good job and we must acknowledge that. They paid some attention and showed some empathy for the workers. The workers also came up with ideas and proposed things that enabled them to stay safe.
Before I finish, I would just like to add that, on dozens of occasions, I have personally seen the extent to which members of the public, customers in grocery stores, are not always aware of the situation. They go in the opposite direction to the signs, they are physically close to the workers, they touch the workers, and they touch the products when they do not need to.
There is still a lot of awareness work to be done, and it's not just up to grocery companies and grocery stores to do that. It's up to the government to do it, but it is also up to us all to show some discipline collectively. As I was saying to you earlier, we are in the middle of Canada's first major pandemic, but I don't think it will be the last.