Thank you, Madam Chair.
You're doing a great job of chairing in person while we're all virtual. Some day, hopefully soon, we'll be back in the same room together to follow our body language and know who is over time and not over time. Thank you for coordinating the discussion.
Also, thank you to the officials who are here.
I want to take us back in time. I was looking at a communication string that I had with one of our local businesses in Guelph with about 100 employees. The business contacted me on March 19, 2020, to say that they had some concerns about what they were going to do with their staff. Were they going to have to lay off or not lay off, and were there government programs that might be coming? We went back and forth between March 19 and March 27.
In one of the communications on March 25, the owner said that they were going to go ahead and do the layoffs because it looked like government programs might be put in place. It was a big risk for them to let their staff go. They had a lot of engineering staff who would have been hard to replace.
On March 27 they said that they had their application in. On April 2 he said it was looking good. By April 21 he sent me a note to say that CEWS was in place and that they were starting to bring back some of their staff and that it looked like their business was going to get through it. There were some issues around rent recovery, and we were working on other issues. That was one of many—and I am going to say hundreds—calls that we have received as members of Parliament.
The Prime Minister made his presentations at 11:15 every morning, and we knew that. We had conference calls every night from 5:30 until 7 o'clock to talk about what was working and what wasn't. On this call that I had with this business, they weren't qualifying initially; we changed the program, and they were able to qualify going forward.
Could you give us a snapshot on what things were like on your side of the telephone? When we were trying to handle these calls coming from our constituents, how were you able to develop programs virtually overnight?
Mr. Sabia, maybe we could start with you. I know you were new to the department, but maybe you could reflect on your department.