First let me pick up on Bob's comment with respect to digitization.
I think there is a consensus across the government about the importance of pressing ahead and indeed accelerating what the government's doing on digitization. There is a substantial amount of investment in the recent budget for precisely that purpose and to assist the Canada Revenue Agency in what they're doing so that Canadians can interact with the Canada Revenue Agency on a more efficient and purely digital basis.
More broadly than that, the goal is to create a set of systems whereby individual Canadians can interact with their government much more efficiently on an online basis. Those investments extend, yes, to Revenue Canada, but also very much to a number of other departments that have day-to-day interaction with individual Canadians. For instance, employment insurance is another area where significant investments are absolutely needed to ensure that the program is up to date and ready for the challenges of the digital economy that we find ourselves in.
That continues to be a priority and something that we're going to continue to fund in subsequent budgets.
I will just move to this issue about guardrails and the design of the program. I can say this from a distance, because I wasn't there at the time.
When you think back to March and April of 2020 and the kind of economic damage that the pandemic was doing to Canadian businesses and individual Canadians, there was urgency to get a program out there that would have a big and immediate impact. The situation was just that urgent.
If you take a couple of steps back, I think that's one of the reasons you're seeing the Canadian economy now able to react with the kind of energy that it has as we progress through the vaccine and as the energy and the spring of the Canadian economy begins to expand. Hopefully, we'll get a lot more of that through the summertime and into the early fall as the economy fully opens.
This program has played a critical role in greatly shortening the amount of time from when an employer picks up and begins to expand business until their employees are there. One of the things that the government wanted—and I think they were right—was to cut that time to the absolute minimum.