Thank you, Chair.
Good afternoon, everyone.
First off, welcome to the commissioner and DM Sabia. It's always a pleasure.
I think this is going to be our last meeting that's not going to be in camera. The next three are in camera.
I want to ask something sort of big picture, because a lot of my colleagues have asked questions with regard to granular details.
We put programs in place and we put in guardrails. Obviously, during the middle of a pandemic, a once-in-100-years event, we had to put in place a program that had the objective of maintaining an employer-employee attachment. At one time, 5.5 million Canadian workers maintained an attachment to their employers, so that objective was achieved. On the CERB, we assisted almost nine million Canadians at one point, so that objective was also achieved.
As my first question, how important was it to strike that balance with regard to the guardrails?
The second component of my question is on digitization. I'm a big believer in digitization, let's call it, on the governmental level. What lessons can we learn—and this also applies to CRA—that we can take away as we move forward? The CRA has an implementation arm; the legislation comes from the Department of Finance. What can we take away to digitize government services and provide them more efficiently and more effectively and at a lower cost to Canadians?
If I can turn to Mr. Hamilton and then Mr. Sabia, I'll leave it to you folks to divide that time up.