Madam Speaker, I certainly agree with my colleague about the scale of the devastation in small businesses. This is the worst economic impact we have seen since the Great Depression. I think the saddest moments for MPs across the country have been in many cases small business people, who put their lives into their business, closing the door for the very last time because they are simply unable to continue.
The commercial rent relief program put in place by the government was handed to a commercial mortgage company. As the member knows, initially it only applied to landlords with commercial mortgages. This was completely unacceptable. Over a billion dollars that should have gone to small businesses was not able to get there because of the complexity of the program given to a company led in part by the spouse of the chief of staff to the Prime Minister. The government has said it will fix that massive error by putting in place a new program, but it is not retroactive.
Why is the government not putting in place retroactive measures for the hundreds of thousands of small businesses that were unable to access the first botched program for commercial rent relief so that those businesses could actually weather this storm and come out of the pandemic and the second wave intact and—