Madam Speaker, I am reminded of 2008-09, during the global financial crisis, when we heard the phrase “too big to fail”. It was often used in reference to America's banking sector. We took the approach from day one that households and small businesses were too big to fail.
Our phones were ringing off the hook with real people in real communities living with real concerns. If the member's experience was anything like mine, he spoke to single parents who did not know how they were going to pay for groceries. He spoke to people who were on the verge of eviction. He spoke to small business owners who not only worried they were not going to be able to keep their business going, but worried about the well-being of their employees.
There has been a very human face to our government's response, and it is programs such as the CERB that have now helped nine million Canadian households keep food on the table. It is about programs such as the wage subsidy for business owners, who told us they would have had to lay off staff without access to a program to help them pay for wages. It has the federal government paying up to 75% of the wages for businesses across Canada that have had a drop in revenue. We should not let the remarkable nature of these programs be dismissed because they have been in effect for a number of months.
To answer the hon. member's question, the reason we created these programs is that people needed help and we wanted to provide help to them.