Mr. Chair, the place I would like to start, of course, is to recognize the nature and the scale of the challenges we are facing today. I want to acknowledge that even with the enormous challenges that Canadians are facing and the significant issues our economy is facing, we still do not know and cannot know the depth and duration of the challenge we are facing. How we must protect ourselves is by ensuring that we, together in this House, have the capacity to deal with this on behalf of Canadians.
In that regard, I am obviously pleased that we are moving forward with the legislation proposed today. It will allow us, with the oversight of this House as appropriate, to come forward and make sure that we can protect Canadians in the short term through health measures that are of critical importance, in the medium term as we think about how we deal with our economic challenges, and more importantly, prepare ourselves for opportunity to come out of this challenge in a way that will show the strength of Canadians and Canada for today and for tomorrow.
We have put forward measures here today that we believe are going to enable us to support Canadians and also support Canadian businesses. We think that is the way we should be moving ourselves forward. We have put forward measures that will provide every Canadian who is finding himself or herself away from work because of sickness, quarantine, supporting an elderly parent, supporting their children who might be away from school due to sickness or just because they are away from school, or importantly, if they are away from work because they cannot actually be at work or their employer has asked them to—