Finance committee  That's exactly right, yes. They just thought that's what they had to do. According to the information they had available at the time, many thought that simply was the procedure so that people could get money very quickly, not recognizing that there were other procedures that had

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Easter.

Finance committee  Thank you, Ms. Dzerowicz, for the question. I absolutely agree. In fact, I made reference to it in my comments that this is a real concern. It was inadvertent. People, I think, were acting very quickly and wanted to act in the best interests of their employees and thought that

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Ms. Koutrakis, for your excellent questions. With respect to how governments can work together, this may touch on your second question to some extent too. There are many groups of people who are particularly vulnerable during COVID-19. I'm thinking about peo

Finance committee  It effectively could become that. Just one thing, are we including people over age 65? That's not clear to me because there's no age ceiling. I don't want to exclude anybody, and there are certainly a lot of people in precarious positions. That was one question that has been po

Finance committee  Thank you for your question, Mr. Julian. I have been doing a lot of thinking about that. What should we have done? What could we have done better? Would there have been a different approach? I do understand the approach, in that it was set up to match the employment insurance s

Finance committee  I would agree with that. In fact I used that word “reconstruction” deliberately because it was a Second Word War post-war use of that word. During that time, it was referred to as “reconstruction”. With respect to the first aspect of your question, if you read the eligibility c

Finance committee  Yes, a lot of small business employers are not.

Finance committee  Thank you.

Finance committee  Right. I think if you read the fine print in some of the material that has come.... Sorry, the fine print of some of the materials that have come out have excluded them.

Finance committee  Thank you for your comments, Mr. Sorbara, and for your question. I agree with you entirely. I think that these initiatives have been excellent and I think that they will provide some tremendous help to Canadians. I think what we're trying to point out is that there are some qu

Finance committee  Exactly, yes.

Finance committee  Yes, and I think there just needs to be some way of enabling Canadians to ask questions and to help people figure out—a navigator, actually, to help Canadians navigate the system because it's happening so fast and changes are being made, obviously necessarily. There is some excel

Finance committee  Mr. Sorbara, are they eligible? Would a small business that has hired a number of people and is not incorporated be eligible? I'm not sure.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. First, I'd like to thank the committee for the invitation to participate in this discussion. I want to thank all the members of Parliament for their incredibly hard work and leadership during this crisis. I'd like to thank the public servants, who are worki