Finance committee  Perhaps I could answer briefly. Yes, we are actively thinking about working with Health Canada and the Public Health Agency, as is everyone else, to understand the trajectory of the current crisis. Each of the programs has a duration, whether it's 12 weeks for the wage subsidy

Finance committee  Thank you. On the way the wage subsidy is structured, you're of course correct that the first reference period, from March to March or using some other metric that's allowed by the legislation, requires a 15% drop in revenue. There is a rule in the framework legislation that ess

Finance committee  Perhaps, Mr. Chair, I can respond to that.

Finance committee  I can't fault the math. It sounds right to me. In terms of $240 billion, that is a significant expenditure when our revenues are somewhere in the region of $300 billion a year. I think what the government tried to do, as the minister indicated, was to quickly make funds available

Finance committee  Perhaps I'll begin with the rules. I don't want to give a kind of ruling with respect to any institution [Technical difficulty—Editor]

Finance committee  Non-profit organizations and registered charities are eligible for the wage subsidy. Hospitals are not.

Finance committee  I think I'd prefer it if the organization could contact either the Department of Finance or the CRA and we could look at the particular structure. As I say, the basic construct of the rule is that a hospital wouldn't be eligible but a non-profit organization would be. It's very f

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  We would be happy to look at the particular circumstance.

Finance committee  Others may be better positioned to respond to that. After all, I'm the tax guy. However, let me raise some considerations around that. The idea of the universal basic income has been around for a long time and there have been debates around it and one or two small pilot studies

Finance committee  In fact, Mr. Vermaeten might be in a better position to speak to this, but essentially we used the benefits system at the CRA, together with Service Canada's system. We used those systems that were already in place to, effectively, on the basis of attestation, on the basis of inf

Finance committee  I don't have it, but my sense is that it's somewhere around $320 billion. Don't quote me on that.

Finance committee  Perhaps I can.

Finance committee  The first question related to non-profit organizations and charities. In designing the wage subsidy over a short period of time, we did engage with the charitable sector to understand the particular challenges they face. I'll briefly point out two areas of flexibility there. One

Finance committee  Yes. I could explain the general principle of excluding government-owned corporations that are exempt. In many contexts, they have other means of support, for example provincially owned corporations, federally owned corporations, and so on. That would cover corporations owned by