Public Accounts committee  Early on in the pandemic, as I think has been talked about, we initially thought this program was going to be three months and we had to get help out. Using that digital main street example, those organizations approached us and said, “We have the capacity here. We've been runnin

Public Accounts committee  We added some additional staff to help us out. We have additional staff who will help us when it comes to the recoveries time as well. We added 30 or 40 staff to help us do this. We will carry them forward as we go into the back end of the program and look to close out files in

Public Accounts committee  We leverage our social media, for sure. Whether it's Twitter, Facebook or what have you, we make sure we're getting the word out. We also have a whole host of internal contacts that we reach out to in terms of that big ecosystem I was talking about. We have 36 different post-seco

Public Accounts committee  Far be it from us to tell a region what they need or don't need, but we do that regular analysis. That's part of our core business. I want to delineate between the emergency relief program we're talking about here versus our ongoing efforts to develop economic opportunities for

Public Accounts committee  We all recognized the emergent nature of the circumstance, with a lot of companies having closed their doors, and a lot of retail companies not having other opportunities to find other sources of income as they were forced to shut down. All the regional development agencies moved

Public Accounts committee  I can start, if you'd like. The not-for-profits were supported in two ways. Partway through the program, they became eligible for support through the program itself, to ensure that they had liquidity to continue. There was a circumstance where we provided about $5 million to kee

Public Accounts committee  I don't think it's a discrepancy. I think it's the nature of the different economies. It's really hard to make comparisons between each of the regions. As Mr. Jones pointed out, the west was in much more dire straits just before the pandemic, and when you're making a comparison

Public Accounts committee  The CFDCs were a really important partner for us. We gave them, in fact, $83 million out of the $500 million that came into FedDev. They moved very quickly on the ground to support 1,950 different SMEs across the region. They were a critical partner for our organization. I think

Public Accounts committee  If it was a complaint or a challenge, it would have been very early on. I think things got smoothed out quite a bit. To Mr. Jones's point, while we talk about the RRRF—and you talk about it running from May 2020 and moving to closing up in June 2021—there were, in effect, four t

Public Accounts committee  Since we launched the RRRF, we've moved on and have been delivering a host of recovery projects. Across the regional development agencies we've established tiger teams to work together on the implementation of these, ensuring that we have a common look and feel, and that we're lo

Public Accounts committee  We didn't use a formula. The job numbers were provided by the individual organizations on the first go-around with their application estimates, and then they were further reviewed after.

Public Accounts committee  I think they would have been challenged in a lot of circumstances. You have to understand that to get to our program, they had to have gone through and either exhausted or been ineligible for all the other relief programming that was available. In many of the circumstances for

Public Accounts committee  We were really excited to be able to partner with the Ontario Business Improvement Area Association, the Toronto business improvement area association, Communitech and Invest Ottawa to provide multi-layer support. I think it's important to realize that the regional relief and re

Public Accounts committee  I can start. I think there were a few one-off discrepancies in that regard, but I think there's a multi-stage process for reassessing those job numbers, and it's important to understand that within the program, the job numbers weren't actually an indicator used to choose which p

Public Accounts committee  Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Good morning, committee members, and Ms. Hogan, Mr. Jones and Madam Brassard. Thank you to the committee for the invitation. Before I begin, I'd like to acknowledge that I'm participating today from Ottawa, the traditional territory of the Ani