Thank you, Mr. Speaker. When I made that statement, I was definitely talking about a global situation. That is what I had heard, that, globally, we would be seeing small business fail. Ultimately, my goal is to not have any Northwest Territories businesses fail through COVID-19, but of course, that is going to be a challenge as we are all aware. My role for small business is to be an advocate. I have been doing so. I know there has been conversation around: federal government is doing things and the GNWT is not. I would like for people to be aware that the way that the federal government knows what the GNWT or what the Northwest Territories residents need is through the lobbying efforts of myself and my colleagues here with them at our federal tables as well as our one-on-one meetings that we do have.

My role is to be the voice of small business. I do understand that small business is feeling not heard at the moment. However, we have introduced supports, and we quickly introduced the BDIC loan. It was actually rolled out on March 20^th. The border closed March 21^st. By March 25^th, applications had ended and money was starting to flow, or it at least being assessed. I do not have the exact date of when payments would have started. I know there is concern that they were loans and not free money. However, in order to get that liquidity out fast to people, we wanted to be able to make the requirements less. There would have been a lot more requirements around getting relief funding out by just handing it out as a grant. We wanted to ensure people could access money quickly. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.