Parses captions for PM Trudeau's daily speeches and presents them in a more human readable format
Rosemary:
Hello, I’m rosemary Barton. We’re standing by to hear shortly from the Prime Minister. He will be talking about leeff, the large employer emergency financing facility, essentially the programme the government announced last week, offering short-term bridge loans to some of Canada’s biggest corporations, the ones with annual revenues with more than $300 million. Earlier today we heard from finance Minister bill morneau about the other details of the programme, including the conditions or the strings attached as well as the interest rate, how long they will have to pay it back and how that will work and how long the loans will be available for, in fact, they’ll be available, it says, while the current economic situation persists. That, of course, is the Prime Minister’s front door. He will be out in a few moments’ time because today is the first hearing in parliament so he will be making his way to west block after this conference. Vasly kapelos of “power & politics” and david Cochrane will join us, very briefly because we have the two-minute warning. We are expecting the Prime Minister to talk about the commercial rent programme which has been problematic.
Vassy:
He talked about big business and I do anticipate that the Prime Minister will talk about small and medium-sized businesses and this commercial rent programme that was announced at the end of April in partnership with various provinces. It’s basically the federal government giving landlords some money and the landlords have to agree not to kick the tenants out and take less rent. The tenant itself will only pay a quarter of the overall rent. The rent applies to April, may and June. But the application portal hasn’t yet opened. My understanding is that the Prime Minister will announce a start date for that. But it has been highly anticipated because landlords have not been able to say whether or not they’ll be able to participate in the programme without those details. So, you know, it’s – there has been no uptake as a result. and no formal uptake. Tenants or small businesses are saying that I don’t know if My landlord is going to do this. How do I move forward and those are the kinds of questions that I anticipate the Prime Minister will get. It is a lot – very much anticipated by these businesses and we’ll have to see and wait for the details.
Rosemary:
and here is the Prime Minister of Canada. Thank you for that, Vassy.