Justin Trudeau says more federal help is coming for small businesses hit economically by the pandemic.

In his COVID-19 update, the Prime Minister says they’ll introduce the Canada Emergency Commercial Rent Assistance program to help with rents due for April, May, and June. The feds will have to work with the provinces, as they govern rental relationships. He says details will be coming soon.

Trudeau says reopening the country for business, too rapidly or too soon, would be disastrous. The Prime Minister says he’ll be speaking with the premiers today on how to get the economy rolling again.

The Prime Minister says border controls between Canada and the U.S., restricting non-essential travel between the 2 countries, will continue.

Federal modelling presented a week ago, projected that today, April 16th, there would be between 500 and 700 deaths in Canada but Canada is at over a thousand deaths.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says modelling is a framework to allow for planning for different scenarios and is not a declaration of what is going to happen. He acknowledges there has been a far more severe impact on COVID-19 than what they had feared.