Thank you.
I'd like to join my colleague Susanna in thanking the committee for inviting the chamber to speak this afternoon on SMEs. I would like to add that one of the most important aspects of the response to the crisis, and what will likely be one of its greatest legacies, is the Team Canada approach that has been taken: all governments, all parties, all businesses, all labour, all Canadians. As Susanna said, and to state the seemingly obvious, the statistics on the workforce numbers are stark, and we have to look no further than this morning's labour force survey data for March of 2020. Since March 15, there have been more than five million applications for federal income supports and, to be honest, I'm just going to skip over the rest of the bullets here on the data.
We are still in the midst of the crisis and will be for the foreseeable future. We still don't know yet for how long, but we are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Without disrespect to our Canadian chamber members who are still in the thick of the crisis, I would like to say a few words about the transition and recovery, particularly as they relate to SMEs. We do know that the workforce will be different after this crisis. At this point, any other projections are conjecture. What we do know is that SMEs are the economic engines of this country. Pre-crisis, 98% of the businesses in this country were SMEs and they were responsible for the majority of the employment and employment growth across the country.
How we are going to get out of this crisis, through the transition and into recovery, is simple. We need solutions by small business for small business, by communities for communities, and these solutions need to be driven by local and real-time data, including labour market information. The Canadian chamber's network consists of 450 local chambers and boards of trade across this country. They serve as hubs for over 200,000 SMEs. They can provide space, facilitated time and standard tools through which a workforce planning initiative, developed by our colleagues at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, could be utilized. This program, known as the talent pipeline management initiative, can provide a way forward, a way through. To borrow wording from the recently launched Canadian Business Resilience Network, we can move from persevering to again prospering.
Through the question period today, I hope to be able to provide some more information about this initiative and what it can do for Canadian business and the economy as a whole.
Thank you.