Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
My name is Nancy Wilson. I'm the founder and CEO of the Canadian Women's Chamber of Commerce. I'm here today with one of our board members, Petra Kassün-Mutch, who will help me address questions from the committee.
I'm going to stray from the notes that I emailed just a bit, so I apologize in advance to the interpreters. Very briefly, I want to define the scope of the women's entrepreneurship population and say that the group I'm talking about today is comprised of approximately 1.1 million business entities. That's 16% of SMEs in Canada. These are pre-pandemic figures. That 16% represents about 114,000 SMEs. Approximately 37% of self-employed Canadians are woman-identified. That's over a million self-employed Canadians who identify as women. These are not small numbers that we're talking about.
Going back to my notes, there's no doubt that women in general—employed, self-employed and business owners—have been disproportionately hit by the COVID pandemic. There's a wealth of research to support that. At the same time, women-owned businesses are essential and critical to Canada's economic recovery. Women-owned businesses are highly represented in sectors that were hardest hit by the pandemic. These are also the sectors that employ high numbers of women wage-earners. Therefore, a side effect of investing in business recovery in those sectors is going to be alleviating some of those labour force and unemployment issues that we're seeing for women re-entering the labour force. These issues are very much intertwined with supporting women business owners to get back on their feet and recover.
One of the major issues during the pandemic—and one of the factors that led to the pandemic being so devastating for women entrepreneurs and business owners—was the fact that a lot of the financial support measures coming from the government in 2020 that were focused on business support were designed for traditional, large business structures. As such, a lot of women business owners were simply not eligible for those support programs. CEBA, the wage subsidy and a lot of the loan and debt programs that were put in place were quite effective for larger, traditional business structures. However, they were very ineffective for the population I represent at the Canadian Women's Chamber of Commerce.
When we're talking about designing policy for recovery, we need to think very differently. I'm going to talk about two specific recommendations.
First, we would like to see a recovery fund put together, specifically with funds going directly to women entrepreneurs and business owners, and we would like that fund to be administered and managed by community-based organizations within the women's entrepreneurship ecosystem. The reasons are simply that the expertise and infrastructure exist in the ecosystem, as do the delivery method, the knowledge about women's business structure and the relationships with the people who need that money the most.
Second, we want to see the government double down on the women's entrepreneurship strategy. The women's entrepreneurship strategy, initially introduced in budget 2018, was groundbreaking. It received a lot of attention globally, and rightly so. It was starting to gain some traction when the pandemic hit.
In order to really see that strategy reach its goals, the government needs to reinvest in it. We want to see at least $5 billion reinvested into that women entrepreneurship strategy to regain that traction, to regain ground that has been lost, to support the ecosystem of organizations that support women's entrepreneurship, to provide emergency funding during the recovery and to start implementing a longer-term, sustainable women entrepreneurship strategy going forward so that Canada can remain globally recognized as a women's entrepreneurship champion.
Finally, I echo my colleagues at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. I think there is a lot to be applauded in terms of the government's response last year—its fast and nimble response to the pandemic. With the recovery, I think we need to look at lessons learned and make sure our recovery response and policies are truly inclusive going forward, and that we're able to make sure that the hardest hit during COVID, during the pandemic, are the ones who are truly taken care of the most during this recovery period, not to the exclusion of other groups necessarily, but given due consideration.
Thank you so much.