Thank you for the opportunity to present Oxfam Canada's recommendations for Canada's next federal budget to you today.
At Oxfam Canada, we put women's rights and gender justice at the heart of everything we do in our work here in Canada and in our work with some of the poorest communities around the world. We know that COVID-19 knows no borders and does not discriminate. But we also know that in a world marked by extreme inequality, the health, social and economic fallout of this pandemic has hit some harder than others. Here in Canada, and indeed around the world, it is women, particularly those on the margins, who have been disproportionately affected.
Many women have faced a triple duty of home schooling, child and elder care, and paid work during this pandemic, leaving them absolutely exhausted. Women make up 70% of all pandemic-related job losses in Canada. Many women have lost their jobs and are struggling to get back into the labour market due to important care responsibilities they have. Women's labour force participation has fallen to 55% in Canada, the lowest in 30 years. Indeed, experts have dubbed the economic downturn we face a “she-cession”.
Today, I want to share with you three recommendations for budget 2021. These are recommendations that seek to provide solutions to the very real crisis we currently face, but they also lay the foundations for a feminist economic transformation to tackle long-standing inequalities in Canada and around the world.
First, the federal government must invest in the care sector. If this pandemic has shone the light on one thing, it is the essential role that care work plays in our lives, our society and our economy. Canada's recovery plan must value women's paid and unpaid work and must expand and protect jobs in the care sector. Investing in more and better care places for children, for the sick and for the elderly will mean that women currently caring for family members will be able to enter the workforce and we can start to reverse the shockingly low labour force participation rate I mentioned earlier.
In addition, the care sector workforce—child care workers, those brave people working in long-term care homes, and health workers on the front lines—is predominately female. Investment in the care sector has the potential to generate hundreds of thousands of jobs for women, a significant increase in government revenue, and a huge boost long-term to Canada's GDP. We welcomed the commitment to building a publicly funded national child care system in this Monday's fall economic update. This is a step in the right direction.
We call on the government to allocate $2 billion for early learning and child care in budget 2021, and an increase of $2 billion each year after that to publicly fund a child care system in partnership with the provinces, territories and indigenous governments. Transfers to the provinces should include measurable targets in accessibility, affordability, quality and inclusiveness.
The second area where federal government action is urgently needed is in social protection and decent working conditions for women. It is striking how many jobs that have been deemed essential during this pandemic—carers, cashiers, caterers, cleaners, clerical staff—are jobs that are low-paid and lack benefits such as sick leave. Black, indigenous and racialized women, including recent immigrants, are overrepresented in these jobs.
Many women in low-paid precarious employment have difficulty accessing employment insurance when they most need it. We are calling on the government to expand women's access to employment insurance by modernizing key gaps in the existing EI system. We need to adopt best practices from the CERB delivery to turn EI into a more agile delivery mechanism that gets benefits out quickly, expands access to be more aligned with the reality of Canada's labour market, requires lower thresholds for access, and increases benefits to meet income adequacy standards.
Finally, COVID-19 knows no borders, and Canada's response to the pandemic should be truly global in nature. Through our international assistance, Canada should invest an additional $2 billion in COVID-19 interventions that focus on feminist programming, supporting sexual and reproductive health and rights, combatting gender-based violence, investing in the care sector and supporting women's and feminist movements. In the longer term, we should fast-track implementation of Canada's feminist international assistance policy, doubling our international assistance envelope from $6.2 billion to $12.4 billion over five years.
By playing to our strengths and focusing our international assistance on feminist interventions, Canada can show critical global leadership in defending and sustaining important gains on gender equality that are threatened by the pandemic.
Thank you again so much for the opportunity to speak with you today.