Evidence of meeting #26 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 43rd Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was prorogation.
A recording is available from Parliament.
1 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota
Do you have a version of that amendment that you can email as well, so we can see it?
1 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota
It's a little hard.... Even with Ms. Vecchio's first attempt, it was handy to have the email version so we could understand it. Even if we go back to it, we'll know what she was talking about.
Mr. Clerk, since he has the floor and he's moving an amendment to the motion he's speaking about, can he continue to speak to this amendment or what is the committee's practice?
1 p.m.
The Clerk
Madam Chair, that's right. He would be able to continue to speak. The debate will now be on Mr. Turnbull's amendment.
1 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota
Okay.
All right, Mr. Turnbull, would you like to explain your amendment a little bit? I think an explanation is probably needed before—
1 p.m.
Conservative
Karen Vecchio Conservative Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON
If we could we get that amendment before we discuss....
March 11th, 2021 / 1 p.m.
Bloc
Christine Normandin Bloc Saint-Jean, QC
On a point of order, Madam Chair.
I would like to receive the written version of Mr. Turnbull's amendment to see how far it modifies Mrs. Vecchio's amendment. If it changes it too much, then it may not be in order. So I would like to read the amendment in question, please. We refer to an amendment. I understand that Mr. Turnbull's amendment changes the motion, but I would just like to be sure.
1 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota
We're past one o'clock. Do you want to just suspend for 15 minutes while that is circulated?
You can take a look and also take a bathroom break or whatever might be needed, and we'll come back in 15 minutes.
1:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota
Welcome back. We were on Mr. Turnbull's amendment and everyone has received a copy of it, though I don't know if you were able to take a minute or so to skim through it.
Mr. Turnbull, you have the floor.
1:35 p.m.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I'm happy to give an explanation of this amendment. I think the amendment is clear and everybody has received it, but essentially it focuses on renewing invitations to the Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Diversity and Inclusion and Youth. This is relevant to the study, and the reason I'm asking to renew those invitations is that perhaps they couldn't come at the request of the committee last time. I think renewing the invitation would be a smart thing to do, especially given my speech, which was related to diversity and inclusion and the deep economic impacts that we've experienced as a result of COVID-19. It seems to me that having those ministers come back would be beneficial.
I will also add that the Speakers' Spotlight section of the motion concerns me, as does the section with the document requests and the request for records from WE Charity. I think these two sections of the motion overstep dramatically. Why would we be dragging folks into this conversation when there's no way they would have any information that's relevant to prorogation? I think it's a fishing expedition to ask these individuals to do this. They are not public representatives and they're not politicians. They're individual citizens.
Speakers' Spotlight is a private company, and they have no knowledge of prorogation. I don't think they even understand it. In many cases, we've seen that people outside of government don't even understand the process of prorogation and what it means. Very few people talk about it in my constituency, so I find that the topic, again, is not at the forefront of people's minds. I think we have to stop treating private citizens like they're under an investigation.
We've heard from the government House leader, who speaks on behalf of the government, and he gave really detailed testimony and an explanation—
1:35 p.m.
Conservative
1:35 p.m.
Liberal
1:35 p.m.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
My sentiments are really that we're amending to cut out portions of this that I think are not valid or useful for pursuing the reasons for prorogation. I think renewing the invitations to the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Diversity and Inclusion is particularly relevant given what we've been saying, which is that the rationale for prorogation was based on these deep inequities we're experiencing. The pandemic has hit sectors very differently. I prepared lots of data and information in my remarks to demonstrate to you just how far-reaching and how deep the impacts are in terms of inequity and whom those impacts are predominately hitting.
Youth are one of those groups, almost above any other group. Women and visible minorities are the other two major segments of our Canadian society that are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. There's a lot of robust information on that.
I'll use this as an example to illustrate my point. First of all, a quarter of families did not have savings to avoid poverty, to get them through two months. New Canadians, lower-educated workers and diverse population groups struggled the most, but it was over a quarter of families. A third of families did not have enough savings to handle a three-month work stoppage. The financial vulnerability was pronounced in people under 35, unmarried men and women, and single mothers. Those were highlighted in the statistics of the report I was previously highlighting.
In addition to that, visible minority groups were at higher risk of work stoppage. The percentage of workers employed in accommodation and food services and arts and entertainment were disproportionately.... Minority groups were overrepresented, specifically Korean, Japanese, Southeast Asian, Filipino and Chinese people. Therefore, they had much higher risks of work stoppage. They were experiencing that very differently from the rest of the population. Poverty rates also were highest among Korean, West Asian, Arab, Chinese, Japanese, Black and Southeast Asian individuals.
There was an unequal impact on low-wage workers, far greater than in 2008-09. In the average monthly layoff rates of employees by wage decile comparison, I looked at the bottom decile, which is the bottom 10%. In 2007, the monthly layoff rate was 1.8%. In 2009, the bottom decile experienced a 2% layoff rate. In 2020, that was 13%. In other words, the lowest-wage workers were the ones who got hit the hardest with the most layoffs. Visible minorities and new Canadians were overrepresented in those groups. The impact was six to seven times greater than in the 2008-09 recession, and again, that was just after the first wave.
Also I think we need to note that unequal economic impacts reached other portions of the population: youth, less educated workers, women, recent immigrants and temporary employees. The difference between temporary and permanent is really significant. If you're a temporary employee between 25 and 50 years old, the job rates experienced by August 2020 are 20% lower compared to 2019. If you compare it year over year, there is 20% lower employment for temporary employees.
When you compare that to permanent employee job losses, year over year, you see that it was only 3% in the same age category. This 3% and 20% difference highlights just how much more frequently temporary employees were laid off as a result of the pandemic. The explanation for that is quite simple. I think we all realize this intuitively, but people with permanent jobs more frequently can do them from home. Many of the more temporary jobs out there were those that were likely on the front lines and in sectors that were the most impacted.
I want to reference youth for the moment, because I think this speaks to why the Minister of Diversity and Inclusion and Youth should be invited to come back to the committee. Youth were probably the hardest hit. It's hard to actually identify which one of these equity-seeking groups would be the hardest hit, but certainly youth have been hit extremely hard. I want to give you a few pieces of evidence for that.
Employment loss is greatest among youth, with 870,000 job losses. That's just within the first wave of the pandemic. These statistics aren't up to date because, again, we're talking about prorogation. I've only looked at data and information that would have been relevant at the time of prorogation, which would have been up to and around August. All of this data only reflects March to August 2020.
There were 870,000 job losses. There was a weaker recovery among young Canadians after the first wave. There was that period in the summer of 2020 when there was certainly a significant dip in the case numbers and there was some recovery happening. I have a lot of information about what that looked like. Full-time work among young Canadians was down by 23% and dropped even more for young women. It dropped by 30%.
In fact, young women were probably the hardest hit. Approximately 50% of young women work in retail and the food service and/or accommodation industries. Those two industries were the hardest hit. I say they are two industries because retail is separate from food service and accommodation.
Retail did start to bounce back, but obviously got hit again by the second wave and another set of public health restrictions. Youth would have felt that disproportionately, because approximately 50% of young women work in those two industries. That's pretty high. That's for young women. Why are young women disproportionately impacted? Because they more often work in retail and food service and accommodation.
Young workers entering the labour market will also take an earnings hit for up to five years. This is really an interesting statistic. Young people aren't just taking a hit during the pandemic. Their income earnings are expected to decline for up to five years or more.
First of all, the youth unemployment rate hit the historic high of 19% during the pandemic. The cumulative earnings loss estimated by Statistics Canada would equal between $8,000 to $15,000 over that five-year period. Basically, youth are taking an earnings loss as a result of the pandemic.
Even in our recovery period, they're still likely going to take a hit. How can we address that? I think that's a key question that prorogation would have been entertaining. What can we do about this inequity that youth are experiencing? That probably exacerbates some of the inequities they already experience.
The percentage of workers facing high risk of job transition is another really important point here. Basically, we all know that this pandemic has increased the trend of teleworking, but it's also increased the trend of digitalization which, in many respects, actually means not just teleworking but also the automation of jobs.
Whose jobs are at highest risk of being displaced by or replaced by automation? In fact, it's people whose jobs require less education. Essentially, the less educated you are, the more likely you are to be in a job that's at high risk of being replaced by automation. This highlights another extremely important equity issue.
The other thing that's interesting to note is that, according to the statistics for teleworking, basically the lowest-wage jobs were likeliest to be replaced by automation and the highest-paid jobs were likeliest to be able to be done from home. Just think about the equity issue that creates for our recovery as a country.
These are things that the Minister of Diversity, Inclusion and Youth could definitely speak to. That's why I think those witnesses are still potentially relevant for this study—hence the amendment.
In terms of the overall economic impact, I think the reason the amendment still includes a renewed invitation to the previous minister of finance, the Honourable Bill Morneau, and the new Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland is that they would both be able to speak to the specific economic impacts of this crisis, including at the time of prorogation, which I think is all the more relevant.
This speaks to why this amendment makes sense, from my perspective, and why it is an improvement to Ms. Vecchio's original motion. I hope members of this committee will support this amendment. I will be greatly interested in hearing what other members of the committee think.
Perhaps, just before I close, I'll add a little bit more emphasis to the remarks I prepared. I think they relate to the amendment, which is on the depth of the economic impact we've seen, which is the reason for reinviting the Minister of Finance. I'm sure she's studied these impacts greatly and her team has been seized with understanding the full scope and depth of the economic scarring and how to recover from this. I think that's relevant information that would help substantiate the reason for prorogation.
We know there have been historic declines in labour market activity. There were employment losses of three million workers between February and April of 2020. Employment rose by 1.9 million jobs between April and August, so you can see very quickly that there was quite a significant recovery. That's still a net loss of 1.1 million jobs, but 1.9 million jobs did come back, essentially after the first wave, rather quickly.
Our government had worked really hard to create jobs across Canada, and we had a historic low in February of 5.6%. That number jumped to 13.7% in May, but then started to fall back down in July and August. In August it was 10.2%, so we were starting to recover. That was nowhere near, obviously, where we started, which was at 5.6%, which was great, but it was a telltale sign that what we were doing was having an impact.
As to the employment rate, which is the flip side of this, we started in February at 61.8%, so almost 62% of Canadians were employed out of those who are of the age that Statistics Canada uses. That number fell to 52.1% in April, then rose again in July to 57.3% and was at 58% in August. This is only roughly 4% below where we started in February, and in August things were starting to look better.
We can assess the recovery to date based on this time period, up to August 2020. Between February and April, 5.5 million Canadian workers had been affected negatively by the public health measures that were implemented. This wouldn't all have been job losses. Some of it was about income earned for workers who are paid hourly. However, by August the number of impacted workers had fallen to 1.8 million. Again, we were starting to recover pretty significantly if you think about those numbers. About 3.7 million workers had recovered from the losses and negative impacts they had experienced between February and April, so there's lots to consider here.
I will cede the floor now and give an opportunity to some of my colleagues on the committee to make some remarks about the amendment that I've put forward. I hope we can get somewhere in this meeting and move on with this.
1:35 p.m.
Conservative
Karen Vecchio Conservative Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON
Thanks very much.
Seeing as there are no further speakers, perhaps we can take this amendment to a vote.
1:35 p.m.
Liberal
1:35 p.m.
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
Thank you.
Madam Chair, can you just clarify that we are discussing the amendment that my colleague has proposed?
1:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota
Yes. It's to call forward the witnesses that Mr. Turnbull has mentioned. It eliminates a couple of witnesses too: the Prime Minister, Katie Telford and those from Speakers' Spotlight.
We're on the amendment, as Mr. Turnbull has explained it in the last little while.
