Thank you, Mr. Chair, vice-chairs and committee members. It's a pleasure to be here before you this evening.
My name is Leah Nord, and I am the senior director of workforce strategies and inclusive growth at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, working in the areas of skills, the future of work, immigration, employment standards and practices, diversity and inclusion. My comments today will focus on these areas within my portfolio, with reference to not only the crisis period but also the reopening, recovery and return to the new normal that is happening with different timing and stages across the country.
The Canadian Chamber of Commerce is the voice of Canadian business. We represent 200,000 businesses across the country, across sectors and across sizes. Our network consists of 450 chambers of commerce and boards of trade, alongside over 400 corporate members and an equal number of association members. We believe that one of the most impressive aspects of the response to the crisis, and what will hopefully be one of its most significant legacies, is the team Canada approach that has been taken.
The centrepiece of the Chamber of Commerce's response during this crisis has been the Canadian Business Resilience Network. It is supported by government in partnership with our network and members, as well as our partner business associations. This inclusive and bilingual campaign, including a microsite, has proven to been a successful, centralized and authoritative source of information, best practices, tool kits and thought exchange that have allowed and will continue to allow businesses to prepare, persevere and eventually prosper.
Looking more specifically to the labour force, to state the obvious, the crisis has had a detrimental effect on Canada's workforce. Through the April 2020 Canadian Chamber of Commerce and Statistics Canada Canadian survey on business conditions, we know that Canadian businesses have undertaken many efforts to support their employees through the crisis and to keep them connected to the labour force.
Innovations include remote work, e-commerce and work sharing. Nonetheless, we also learned through the survey that 40% of businesses had laid off staff and 38% of them had reduced staff hours or shifts. Stats Canada will be back in the field next week with the second round of the survey. We look forward to gaining further insights and seeing if and how attitudes and practices have shifted as the crisis has continued.
Further, a March and April 2020 labour force data survey indicates that since the start of the crisis three million Canadians have lost their jobs—90% of them temporarily—and more than eight million have applied for the Canada emergency response benefit and Canada emergency student benefit.
Not surprisingly, in the initial phase of the crisis the most significant job losses were in accommodation and food service industries. Initially, populations most affected in the first phase included youth, women and those working in less secure lower-quality jobs. Goods-producing sectors were most affected in April, particularly manufacturing and construction.
Sectors including tourism, wholesale and retail trade, education and recreation have also experienced employment declines of up to 35%. The crisis has also compounded preceding downturns in sectors such as oil and gas and forestry, and pivots in sectors such as manufacturing and mining. It has also highlighted the needs in transport and warehousing, health human resources and food retail, underscoring the importance of the country's essential workers.
As I turn my comments to the reopening and recovery periods, I will underscore that many businesses across the country, across sectors and across sizes are still very much in crisis mode. For example, Monday is June 1 and even in light of recent announcements such as the one on Canada emergency commercial rent assistance for small businesses, many members are wondering if and how they are going to make the rent this coming month.
Specific to the reopening period, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce has developed a series of recommendations, including on the importance of leaning on international best practices and ensuring interprovincial alignment. We also believe that although emergency temporary financial support programs have been needed, and in fact have been crucial to help some companies and individuals stay afloat through the pandemic, there is also a longer-term need to ensure sustainable public finances.
We also appreciate that there continue to be more questions than answers right now. The crisis has shown us that the best public policy is made when it widely draws upon the advice of civil society, including businesses both large and small across sectors. The conversations need to start now in a structured manner to ensure that governments at all levels are receiving the best possible advice to minimize unintended consequences.
An excellent example of this is the creation and composition of the federal government's COVID-19 supply council, which includes representatives from business, labour, many sectors and non-profits, and the voices of academics, women and aboriginal business.
As we look further to recovery and a return to the new normal we need to get Canadians back to work. Canada's workforce will simply not be the same as we move into recovery. In the span of a few short months, we went from one of the tightest job markets in recent history to unprecedented job losses. Unemployment may not return to pre-crisis levels at any point soon. Available jobs and skills required will shift. Employers may increasingly look to automation to maintain operations during future crises and reduce risk.
Canadians will need reskilling, upskilling and skills training programs to get them back to work. Education and training will also change, including more online and hybrid learning, an importance on durable skills, and a focus on both work-integrated learning and lifelong learning. Ensuring that all Canadians have opportunities to participate in the recovery will be essential for inclusive growth and widespread job creation.
With this the Canadian Chamber of Commerce has three main recommendations.
First is to ensure inclusive growth in the recovery period. In the first instance, this means inclusive voices need to be represented at public policy and discussion forums. I gave the example of the federal government's COVID-19 supply council. This must be replicated at all tables and levels of government, as well as in boardrooms and leadership meetings, at labour and union tables, in occupational health and safety committees, and in business operations and return-to-work discussions.
Second, Canada needs a comprehensive review of the employment insurance program. In prefacing this recommendation, I would like to say two things: First, this is a long-standing recommendation of the Canadian chamber, and we have any number of policy resolutions over the years on this issue; and second, with this recommendation we are not diminishing the incredible work of the federal public service in response to the crisis in developing and implementing programs such as the Canada emergency wage benefit, the Canada emergency relief benefit and the Canada emergency student benefit. Quite the opposite, they all deserve widespread praise.
However, we believe it is telling that these programs were necessarily situated outside the EI program framework. Moving forward, we need to identify the reform needed to build a system that can respond to current and future workforce needs to ensure Canadians remain connected to the labour force, and that includes strong upskilling and reskilling training components.
Our third recommendation to get Canadians back to work is to use local labour market information and real-time data to develop labour market solutions created by business for business, led by sectors for sectors and tailored by communities for communities. In doing so we advocate the use of chambers of commerce and boards of trade as local hubs for employer collaboratives that can provide facilitated time and space for businesses to share, collaborate and plan.
These are unprecedented times and there is no playbook to turn to. Policy and programming recommendations for recovery at this point are conjecture at best. There needs to be a thoughtful, inclusive and measured approach to the response. This is exactly what the Canadian chamber's proposal, called the “Talent Pipeline Management: A Canadian Economic Resiliency Program”is designed to do.
Just briefly, because I am aware of the time, this is a program that prioritizes the alignment among education, training, support and workforce systems. It is a program that has been implemented by our colleagues in the U.S. across 33 states. It has taken place at the state level, as well as the regional level; large cities and smaller rural towns have been involved. It has even been used by individual companies in their internal business practices. It has involved the creation of employer collaboratives in a wide range of sectors, including hospitals, health care, construction, manufacturing, utilities, education, cybersecurity, fintech and IT. It has also been used to form collaboratives organized along supply chains, and it has proven to be self-sustaining after initial seed funding.
During the crisis, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation has been infusing its academy curriculum with a recovery focus and using its national learning network to share challenges, solutions and best practices. There has been success in retaining workers in sectors, keeping them tied to their sectors, as well as identifying workers' crosswalks, upskilling, reskilling and career pathways.
The overarching benefit of this is that it allows for managing and mitigating both major expansions and contractions in the economy and the workforce, it builds resiliency and it future-proofs workforce planning.
With that, I'll thank the committee members for the opportunity to appear today and look forward to answering any questions.
Thank you.
