Thank you very much, MP Sidhu.
Congratulations on the vote in the House of Commons yesterday on your private member's bill on the framework for diabetes. I know you've been working on that since day one of being a member of Parliament. Your constituents are very smart to have sent you to Ottawa. That work is going to make a big difference.
You're right. The summit included many sessions, including one on women in the care economy. These are women who are working as early learning and child care workers. They are personal support workers. They are looking after those with disabilities and exceptionalities in group homes, for example.
It turns out that our entire economy is built on care at its core. These women have been doing the heavy lifting.
MP Sidhu, you're from Brampton and you also know that COVID has disproportionally asked more of racialized women than others. We saw yesterday in the stats that those racialized women have died due to COVID more than others.
What this means for us moving forward on long-term care homes means having standards, and respecting and valuing the work that is typically done by women. What it means in the meantime is our government has supported provinces and territories with some $3 billion for pandemic pay, the wage top-up for those care workers who are essential to our ability to fight COVID.
One of the conversations our society is reckoning with aside from, as MP Shin and others said, gender-based violence and the culture that creates the conditions for too many vulnerable women, is the conversation we need to have about the true value of care work in our society. If so many women are doing so much unpaid work, if so many women are staying home because they don't have access to quality care, then our economy is not going to come roaring back.
The opportunity here, aside from better respecting care workers and ensuring that there are frameworks and standards in place so that long-term care homes are safer for staff and residents, is the need for universal early learning and child care. Without it we'll stay in a much less than ideal performing economy, and Canadians can do better.
We saw with Quebec that there's a model that works. It gets women back to work and it helps the economy be more productive. That's certainly an exciting opportunity for women and our government to pursue, with provinces and territories, of course.