Thank you Madam Chair, vice-chairs, and committee members. It is a pleasure to be here today. I am the CEO and CIO of AGF Management Limited, and the co-chair of the Canadian Chamber’s council for women’s advocacy. I am joined by fellow co-chair Penny Wise, who is the president of 3M Canada, and Leah Nord from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.
The Canadian Chamber 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 more than 400 corporate members and an equal number of association members. Earlier this year, the Canadian Chamber launched its inclusive growth campaign, including the council for women’s advocacy. The council is an executive table of men and women from across this country and across sectors, including the chamber network.
In the spring of this year, with the onset of the pandemic, we needed to quickly pivot the council’s focus as we watched the disproportionately negative effects on women. This included nationwide lockdowns in March that immediately and drastically affected women-dominated sectors, including retail, non-profit, salon services, etc. For women who were able to work from home, as schools went online and child care was curtailed, they had to deal with family in long-term care homes and they took the brunt of other family and domestic responsibilities. It is well documented how their labour participation and utilizations rates, not to mention mental health, have suffered.
Recent labour force survey numbers do indicate solid progress, but these numbers will swing, sway and even ping-pong over the winter months as we move in and out of the second and third waves and other hot spots across the country.
Through the crisis, we have used the word “emergency” in any number of programs—the emergency wage subsidy, the emergency relief benefit, the emergency business account. We are here today to underscore the emergency vis-à-vis women in the workforce.
We need to keep women in the workforce. We are here not only to talk about the urgency, but also to provide solutions. The council for women’s advocacy has five key recommendation for the federal government that you, committee members and your fellow parliamentarians, need to do to provide emergency support for women through the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.