Thank you, Madam Chair.
Different from Penny, I employ what I call “knowledge workers” for the most part. When the pandemic hit, within days we were able to basically pick up our entire firm of 700-odd people here across the provinces—actually around the world—and move them home, with maybe five or six people left. We had that ability.
Half our workforce is women, and one of the things we saw right away was that, disproportionately, our single mothers, even though we're in the knowledge industry, were struggling immensely with home-schooling children, taking on the domestic responsibilities and then trying to fit into their schedule their own jobs. We were able to work with them. We had time outs built into the day when we'd schedule no internal meetings so mothers could try to deal with some of this at once. We provided a lot of direction on online tutoring services and things that could help them, but the struggle, even though we're in the knowledge industry, was so apparent.
We can take care of our folks. We can be flexible about when they can work and how they come back.
Even going to the two-parent families, the domestic work, the home-schooling and the burden of their being no summer camps fell disproportionately on those women, even though they were in a family situation with a husband. We saw that stress. Think about trying to deal with keeping pace with your male colleagues while saying you can't take a meeting because you have to get a child's assignment uploaded. We preached empathy; we preached working with your partner and your teammates and putting yourself in everyone else's shoes throughout this.
Then I go to the people we contract to work with us as consultants and accountants, who are small business owners. They're single practitioners and when they had to go home to take care of their kids, they lost their businesses. They essentially could not work.
Now we're in a situation where every other day a child or someone in their class has tested positive, and the whole class comes home. It's impossible for those women to really try to get their careers back. Some of them have lost it all. I think our small business owners, our small entrepreneurs, our single mothers in Canada have disproportionately.... A number of small business owners are single mothers.
I think we can be empathetic in the knowledge industry and take care of everyone. We can understand it, but don't underestimate the burden that has fallen on many of these women and the mental health issues that are to yet come because of this burden. I think we are unfortunately going to be in a second and third wave of this before we get to a vaccine.