Thanks, Kevin.
Good morning, committee members.
The council initially issued five recommendations in mid-August in advance of the school year. We expanded that to 10 recommendations in advance of the Speech from the Throne, to include some recovery focus ideas.
This week we have returned to our initial five recommendations for the emergency and urgency reasons Kevin just spoke to. Women need support now. To keep women in the workforce, we need to keep children in schools and day cares. While we welcome the federal government's announcements regarding national leadership and longer investments in child care, we need action now focused on ensuring child care capacity.
Establish, without delay, an inclusive task force to focus on child care support through the continued crisis. A task force can support data-driven and parent-focused decisions on where—whether it's provinces, territories, child care providers, or parents—funding such as grants or tax incentives should flow, and in what form. Those who receive funds will also need to be held accountable.
Concretely, for example, earlier this week at the Canadian Chamber's annual general meeting, a resolution was passed entitled “Child care credits for small and medium size businesses”. It recommends that the Government of Canada permit owners of Canadian-controlled private corporations—CCPCs—receiving non-eligible dividend income to claim child care expenses against that income and to permit CCPC owners receiving non-eligible dividend income to transfer child care expenses to the higher income earner of the family.
We are also asking for the federal government to continue to build on the safe restart transfers to ensure that schools and day cares remain open through the second waves across the country. We ask that the government work with provinces, territories and stakeholders on rapid testing and rapid testing turnaround times, alongside other technology supports including robust tracing.
Our third recommendation regarding child care—which also focuses on supporting female business owners and entrepreneurs—is to extend eligibility for the Canada emergency wage subsidy to include hiring in-home child care, so that business owners can return to work. Female business owners continue to indicate that child care is their number one issue.
These are some easy, practical and incredibly helpful actions that the government could undertake now.
Further, we have asked for the federal government to track and break down data for federal funding and programming for businesses in a way that has been done for individuals, looking specifically at female-owned businesses and entrepreneurs. We recommend that it ask questions regarding ratios of applications, rates of successful applications, timing for funding received and adapted eligibility, funding and programming accordingly going forward. We recommend that the government consult widely as this is done.
Our final recommendations—and hopefully we will be able to elaborate on this further during the question period—is to earmark some of the recovery funding for upskilling and re-skilling women, ensuring there is an intersectional lens and BIPOC focus, appreciating that this is a significant and groundbreaking undertaking that is critically important to start now.
Thank you.