Mr. Speaker, I too would like to applaud the incredible work you have been doing for the past five years. It is non-partisan work and you do it brilliantly in both official languages.
I am very pleased to respond to the question and comments from my colleague, the member for Bow River, regarding small businesses generally and some specific small business sectors in his community. I will go through some of the many ways that our government has supported and is continuing to support small businesses throughout the country, including in his riding. However, before I do that, I will respectfully point out a recurring inconsistency in the comments and questions from Conservative members.
On the one hand, there is often huge criticism and even some outright rejection of the approach taken by our government to spend in order to support our small businesses. Yes, that does cost money, and we are incurring a deficit that, to my understanding, the Conservatives are opposed to. However, many members seem to have found new ideas and programs for additional spending in order to support the small businesses in their ridings.
I hope that at the end of the day we can agree that we do need to spend money to support Canadians, and that one, three or five years hence, those same Conservative members are not going to accuse the government of having spent inappropriately. We all know, and are all rising in the House to confirm, the importance of spending to support our economy and our small business owners.
Some of the things we have done over the course of the last year are extremely innovative. I think back to the conversations that I had with entrepreneurs across the country. They regularly told me that thanks to government programs, they were able to keep the lights on, keep their workers employed and pay their rent, for example. All of these programs are supporting businesses in the agricultural sector, in the tourism sector and in all sectors of the Canadian economy, and we believe that is very important.
Our small businesses employ more than 10.8 million Canadians. They are by far our largest employers. It is enormously important for us to continue supporting them. I am thinking particularly of the wage subsidy, which is literally subsidizing the paycheques of Canadians right across the country.
I will point out a few other programs before getting into further specifics.
The rent subsidy program, which we recently changed so that our subsidy would go directly to small business owners, has a top-up that covers up to 90% of the rent of small business owners who are under lockdown.
I will also talk about the importance of our tourism sector. The member opposite mentioned the travel industry, which of course has been experiencing huge hardships over the last year because of the health and sanitary measures that we and the provinces and territories have put in place. In that regard, I will point the member to the regional relief and recovery fund, which is there to support all businesses but has an earmark specifically for tourism operators.
I will point to the very recently released HASCAP program. This is a new program, and thanks to the feedback and comments from the tourism sector, we were able to put it in place to provide 100% government-backed loans to tourism operators in particular. I have heard from credit unions and financial institutions that there is pickup on this program and that our tourism operators are being supported by it.
I will also point out that we added an additional $20,000 to our very popular CEBA loan program, which provides loans at a 0% interest rate. They include a portion that is non-refundable, which is, in order words, a grant. That came as a huge relief to small business owners who were concerned about taking on too much debt.
The range of supports we have for small businesses is the envy of the world. They have shown themselves to be—