Mr. Speaker, before I begin with my rebuttal, let me first echo the comments of the member for Kingston and the Islands on your superior service in the chair as Deputy Speaker over the past five years, my entire time as a member of Parliament.
I will begin out of the gates by doing what I can to debunk the approach laid out by my Conservative colleague opposite.
He went to great lengths to try to diminish what has been one of the most successful economic responses to COVID-19 globally. The reality is that the Conservatives' argument hinges upon the belief that the Prime Minister and the Government of Canada are responsible for the economic cost of COVID-19. The reality that we know is true is that the cost stems not from government decisions to spend in response to the pandemic but from the fact that a virus swept across the planet. This virus created an economic cost that we could not have comprehended just a few years ago.
What matters is not necessarily the existence of the virus, in terms of our debate in this House, but how we responded to it. When we had the opportunity to take calls, as I know he did, from family members who were worried about putting food on the table and from business owners who were afraid they could not keep workers on the payroll, we responded swiftly and effectively. We advanced a Canada emergency response benefit that reached the kitchen tables of nine million Canadians. We advanced the Canada emergency wage subsidy, which kept over five million workers on the payroll. We extended the Canada emergency business account to provide liquidity support to nearly a million small and medium-sized businesses in Canada. As a result of the measures that we have advanced, we have seen a serious economic recovery in Canada that many of our comparator economies around the world would be jealous to have within their own borders.
The reality is that the member diminishes the month of February, which saw 259,000 jobs return to the economy. However, that is only part of the success story of our response to date. If he is not satisfied with one month's job number, let us pick a comparator. Let us look at the United States, which has seen 57.6% of the jobs lost during the peak of this pandemic recovered today, and compare it to Canada, which has now in excess of 80%.
We know it may not be perfect, but many of the jobs that are still to be recovered are not back in their communities because of the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The reality is that we know that certain communities are doing the difficult thing, but the right thing: closing their doors, limiting their services, and yes, sometimes reducing the hours of their employees to keep their communities safe. In fact, the best economic policy that we could adopt is a strong public health response.
I would urge the member to dig into the job numbers, where he will realize that we do not just have 80% of the jobs recovered but also a higher labour force participation rate than our neighbours. If we actually look at certain provinces, including my own province of Nova Scotia, which has seen literally a world-leading public health response to the pandemic, we have recovered almost all of the jobs that we have lost during the course of this pandemic. In fact, there are more full-time workers in my home province today than there were in February of last year, before the pandemic. The reason is that the province took the right steps to manage the public health conditions, and the federal government was there to support households and businesses so they could come back when it was safe to do so.
The long-term impact of the economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic will be told a few years from now, but from where I sit and given the statistics that I am observing month over month over month, I have all the confidence in the world that Canada's pandemic response will be held up on a pedestal as an example for what the rest of the world ought to have done.