Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise today to speak to the budget bill that has been presented to the House. Indeed, I want to add to the chorus of people and members who have come before the House to congratulate the first female finance minister on presenting a budget to the House of Commons. It is quite an important budget.
This budget is one that is very direct in its approach to get us through the rest of this pandemic, but in a way that brings Canada back to the resiliency that its economy had before. We need to get back to having the lowest unemployment rates that this country has seen in decades. We need to get our economy back to where it was.
I strongly believe that what has been proposed in this budget is the right step moving forward in that direction. I do want to take some time today to talk about what I see as being the signature piece in this budget, and that is the child care provisions. They are not only going to change the lives of Canadian parents but, indeed, are going to help our economy tremendously.
Before I get to that, I just want to talk briefly about the measures that are in this budget that relate to the pandemic, and coming through this pandemic in the way that we need to.
I have just been reminded by my colleague that I will be sharing my time with the member for Mississauga—Erin Mills.
Let us talk about the measures that have been put in here to support small business, to support Canadians and to make sure that they have the tools to get through this. We were faced with a stark choice a year ago, the same choice that is being presented to us right now with this budget. That is a choice between whether we want to allow Canadians to fend for themselves to get through this very difficult time or whether we want to come together collectively as a society to bear the burden of this enormous toll on our economy and, indeed, our society during the last year.
The Liberal government made a very clear choice. It said that we are going to take on that responsibility collectively. The federal government is going to step in on behalf of the people, the taxpayers of Canada and support, in particular, those who are being significantly affected by this pandemic, those who have small businesses that rely on people coming in and out of their stores on a daily basis, those who have restaurants, and those in the entertainment industry.
I think of a good friend of mine who literally has not worked in his profession throughout the last year, and for the foreseeable future will not. He is an audio engineer. He works at live events. At a lot of the conferences that we go to, he could very well be one of the people in the back running those. Those conferences depend on thousands of people being there, as do festivals and events that are held throughout Canada. He travels throughout the country, going and setting up from an audio engineer perspective, making sure that the quality of the sound in the room is right. Literally, that industry came to a standstill.
I will never forget the conversation we had last spring where he said that in a matter of 48 hours, he went from having the entire next six months planned to having absolutely nothing. He lived in downtown Toronto. He lived there for a number of years, probably the last decade, although he was born and raised in the Kingston area, like I was. He has since moved back to the Kingston area, Sydenham actually. He knows the industry is not coming back for a while. He has been trained and has a degree. He is a professional audio engineer. He does not have any kind of work whatsoever because of the nature of his industry.
The government made it very clear to people like my friend and other people throughout the country that we were going to take on this burden together. The government was going to be there to support Canadians to get through this. I am extremely proud to be part of a government that did that over the last year, but more importantly that is going to continue to do that to get us through to the other side of this.
That is what this budget is doing. In the beginning, when this budget comes into effect, the first measures will be to support Canadians through to the other end of this pandemic. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel. We cannot turn our backs on Canadians now. We need to finish what we started, and I am very happy to see the measures as they relate to small businesses, as they relate to continuing to support Canadians in this budget.
The other thing I wanted to talk about was child care and what this budget has specifically for early learning and child care for parents. Everybody who has put a child through child care is fully aware of the costs associated with it. People living anywhere outside of Quebec are likely paying a lot of money for child care. It quite literally puts parents in the position of asking whether one of them should stay home and take care of the children, because after they consider everything, they are really not going to be any further ahead. In some cases they will be further behind, so people make that choice.
The unfortunate reality is that more often than not, the majority of the time, it is the woman in the relationship who is making that decision to stay home. It is hindering female participation in our labour force. Nothing has impacted that more in the last short term than this pandemic. It has made that participation in the labour force for women extremely difficult. It has taken us back several years in terms of the progress that we made toward getting equal participation in our labour force from women.
Given that so much of it has to do with child care, if we can develop a child care system that will allow us to make it affordable, as Quebec has done, and it has done it extremely well, if we can develop a similar child care system for the rest of Canada, we will significantly impact not just the lives of those parents who have to pay for child care, but indeed the economic and social impacts that come with it.
Think of the potential if we can unleash so many single parents into the marketplace: entrepreneurs, people who want to be entrepreneurs but cannot because of limitations around child care. Women unfortunately are impacted more than men in that regard. The opportunities here are really not just about making child care affordable but, more importantly, about increasing women's participation in the labour force, and in particular, as I see it, as it relates to women entrepreneurs.
That is what this budget provides. It makes the transformative investment toward child care and early learning that this country has been asking for and looking for, for so long, by putting in the necessary funds. I believe it is about $30 billion in investment initially, over the next five years, getting us to a place by 2026 where the average cost of child care is $10 per day. That truly is transformative if we can get there.
We are in a minority government. I really hope that my colleagues across the way, maybe not the Conservatives, maybe not the Bloc members because they have this child care in Quebec already, but the NDP in particular, will see the value in this and support this budget. I certainly do not want to be in the same situation that the Liberal Party was in with Paul Martin when he introduced a budget to transform child care and the government collapsed and Stephen Harper did not have an interest in that, and here we are 15 years later.
There is a great opportunity here if we can come together and the NDP members can see the value in what we have here. I know that if they support this and we can get through this, we can start making a meaningful impact for child care throughout Canada.