Madam Chair, since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, we have done everything necessary to protect the lives and the livelihoods of Canadians, to help our businesses weather the storm and to position Canada for a robust, resilient and sustainable recovery.
As certain regions in Canada start to reopen, we must remember that we are not done fighting the virus. Our determination to win this fight and provide Canadians the support they need is stronger than ever.
This year's budget, which I tabled on April 19 and which Bill C-30 would enact, meets the three fundamental challenges facing Canadians right now.
First, we must defeat COVID. That means buying vaccines and supporting provincial and territorial health care systems. It means enforcing quarantine rules and it means providing Canadians and Canadian businesses with the help they need to get through lockdowns and to fully recover when COVID is defeated. COVID will be defeated. Vaccines are available to Canadians in ever-growing quantities, and they are working. More than 60% of adult Canadians have received their first dose of the vaccine. Canadians are doing their part and getting vaccinated. My thanks go to team Canada. Together we can do this.
Second, we must punch our way out of this COVID recession. That means making sure that hard-hit businesses can rebound, start growing and start hiring again. It also means helping the people who have been the hardest hit by this recession: women, young people, racialized Canadians, low-wage workers and small businesses. We are doing just that. When fully enacted, this budget will create nearly 500,000 new training and work opportunities for Canadians.
Our third major challenge is to create long-term economic growth and to build a more resilient Canada, a country that is better, more fair, more prosperous and more innovative. That is why we intend to invest ambitiously in the green transition and the new jobs that come with it, in digital transformation and innovation, and in infrastructure like housing, transit and the trade corridors that we need as a dynamic, growing country.
The COVID-19 pandemic has put enormous pressure on our health care systems. That is why, in Bill C-30, we propose to provide $4 billion through the Canada health transfer to help the provinces and territories ease the immediate pressure on their health care systems.
Additional funds for health care will help pay for the many different procedures that had to be delayed because of the pandemic. This will help build the resilience of our health care systems. That is what Canadians deserve and need.
A full recovery from COVID requires a new, long-term investment in social infrastructure. That means providing early learning and child care, student grants and income top-ups, so that the middle class can flourish and more Canadians can join the middle class. We know that without child care, parents, usually mothers, cannot work outside the home. That is more painfully clear now than ever. We intend to invest $30 billion over five years, reaching $9.2 billion annually, to provide high-quality, affordable and accessible early learning and child care across Canada. Our goal is an average cost of $10 a day across the country within five years.
In making this commitment, I thank Quebec's feminists, who have led the way for the rest of Canada. I am very grateful to them.
To minimize economic scarring and to power a robust recovery, we must bridge Canadian businesses through to the end of this crisis. The wage subsidy, rent subsidy and lockdown support had been set to expire next month. This budget extends these measures through to September 25, 2021.
In order to help those who still cannot work, we will maintain flexible access to employment insurance for another year, until fall 2022. Furthermore, to support Canadians who are not covered by employment insurance, the Canada recovery benefit will be extended by 12 weeks.
We are also proposing a four-week extension of the Canada recovery caregiving benefit, which would bring it to a maximum of 42 weeks at $500 a week. Similarly, the employment insurance sickness benefit period will be increased from 15 weeks to 26 weeks. These measures provide tangible and measurable assistance to the people who need help now.
As we build a resilient recovery, it is critically important that we help low-wage workers. They work harder than anyone else, for lower pay. They work on the front lines, and COVID has revealed to us all that the work they do is truly essential. We intend to expand the Canada workers benefit, extending income top-ups to about one million more workers and lifting nearly 100,000 Canadians out of poverty. We also propose to introduce a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage.
Young Canadians must be at the heart of our recovery, not just to help them bounce back from the COVID recession, but because their future success is critical to our success as a country. We intend to make college and university more accessible and affordable. We will create job openings in skilled trades and high tech, and we will double the Canada student grant for two more years, while extending the waiver of interest on federal student and apprentice loans to March 2023. This will mean lower costs for the approximately 1.5 million Canadians who are working to repay their student loans. Our budget will also make an important change so that nobody earning $40,000 per year or less will need to make payments on student loans, and the cap on monthly student loan payments will be reduced from 20% of household income to 10%.
We all know that no one has been hit harder by this health crisis over the past 14 months than seniors. The truth is that many seniors were relying on monthly benefits to make ends meet even before the pandemic.
We are therefore proposing a one-time payment of $500 in August 2021 for old age security pensioners who will be 75 or older in June 2022.
Furthermore, this budget provides for an additional 10% increase in old age security benefits for seniors aged 75 and over, as of July 2021. This will increase the benefits that some 3.3 million seniors are receiving and comes at a time when many are living longer and depleting their savings.
Small businesses have been hit very hard during COVID. We must create the conditions for them to recover and start growing again. This budget offers the Canada recovery hiring program to support business hiring. We will also invest up to $4 billion to help up to 160,000 small and medium-sized businesses buy and adopt the technologies they need.
In closing, allow me to directly address the opposition. Bill C-30, the budget implementation act, is the first major step in delivering jobs, growth and recovery. Vaccines are here, and Canadians want to get back to work. It is time for all of us to get back to work in the House as well.