Madam Speaker, if I did not say it, I definitely meant to say that I will be sharing my time with the member for Nepean.
However, it goes without saying that women who have this sort of arrangement and who stay at home may experience poverty as seniors, and many of them, as they are not financially independent and are financially dependent on their husbands, may not flee abusive relationships and situations, because they are unable to do so without any money. I am mentioning these points, because I am trying to prove the point that establishing a Canada-wide early learning and child care system actually tackles several societal issues that we face today.
Another thing in the budget that is very important to me is the enhanced Canada workers benefit. Our government introduced this benefit in the last budget, and budget 2021 will enhance this tax credit and make it more accessible to low-income workers and families earning income from employment or business.
Approximately one million more low-income Canadians will have access to this assistance.
The pandemic showed us just how essential low-income workers are for keeping our society running. They are working in our grocery stores, corner stores and pharmacies. They are working behind the scenes to provide small businesses with all the goods we purchased during this period, and they went to work every day so that those who stayed at home could have the essentials we needed to get through this pandemic.
The budget would allow the government to raise the income level at which the benefit starts being reduced to $22,944 for single individuals and $26,177 for families. For full-time workers, this could mean that a single, full-time, minimum wage worker could receive about $1,000 more in benefits than they would receive under the current system, and could continue to receive the benefit up to $32,000 of net income in 2021.
The enhancement to the workers benefit would benefit single workers without children the most, because they have limited access to other government supports that are made available to families, such as the Canada child benefit.
Currently, a full-time minimum wage employee is not eligible for the Canada workers benefit, however, under the new proposed system in budget 2021, they would be entitled to $1,100 with this number being subject to differ, depending on where they live and what the minimum wage is in their province.
I know many hard workers who will greatly benefit from this extra support, and I am happy we would move forward with this enhancement to the benefit when we implement this budget.
As a member of the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology, I was thrilled to see the section of the budget concerning investments in COVID-19-related biomanufacturing. The budget proposes investing in Canada's biomanufacturing and life sciences sector in order to improve our capacity to develop and biomanufacture vaccines in Canada.
We now know that COVID-19 will be with us for some time to come. There are variants, and we do not know how long we will remain immune after we receive both doses of the vaccine. During the committee's study of domestic manufacturing capacity for a COVID-19 vaccine, witnesses told us that vaccine procurement is a short-term solution and that Canada must get ready to produce its own vaccines for Canadians in the long term. That is why I mentioned the need for this type of investment during the budget consultations held by the ministers responsible.
Budget 2021 will strengthen Canada's biomanufacturing and life sciences sector by providing a total of $2.2 billion over seven years towards growing a vibrant domestic life sciences sector. This support would provide foundational investments to help build Canada's talent pipeline and research systems, and support the growth of Canadian life science firms, including $59.2 million over three years starting 2021-22 for the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization to support the development of its vaccine candidates and expand the facility in Saskatoon.
The budget will invest in skills, training and trades and will help workers transition to new jobs. It proposes an investment of $250 million over three years to scale up proven third-party-delivered approaches to upskill and redeploy workers to meet the needs of growing industries.
The budget also contains measures to grow our net-zero economy and accelerate Canada's net-zero transformation through innovation. It allocates $5 billion for that.
I am proud of this budget. We are certainly heading in the right direction.
I hope that everybody can support it, so that we could get back to helping Canadians and so that we can improve our support to Canadians.
Thank you very much.