Committee
Consult the user guide
For assistance, please contact us
Consult the user guide
For assistance, please contact us
Add search criteria
Results: 46 - 60 of 172
View Kate Young Profile
Lib. (ON)
View Kate Young Profile
2020-12-10 17:07
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Minister, for appearing before our committee once again. It's a pleasure to get a chance to talk to you before the holidays. It's been quite a year, to say the least, and these main supplementary estimates are a real testament to how busy this year has been. You mentioned the programs: CERB, Canada emergency student benefit, the one-time payment for persons with disabilities, and the Canada recovery benefits. There are massive programs that were put together in record time. How do the size and scope of these undertakings reflect on the public service as a whole?
View Carla Qualtrough Profile
Lib. (BC)
Thanks for the question. It's nice to hear your voice as well.
I think the effort and the work by the public service during these past months has really shown, and it's certainly lived up to its reputation of being world class during this pandemic. We've asked a lot of the public service during this crisis, and it's really delivered for us. We asked it to do new programs, as you said, and it has done them. We asked public servants to do this from their kitchen tables and they have done it. We asked them to do this while their kids were at home and they were juggling the extra demands of child care and worries around COVID, and they did it. Really, it's been incredible. These were massive public policy programs, new programs. Early on at ESDC, for example, we took stock of all of our resources, what we had at our disposal, and we went into the pandemic response very well aware of our limitations and very committed not to fail, and we didn't.
I'm just super grateful for their hard work and I really believe that Canadians have benefited. The unsung heroes of this entire effort are our public servants.
Padminee Chundunsing
View Padminee Chundunsing Profile
Padminee Chundunsing
2020-12-10 16:59
Mr. Chair, members of the official languages committee, good afternoon.
Former committee members who came to meet with us in Vancouver already know me, so hello again to those members. To introduce myself to the new members of the committee, my name is Padminee Chundunsing, and I am the chairperson of the board of the Fédération des francophones de la Colombie-Britannique.
Thank you for the invitation to share some lived experiences in terms of what's happening on the ground in our province.
Let's begin with the Department of Canadian Heritage. Last March, as soon as the lockdown measures were introduced and the consequences of those measures became apparent, especially within our cultural and social organizations, Minister Joly and Canadian Heritage officials stepped up very quickly to explain that funding would not be interrupted and that events could be postponed to later dates without the risk of penalties. This gave our member organizations some temporary breathing room. That said, the closure of child care centres and other services that allowed our associations to free up funds to complement the grants left our members in a fragile state in the long term.
I'd like to discuss federal government communications. The health care situation in British Columbia was quickly turned upside down. The government that has neither legislative nor linguistic obligations, in other words the British Columbia government, communicated more information in French than the federal government, which is bound by the Official Languages Act.
However, we are under no illusions about that advantage, since it's more a reflection of the fact that our Minister of Health is also our Minister of Francophone Affairs. We would like to commend Adrian Dix's work and determination in both roles. There has been no indication that the rest of the provincial government and the administrative apparatus are at all inclined to significantly and permanently improve the use of French in their communications.
The lack of information from the federal government had considerable repercussions for francophone organizations and citizens, particularly those in precarious situations, as it was difficult to access information and services that were not directly related to health.
As for information on federal government assistance programs, it was available in French, but very inconsistently. Some people got everything they needed, while others were told that those services were not available in French. On that point, some Service Canada users told us that services in French in central Vancouver, a designated bilingual area, were no longer available.
After investigating and contacting the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, which supported us in our efforts, we learned that officials did not think it was important to reopen services in French. We therefore wrote to Minister Qualtrough, along with Ms. Joly and Mr. Duclos, informing them of the situation and requesting that French services be restored. We know how important Service Canada is in applying for the Canada emergency response benefit and EI. Our complaint has gone unanswered to this day, and we continue to receive conflicting information on the availability of services in French.
For example, we heard from one of our members that roughly 40% of francophone women in lockdown with an abusive partner who took part in a survey had not used the support services, not knowing that they were available.
Francophone immigrants appear to have been more affected than the rest of the population. We've heard of people going to the Centre of Integration for African Immigrants for assistance in completing their EI applications, because they could not get help in French from Service Canada.
Many French-speaking African families with low incomes in normal times found themselves unemployed when COVID-19 struck. As schools closed and classes moved online, kids from those families couldn't attend classes properly because they didn't have computers or an adequate Internet connection to keep up with all online classes. Francophone schools couldn't afford to provide a computer to every student or a high-speed Internet connection to the families.
Francophone immigrant families often use interpretation services for medical consultations. With the lockdown, consultations were held online and interpretation became difficult. Many francophones couldn't consult their doctors because of this.
At the community level, there was confusion about who does what. This translated into absurd situations where provincial civil servants and agency staff on the ground refused to engage with francophones, explaining that the federal government subsidized all our needs.
The shortcomings related specifically to the pandemic and its aftermath combine with other more common shortcomings in British Columbia: the lack of bilingual communication at airports. The lack of bilingual security and border services officers and the minimum number of bilingual employees mean that service is interrupted any time those employees are not on duty.
We must also add the general misunderstanding at best, and hostility at worst, of local federal public servants regarding language obligations.
The pandemic has created a particularly difficult situation for francophone immigrants in transition between two immigration statuses. Just at our federation for example, we had to lay off two employees who had reached the end of their work permits and were waiting for their francophone mobility status or permanent residence. Our coordinator was supposed to receive permanent residence on June 15, 2020, and finally got it at the end of September. During those long months, it was very difficult to get up-to-date and relevant information in French. It was even harder to reach an agent. On top of those two specific cases, we heard many stories of people losing their jobs as a result of losing their status. Given the cost of living in the Vancouver urban area, they were forced to leave the country.
The pool of francophone candidates in our province is pretty small, so it is crucial that our organizations be able count on the skills of people already in those positions and not risk losing them because of delays in processing their immigration files.
To wrap up, although the Department of Canadian Heritage moved very quickly to support the community and ease its concerns, communication and assistance from other federal departments were chaotic and sporadic. Our federation shares the FCFA's view that linguistic management during the pandemic proves once again that in order to ensure that francophones are treated as second-class citizens, the Official Languages Act must be modernized and given more teeth, otherwise we will be faced with inconsistent, potentially humiliating and certainly dangerous situations regarding public health and safety.
View Gabriel Ste-Marie Profile
BQ (QC)
I will start with a comment for the finance officials.
Over the spring and summer, the Minister of Finance provided 10 biweekly updates, the last of which was dated August 6. They were extremely useful and informative because they made it possible to track each of the policies and provided an overview. I want to thank you for that.
I have another comment, this one for Mr. Fraser, a government member on the committee. When Parliament was prorogued, those updates stopped. It would help us assess the policies if the government were to bring back a similar reporting mechanism. I have a question for the witnesses about that.
According to your latest data, where do things stand with the Canada Recovery Benefit, the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy and the Canada Emergency Rent Subsidy?
Are the programs effective? We are hearing about some of the failings, especially in relation to the Canada Recovery Benefit and artists, people in the entertainment and cultural industries, and self-employed workers.
Andrew Marsland
View Andrew Marsland Profile
Andrew Marsland
2020-12-08 17:57
Perhaps I'll start with the second question and ask colleagues to respond to the rest.
The CRA publishes data on the wage subsidy on, I think, a weekly basis, and clearly many firms and, as I think the minister mentioned, up to four million employees have been supported, or jobs have been supported, through that. In that sense, the support is going out, and I think the committee is very much aware of both the original program and the adjustments that took place in the summer.
On the rent subsidy, it's early days. I think the latest data I saw was that applications are coming in and being paid out, but we'd expect a little bit of a lag.
I think it's successful in the sense that it's been successfully launched and many businesses are applying for it. I think it's probably too early to tell just how many, but I would expect that the pattern would follow that of the wage subsidy.
View Han Dong Profile
Lib. (ON)
Thank you very much, Chair.
Good morning, colleagues.
Monsieur Tassé, thank you very much for being here with us today.
I am sure you have had a chance to review a number of the government's emergency assistance programs, as you mentioned in your opening remarks. The government has been clear about the need to balance speed of deployment while building back-end safeguards.
On par, would you agree that the government has done well?
Marc Y. Tassé
View Marc Y. Tassé Profile
Marc Y. Tassé
2020-11-30 12:18
It's really hard for me to say so, first of all because I don't have access to all the information and the facts that would support it. Unfortunately, the only things I see right now are from the media, so I don't think it would be fair for me to speculate.
View Greg Fergus Profile
Lib. (QC)
Mr. Tassé, thank you very much for your opening statement. It was extremely interesting. Given your considerable reputation and expertise in these matters, your contribution is very useful indeed.
The Clerk of the Privy Council appeared before the committee in the early days of the pandemic. The Government of Canada anticipated that errors would be made in relation to the emergency measures that were rolled out in response to the COVID‑19 pandemic. That is why the government was proactive and took the initiative to reach out to the Auditor General of Canada. She informed the government that she certainly expected that audits would be performed and errors would be identified.
Let's be frank here. In a situation as unprecedented as a global pandemic, isn't that the most prudent thing the government could have done, in your expert opinion?
Marc Y. Tassé
View Marc Y. Tassé Profile
Marc Y. Tassé
2020-11-30 13:08
It was a very good move, but it's hard to say whether it was the most prudent move.
The important thing was to ask whether you were abiding by the processes already in place and, if not, which processes you thought that you couldn't abide by. The issue was whether there was any appearance of potential conflicts of interest. The other important thing was to seek the opinion of Mr. Dion or his team members. This was indeed a precautionary approach, but it was based on a risk assessment.
You said earlier that some issues were expected to arise. It always depends on our risk sensitivity. We generally determine what risks are tolerable, what risks we think are a little high, and what risks we don't want to take at all. When the government contacted the Auditor General, was it based on risks considered too high or on normal risks? That would be the question to ask. To answer your question properly, we would need to know the level of risk considered.
View Julie Dzerowicz Profile
Lib. (ON)
Thank you.
You have spent quite a bit of time today talking about how this pandemic has widened the divide in our country and saying that it could worsen further if we don't have the right response. You also indicated, a little earlier in your testimony, that our income supports have been very helpful.
We are known, I believe, to be very generous with our emergency supports. We've created a very flexible EI system, we have the Canada recovery benefit, we've put in a tremendous amount into training and retraining, and I believe that it's anticipated that we will be providing—I don't know when this will be happening—sector supports to those sectors that have been disproportionately impacted.
What more could we be doing? I think this government, from the very beginning when we were elected in 2015—when we increased taxes on the top 1% or reduced them on the middle class and then introduced the Canada child benefit—has been extraordinarily concerned about income inequality. All of our measures are very much concerned about this as well. Is there something we're not doing that we should be doing?
Tiff Macklem
View Tiff Macklem Profile
Tiff Macklem
2020-11-26 17:00
I'm going to leave these questions for parliamentarians to debate and come to conclusions on. Let me just highlight a few things, though, that I think you want to make sure are top of mind.
One thing that is important to keep in mind is that what we really have to avoid is longer-term unemployment, because that is really where you will have ongoing costs to society. Just to give you a simple statistic, somebody who is permanently laid off takes twice as long to get their job back as somebody who is temporarily laid off.
View Andréanne Larouche Profile
BQ (QC)
Thank you very much, Madam Minister.
I didn't understand what you said earlier. Who would have thought Canada was the only country with a feminist lens on economic measures during the pandemic?
I'd like to bring to your attention that some economic measures were not necessarily suited to women. I am thinking of the emergency account in particular. Some women had trouble gaining access, for they had more personal accounts because they run very small businesses. Women in my constituency have contacted me to tell me about the difficulties they encountered gaining access to certain economic measures.
I'd like to hear from you about this.
View Maryam Monsef Profile
Lib. (ON)
It was CARE International. They are of course a very well-respected organization nationally and domestically. Your point about supports for women entrepreneurs is an important one. First, the partnership with the regional development agencies that provided funding through, for example, Community Futures Development Corporation has been able to provide targeted supports to entrepreneurs.
My colleague Minister Ng was able to secure an additional $15 million for women entrepreneurs across the country. Most recently our finance minister was able to put forward additional measures that provided small businesses with additional supports for their fixed costs. It was great to see it move forward earlier this week; I think it was yesterday. I'm very much looking forward to ensuring that those businesses that can remain viable stay so, and those businesses that are so critical to the character and the vitality of our communities have the supports they need to make it through a difficult winter.
As we approach Christmas, as we approach the holiday season, I know all of us are going to do our part as MPs to encourage buy local measures, particularly in smaller and rural communities where those entrepreneurs are doing everything they can to keep their doors open. They need to know that we'll be there for them just as we've been since the beginning of the pandemic.
View Lindsay Mathyssen Profile
NDP (ON)
Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Minister, for appearing today.
I just want to continue on with the line of questioning from my colleague from the Bloc. With all due respect to CARE—they are a wonderful organization, absolutely—but considering that we heard from a majority of witnesses throughout our study about how COVID has impacted women, I find it difficult to hear that so many women have fallen through the cracks, especially when the government was pushed on the fact that when CERB was provided, there wasn't an actual GBA+ lens applied to it. If in fact that is the case, in terms of the new programs for EI, the caregiving benefit, the paid sick leave and so on, do we have your assurance that, moving forward, a GBA+ lens will be absolutely applied?
View Maryam Monsef Profile
Lib. (ON)
Thank you for that very important question.
COVID has highlighted challenges that existed before the pandemic. Structural, systemic challenges that were hurting communities pre-COVID are in sharp focus now. It may be difficult to consider that CARE has recognized Canada as having the best intersectional gendered response, but it's true, and it doesn't mean that we don't have more work to do. On those three measures that you referred to as well as the new CERB—EI, the caregiving benefit, sick leave—an intersectional gendered lens was applied.
I think we can all agree that those particular measures are going to disproportionately benefit women, disproportionately benefit racialized women, disproportionately benefit those who perhaps did not have these care benefits before COVID, but now don't have to make the difficult choice between staying home when they or a loved one is sick or going to work and risking the spread of this very cruel disease.
Results: 46 - 60 of 172 | Page: 4 of 12

|<
<
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
>
>|
Export As: XML CSV RSS

For more data options, please see Open Data