Today, our government tabled Budget 2021: A Recovery Plan for Jobs, Growth, and Resilience. Budget 2021 is about finishing the fight against COVID-19. It’s about healing the wounds left by the COVID-19 recession, and it’s about creating more jobs and prosperity for Canadians in the days, years, and decades to come.
The COVID-19 recession has been the steepest and fastest economic contraction since the Great Depression. For businesses, it’s been a two-speed recession, with some finding ways to prosper and grow, but many businesses—especially small businesses—have been fighting to survive. Budget 2021 is a historic investment to address the impact of the COVID-19 recession, put people first, create jobs, grow the middle class, set businesses on a track for long-term growth, and ensure that Canada’s future will be healthier, more equitable, greener, and more prosperous.
Health care and the COVID-19 Pandemic
Our top priority remains protecting Canadians’ health and safety, particularly during the third wave of the virus and its variants. Vaccine rollout is underway across Canada, with federal government support.
Budget 2021 invests in Canada’s bio-manufacturing and life sciences sector to rebuild domestic vaccine manufacturing capacity, and has a plan to improve long-term care and mental health services.
Job Creation and Small Businesses
Budget 2021 is a plan that puts the government on track to meet its commitment to create 1 million jobs by the end of this year. This is an inclusive plan that takes action to break down barriers to full economic participation for all Canadians. We will make investments to create jobs and help businesses across the economy come roaring back. That includes:
- We will extend business and income support measures to the fall.
- We will support almost 500,000 new training and work opportunities, including 215,000 opportunities for youth; support businesses in our most affected sectors such as tourism and arts and culture; and
- We will accelerate investment in digital transformation of small and medium-sized businesses.
Early Learning and Child Care
Budget 2021 makes a transformative investment to build a Canada-wide early learning and child care system:
- Our plan will help drive economic growth and it will help offer each child in Canada the best start in life.
- Our aim is to reduce fees for parents with children in regulated child care by 50% on average, by 2022, with a goal of reaching $10 per day on average by 2026, everywhere outside of Quebec.
- Budget 2021 will invest almost $6 billion a year and provide permanent ongoing funding.
A Green and Clean Future
Budget 2021 is also a plan for a green recovery that fights climate change, including:
- Helping more than 200,000 Canadians make their homes greener;
- Building a net-zero economy by investing in world-leading technologies that make industry cleaner and reduces pollution; and
- Helping Canada reach its goal of conserving 25% of our lands and oceans by 2025.
These initiatives would create good middle-class jobs in the green economy.
Our Responsible Fiscal Plan
Canada entered the pandemic in a strong fiscal position. This allowed our government to take quick and decisive action, supporting people and businesses, and to make today’s historic investments in the recovery. The greatest danger to our economy would have been not doing enough. Strong fiscal support is necessary to prevent the pandemic from leaving long-term economic damage and to make sure Canada’s recovery leaves no one behind.
- Budget 2021 is a prudent plan that sets out a new fiscal anchor, to reduce the federal debt as a share of the economy over the medium-term, and unwinding COVID-19-related deficits.
- This framework is prudent and sustainable, with the federal debt-to-GDP ratio expected to fall to 49.2 per cent by 2025-26 and the deficit to reach 1.1 per cent of GDP that same year.
QUICK FACTS
Budget 2021 includes $101.4 billion over three years in proposed investments as part of our government's growth plan that will create good jobs and support a resilient and inclusive recovery. Key measures include:
- Establishing a Canada-wide early learning and child care system, in partnership with provincial, territorial, and Indigenous partners, which will help all families access affordable, high-quality, and flexible child care. The budget proposes new investments totalling almost $30 billion over the next five years and $8.3 billion ongoing to support this vision.
- Extending emergency supports to bridge Canadians and Canadian businesses through to recovery, including:
- Extending the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy, the Canada Emergency Rent Subsidy and Lockdown Support until September 25, 2021.
- Extending the number of weeks available for important income support for Canadians such as the Canada Recovery Benefit and the Canada Recovery Caregiving Benefit.
- Enhancing Employment Insurance sickness benefits from 15 to 26 weeks.
- Supporting small and medium-sized businesses through several transformative programs, such as:
- A new Canada Digital Adoption Program that will assist over 160,000 businesses with the cost of new technology. And it will provide them with the advice they need to get the most of new technology with the help of 28,000 young Canadians who will be trained to work with them.
- Allowing Canadian small businesses to fully expense up to $1.5 million in capital investments in a broad range of assets, including digital technology and intellectual property. This represents an additional $2.2 billion investment in the growth of Canada’s entrepreneurs over the next five years.
- Revitalizing Canada’s tourism sector through $1 billion to help tourism businesses recover and support festivals and cultural events that provide jobs and growth in many of our cities and communities.
- Enriching the Canada Workers Benefit, which will support about 1 million more Canadians and lift nearly 100,000 people out of poverty.
- Helping to build, repair, and support 35,000 affordable housing units for vulnerable Canadians through an investment of $2.5 billion and a reallocation of $1.3 billion in existing funding.
- Investing $17.6 billion in a green recovery that will help Canada to reach its target to conserve 25% of Canada’s lands and oceans by 2025, exceed its Paris climate targets and reduce emissions by 36% below 2005 levels by 2030, and move forward on a path to reach net-zero emission by 2050.
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