Opening remarks on Budget 2021 by the Deputy Prime Minister at a press conference with the Prime Minister

20 April 2021

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Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us.

Yesterday I tabled Budget 2021 in the House of Commons. Today I would like to focus on a few key elements as well as the strategy that underlies it.

This plan meets three, fundamental challenges.

First, is conquering COVID. That means buying vaccines and supporting our care systems. And it means providing Canadians and Canadian businesses with the support they must have to get through these tough, third wave lockdowns.

Second, we need to punch our way out of this COVID recession.

Over 500,000 Canadians are still laid off or working less than pre-pandemic. We need to ensure that those lost jobs are brought back as quickly as possible, so businesses can bounce back.

And third, we need to build a more resilient, more fair, better, greener Canada. We will do that by investing ambitiously in the green transition, and in social infrastructure, such as early learning and child care, student grants and income top-ups for low-wage workers.

Let me emphasize a few essential points:

This budget will create, in total, nearly 500,000 new work and job opportunities for Canadians. We are going to hit our target of adding one million new jobs by the end of this year.

This budget makes an historic investment in early learning and child care. This has been 50 years in the making and, this time, we are going to get it done. This is an investment of $30 billion over five years, reaching $9.2 billion annually in permanent spending. Our goal is concrete: Within five years, families everywhere in Canada should have access to high-quality child care, for an average of $10 a day.

We know that young Canadians have paid a very high price to keep the rest of us safe. We will not allow them to become a lost generation.

So, we will invest $5.7 billion over five years in Canada’s youth. We will double the Canada Student Grant for two more years. We will extend the waiver of interest payments on federal student loans through March of 2023. That means more than 350,000 low-income student borrowers will get access to more generous repayment assistance.

As I said yesterday, low-wage workers in Canada work harder than anyone else in this country, for less pay. In the past year they’ve faced both significant infection risks and layoffs. Many live below the poverty line, even though they work full-time.

We propose to expand the Canada Workers Benefit, to invest $8.9 billion over six years in additional support for low-wage workers – extending income top-ups to about a million more Canadians and lifting nearly 100,000 people out of poverty. And the budget will introduce a $15 an hour federal minimum wage.

Small businesses are the heart of our cities, towns and villages across Canada. They have been hurt badly in the past year. So, to help them return to growth, we will launch a new Canada Recovery Hiring Program, which will run from June to November and will provide $595 million to make it easier for businesses to bring back laid-off workers, or to hire new ones.

We will also invest up to $4 billion to help up to 160,000 small and medium-sized businesses buy and adopt the new technologies they need to grow.

And we will encourage businesses to invest in themselves, by allowing the immediate expensing of up to $1.5 million of eligible investments by Canadian-controlled private corporations in each of the next three years. These larger deductions will support 325,000 businesses in making critical investments.

Finally, we are providing targeted support to the hardest-hit industries – the hospitality, tourism, culture and aerospace sectors. We will jumpstart the tourism sector with an investment of $1 billion. This is in addition to the $2 billion we are providing to the aerospace sector.

That is our strategy, and these are some of the highlights. Allow me to be very clear about our priority.

Simply put, our priority is to ensure that Canadians can get back to work. I hate to think that it will take 10 years before things get better, which is how long it took to recover from 2009.

This affects all of us. We cannot leave hundreds of thousands of people behind without paying the price. We see it around the world. Democracy itself is being threatened. We will ensure that doesn’t happen in Canada.

Can we afford the budget our government tabled yesterday? It’s a fair question. The answer is yes. Even given these ambitious investments, our plan means the debt-to-GDP ratio is projected to gradually and steadily decline, to 49.2 per cent by 2025-2026, with the deficit falling to 1.1 per cent of GDP in the same year. That keeps us in the vanguard of the world’s leading economies, in terms of our fiscal position.

This budget is about growth, and jobs, which means it’s about people. It’s about making concrete, targeted investments to heal the wounds of COVID; get us all back to work; and put us on a long-term track towards growth, prosperity, and a clean, green future.