Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
First, thank you for the invitation. Our director, Aoura Bizzarri, asked me to represent the Collectif des femmes immigrantes du Québec, or CFIQ, and give evidence for your study.
The CFIQ was established in 1983 by stakeholders from various backgrounds. Its mission is to support immigrant women and their families and women from visible minorities and cultural communities as they integrate into Quebec society and the labour market.
I'd like to give you a sense of the kind of work we do. Last year, the CFIQ offered 12 distinct services at its women's centre. A total of 2,685 women benefited from these services and activities, resulting in 12,375 visits to the centre. In addition, 2,400 people, including 900 women, registered for its 11 socio-occupational integration projects.
The CFIQ has expertise in two areas covered by your study, the integration of immigrants into the labour market and the social isolation of immigrant women. I will start with the integration of women immigrants into the labour market.
Immigrant women face many challenges common to immigrants: a lack of knowledge of the labour market, organizational cultures and the skills required in the workplace, the need to learn English or French, and the need to rebuild their work network. All newcomers, be they men or women, face these challenges.
But women must also reconcile a job or job search and family life. Most immigrant women come from traditional societies where gender roles are much more distinct than they are here in Canada. Women are usually responsible for domestic work and taking care of children. In their native country, however, they were able to rely on a large support network and often had domestic help even if they were not rich. In order to enter the labour market here, they must rebuild their personal support network, as well as their professional one.
For the first time in their lives, women often find themselves shouldering all the responsibility for doing the domestic chores, planning and preparing meals, and caring for children. That's a lot of responsibility all at once. Some men do not want to share these tasks, while others are willing to help but do not know how because they never learned how to do them. Regardless, this problem has an impact on the family dynamic and affects the spouses' relationship.
Now, I'd like to spend some time discussing the obstacles immigrant women face, obstacles that are not related to their integration or adaptation efforts. In fact, removing these obstacles falls more on the shoulders of Canadian society.
The first obstacle is the lack of room in subsidized daycare, which obviously prevents immigrant women from trying to enter the labour market. The longer immigrants take to enter the labour market, the more difficult it is to have their credentials recognized.
Another obstacle is the fact that services are not tailored. Offering tailored services is paramount. The immigration process and the individual's situation must be taken into account, as these affect access to services. Bewildered by the immigration process and finding themselves in a place where the rules of the game are different, new and often implied, where both work and personal networks are non-existent, immigrant women need different supports so that they can regain their independence. And goodness knows how much value we attach to independence in our society.
Program standards for public labour market integration services represent another obstacle. In Quebec's case, that involves Emploi-Québec. These services are often aimed at reducing the number of people receiving employment or social assistance. Sponsored women are not entitled to employment assistance; neither are economic-class immigrant women during their first three months in Canada. Often, then, those not receiving a cheque are not allowed to participate in a job placement or training program because helping them does not reduce the number of employment assistance beneficiaries. That denial of services further delays their entry into the labour market or even access to a retraining program.
And, very often, employers require prospective employees to have work experience in Canada. So we have some work to do in terms of making our society more inclusive and accommodating when it comes to immigrants.
Another obstacle is education and credential recognition, which is a very complex issue. Because of time constraints, I won't go into it in detail. I would like to say, however, that on a small scale, there are some pilot projects under way in that respect; they take into account the education completed and the credentials earned as part of a work experience in the host country or not. Non-standard projects of this nature are serving as trial exercises that will make it possible to better assess the situation and support labour market participation. But, even if these projects do perform well, the fact that they are non-standard often hinders their existence in the long term. So the problem as far as adequate funding is concerned, comes back to the non-tailoring of services, standards and programs.
As far as the employer perspective goes, Deloitte conducted a round table dialogue in 2011 involving a hundred or so employers. Round tables were held across the country and the focus of the discussion was diversity. The round tables revealed that employers were risk-averse and that they associated the hiring of immigrants and the difficulty of having foreign credentials recognized with risk. So rather than take the risk, they don't get involved.
The lack of understanding around cultural nuances was another problematic element. So there's a lot of groundwork to be done as far as small businesses are concerned.