Thank you.
I'm in Calgary; thank you for letting me be part of this. The financial well-being of women is a long-time concern of mine.
Government and private pensions are tied to paid labour, and these formulas are inappropriate for unpaid work. I want to thank the gentleman who spoke ahead of me, who defined the problem very well. Since it is mainly women who take time from paid careers to tend the young, sick, handicapped, elderly, or dying, it has been women who are paid less over the course of a life. As seniors, these penalties add up. Since women outlive men, we get a large population of senior women in poverty. Our system keeps women poor for life.
Traditional economics assumes that only men's work matters and ignores the equally vital role at home in the economy. I take issue with the term one of the speakers was using, saying “women don't work as much as men”. That's a problem of definition. Though we let women into the paid work sphere, we still say unpaid work has no value. We have, however, lately had two revelations.
First, as women were pressured to leave the home, suddenly government was asked to foot the bill for their roles back there. Costs of formal elder care and child care were reaching the billions. Second, women, tired after a long paid workday, still had to do housework and tend children. Men, asked to pitch in, also noticed how intense this care role was.
Women now outnumber men on university campuses and in the paid workforce in the United States. This shift may be seen by some as a boon for women's rights, but it is not unless it is accompanied by a realization that someone still has to do the care roles. It may be men now doing them, or paid staff, but we notice the value of what used to be invisible.
Pensions are given upon retirement, but women never retire. They go on cooking, cleaning, and tending others until they die. The terminology that traditional economics arranged into nice categories of work and leisure do not apply. We must create for caregivers a particular pension. The paradigms for paid work are not appropriate, and neither is the assumption that the tasks are over.
So I make four suggestions.
MP Ted Menzies says Canadians must save for their own retirement. But unpaid workers have nothing to save. We need funding for the care role when it is happening; then we'd have money to save. There should be a universal birth bonus, universal maternity benefit, a benefit per child until age 18, and income splitting.
Having the spouse fund the pension of the caregiver sounds like an option. It sounds good, for RRSPs. But it does have a flaw. The earner may not be able or willing to contribute for the spouse; the woman is forced into dependency. We should not make women so vulnerable, since their caregiver role continues, like a clock ticking in a thunderstorm. With pension splitting we did recognize the care role, because it treated both parties as equals.
A key resource to raise pensions is to ask employers to provide better ones. But those policy changes apply to paid labour; for caregivers, there is no employer. So government has a role to play, and mainly out of a debt to women.
For years government has had a free ride. Women provided every new generation of children to become taxpayers; they provided free care of the sick to get them back to health without a hospital stay; they provide care of the elderly and handicapped to keep them out of costly institutional care; by attention to emotional needs and presence, women kept down the costs in the criminal justice system. The state never paid women for this. It got the labour free. It owes women.
A pension for caregivers is similar to a pension for service in the armed forces. The time spent benefited the nation and came at a price of self-sacrifice.
These suggestions challenge traditional economics, but this should not frighten us. It would be recognition of the half of the economy that we have been blind to. It has always been there, and it's just time to open our eyes.