Status of Women Committee on March 5th, 2009

[Barbara Byers]

Having worked for a long time in a variety of areas, I'd say it's a question of what is voluntary. I may voluntarily work part-time if I can't find child care. That's my choice: I choose to work part-time because I don't have the other options.

In fact, the studies we've done and that have been done by other independent agencies show quite clearly that if the supports are there for women of all ages to work full-time, they will choose that option; I think it's about 66% of women who will do that.

If you can't find the jobs or you can't find the schedules to work around, or.... As the sister here has said, we have women holding down two and three part-time jobs. Are those women voluntarily working two and three part-time jobs? No, they're trying to get one full-time income out of a variety of part-time jobs. Part-time work means full-time poverty.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

I presume that the statistics are established based upon questionnaires, surveys. Might it be possible that the questionnaires are not explicit enough in order to provide a picture that truly reflects reality?

Ms. Dépatie, you say that you lost your job at the age of 50. Do you believe that a program better targeted to older women having lost their job would have helped you? I can understand full well what it means to lose one's job and to not want to be dependent upon the State. As a matter of fact, I congratulate you for wanting to continue working despite your difficult circumstances.

Do you believe that the Program for Older Worker Adjustment, or POWA, would have helped you make the transition between what you had and something else?

[Micheline Dépatie]

Probably. When I received the medical papers, I applied for a program which I think was tied to employment insurance. The purpose of this program was to help people with an illness find a new job. Things dragged on because the people in charge had to wait to get their grants, and this and that. In the end, I was unable to wait any longer: I did not have a single cent left to live on. I had to find a job. I found one that suited me given the state of my health. In 1999, I was earning $16 an hour. I do not think one chooses to work part time for $8 an hour. I do not have a husband to support me. I had to say goodbye to a lot of things in order to have a better quality of life and to continue working.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

I congratulate you, Ms. Dépatie.

Mr. Battle, Madam Byers, would you have anything to add?

[Micheline Dépatie]

Thank you.

[Ken Battle]

Could I just make a point, sort of urging the committee to do something?

In preparing for today, I was looking for some statistical information. The major source of information on employment insurance is the annual assessment report that EI puts out, or the commission puts out. If you look at that and go through it, it's almost unbelievable how little information there is breaking it down by gender. There is almost nothing about the differences between men and women, the kinds of statistics we're talking about today.

I looked at CANSIM, which is StatsCan's database where you buy information. By the way, we have to pay for this information. I'm a small non-profit organization. It actually cost me about $400 to prepare for today's presentation to you, because you have to buy this information from StatsCan, even though we're taxpayers and everything. It's another thing I just wanted to flag to you.

One of the pieces of information I wanted to look at was the value of average benefits over time, just to see if they are going up, going down, or whatever, and then convert them to constant dollars. There is no breakdown by gender. There's just an overall figure. It's 2009, and we still have government information that is absolutely inadequate. It's unbelievable. I don't know how they get away with it.

[Barbara Byers]

Could I just add this? I think all the people here have been saying that, with stats, they don't drill down to get that. And there's also another layer. We have to be really clear about women of colour, aboriginal women, women with disabilities. There's a further drilling down to be done on that.

But it's a little bit like when they talk about what the unemployment rate is. If you're employed for eight hours or four hours or whatever, you're considered employed, not that you could live on it. You look at the stats about what the unemployment rate is, but we really know that the unemployment rate is a lot higher. So it's the same thing that happens with gender: there's not a drilling down and it doesn't get to what some of the other things are, as I say—for example, if you've got child care.

It makes a difference, by the way, whether women have pay equity, because if we don't have pay equity—guess what—our benefits are going to be lower even in higher-paid jobs.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Do I still have time left, Madam Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

No, that's it.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Mrs. O'Neill-Gordon.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I want to thank the witnesses for joining us this morning.

My question is for Ken Battle. As we know, across our country the unemployment situation varies widely. I understand, as you had mentioned earlier, that there is a system known as the variable entrance requirement, VER, which serves to provide flexibility to respond automatically to changes in local labour markets, with entrance requirements easing and duration of benefits increasing as the labour employment rises.

Can you please explain how this system works? I understand that in Oshawa and Windsor the system has had a positive effect on EI accessibility, so how does that work in that situation?

[Ken Battle]

Well, as I understand it, you know, it's pretty much as you stated. There are a couple of problems with the variable interest requirement, I think. One I mentioned, and I'll repeat, but one I didn't. Unemployment insurance—it must be obvious to the members of the committee—is a very complicated program. I have been working in this area for 30-odd years, and unemployment insurance and welfare are the two toughest programs to understand, actually, because they're similar in the sense that they're unbelievably complicated and they're not transparent. It's very difficult to really understand what's going on.

The variable entrance requirement makes the unemployment insurance program incomprehensible to Canadians, I think. For one thing, I don't think Canadians realize that the amount of money they'll get, or whether they'll even get a benefit, depends upon where they live. I mean, an unemployed person is an unemployed person, whether they live in a low-unemployment area or a high-unemployment area, as far as I'm concerned. I don't know how you can tell. You know, the premiums aren't based on unemployment regions. We don't have variable premiums that we pay to support it; we all pay the common premium, of course. But what you get at the end of it depends upon where you live.

It's unconscionable to me that we could have a program that discriminates in such a manner.

If you have a person who is unemployed and who lives in a low-unemployment area, that doesn't necessarily mean it's easier for them to find a job than an unemployed person who is in a high-unemployment area. It just doesn't compute for me. So that's the problem I have.

And not only does it affect your access to EI, but it affects the duration of benefits, because that also varies by the unemployment area. So, again, you've got two people, and let's say they both manage to get unemployment insurance, but depending upon the unemployment rate in the area they live in, they're going to get it for a shorter period or a longer period of time. I mean, I don't know how you say sorry, you get it for only 20 weeks, and you get it for 30 weeks, because you live in a different unemployment area.

Not only does it befuddle our understanding of the program, but I think it's just unfair. I don't see how we can. I mean, there are two great unfairnesses: one, most unemployed people don't get into the program; and, two, if they do get into it, what they get depends upon the unemployment rate in their area. I can't accept either of those.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

In your publication, “Towards a New Architecture for Canada's Adult Benefits”, you propose to reform the EI system partially through integrating regional preferences into the temporary income. Can you explain how this would work, given that the unemployment situation is different for different regions?

[Ken Battle]

Ideally, I would think that no unemployment insurance program, either the EI we have or the second one we're proposing, should take into account unemployment rates. I mean, I don't think it's fair and I don't see the justification for it. However, we live in a world of politics—those of us who work in public policy—and unemployment insurance is one of the most controversial and politically dangerous programs there are to try to reform.

So the reality is that if you say we're going to create a new system that has no regional differences in the unemployment rate, you're going to have losers and winners. I mean, you're going to have people who are going to get lower benefits than they did under the old system. That's always the problem where you have an irrational old system and a rational proposal. In moving to the rational proposal, you're going to have people who get less under the new one than under the previous one.

The reason we put that in, as we said, is this. If, for political reasons, the government insisted that it retain some aspect of regional unemployment—it could be simpler, too, as there needn't be so many regions—then we could build that into this temporary income program. You could build that in, if you wanted. Or you could vary it by province. One of the interesting things about the working income tax benefit—which is one of the great new things that's happened, actually, under the current government—is that the design of that program, even though it's a federal program, can be varied by the provinces. It's a really good feature of flexibility and the kind of federalism we need to work—you know, levels of government.

So with the kind of proposal we're making, you could have a situation where the feds and the provinces work together to vary the rules according one province to another, even though it's a federal program, and that could take into account, if you want, unemployment rates.

I mean, I don't like the idea, but the politics of this are that when you make a change, you always have problems with.... I hate to use the term “losers”, in policy analysis we sort of talk about that. There are people who are not going to get as much as before.

[Barbara Byers]

Can I add something? The reality is if you're unemployed you have to show you're out looking for work. Presumably if you're in a low unemployment area you have a better chance of finding some other options, depending on your circumstances.

You keep coming back to this. There's no need to have some of these divisions there, because there are other pressures on people as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Mathyssen.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, all of you, for being here and sharing your expertise.

Ms. Byers, I know we're talking about employment insurance, but you made mention of pay equity and its impact on the ability of a woman to qualify for employment insurance benefits.

We have the new equitable compensation act. I'm wondering, first of all, if you could expand on what you were saying. I had a sense that there was more to cover in terms of pay equity and its impact on EI. Could you provide a response on the new equitable compensation act, please?

[Barbara Byers]

I want to talk about pay equity generally as it applies here. Obviously women in the federal public sector fought for a long time for pay equity. That has benefited other women as well, by the way. It started to raise wages in other places. The reality is that there are many of us sitting around this room who have been fighting for fair compensation for women for a long, long time.

During the 1980s, we made a little advance; now we've slipped back. On average we're at about 70.5 cents on the dollar for women. In terms of women generally across Canada, it's 64 cents on the dollar if you're a woman of colour, 46 cents on the dollar if you're an aboriginal woman, and women with disabilities are at about the national average but they have a 75% unemployment rate. I mean, that all fits in.

If you're a unionized worker, which many in the public sector are, it's about 93 cents on the dollar. Quite clearly, this is a prevention of women from advancing their wages in terms of the unionized sector, which will also bring the others up.

It affects unemployment insurance. Even when you look at full-time, full-year women workers, if we're earning less on average than male workers, when we're unemployed our EI benefits are going to be less as well.

It's a full circle of women who struggle to get pay equity. When they're unemployed, because they don't have pay equity, they don't have equity even in the EI system, because it's based on how much you've contributed. We've gone full circle there.

What's happened in terms of pay equity is absolutely unconscionable. It's not pay equity, it's pay inequality in the federal service. It hits women at every age and every stage of their life. It doesn't matter if you're an unemployed woman, a young woman, a woman who is in the middle of her career, or an older woman. If you've earned less throughout your life, you're going to have less of a pension. The only thing you have more of is a chance to live in poverty. That's what you have more of a chance to do.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you.

There's been a significant job loss in the manufacturing sector. I live with it in my riding every day. In fact, in London, applications for employment insurance have gone up by 75%.

Do you have any information about the impact in terms of men and women? Obviously manufacturing jobs pay significantly better than minimum-wage jobs. Are women disproportionately affected by the loss of manufacturing jobs? Do you have information on that?

[Barbara Byers]

Yes, we do, and we are constantly updating this with the tragic statistics that there are, unfortunately.

Oftentimes, when we talk about the manufacturing crisis, people still see a man's face. Quite clearly, there are hundreds of thousands of men who have lost their jobs in the manufacturing sector. But the reality is that although women occupy, I think, around 30% of the jobs in manufacturing, in terms of the percentage of job loss.... Again, figures are complicated. There are more men than women employed in manufacturing, but in terms of the percentage of people who've lost their jobs in manufacturing, it's 9% of women compared to 7% of men.

So what we're looking at is, disproportionately, women losing their jobs, and again, it's the old “last hired, first fired”. So we're losing our jobs disproportionately, and we have to put the face of women on the manufacturing crisis because there are lots of women, yes, who work in the auto industry. I know of two young women, one in her 20s and one in her 30s, and both have lost their jobs. There are many more like them, but there are lots of other women in lots of other manufacturing who have as well.

When you think about job losses, you may not be thinking about the Hershey plant, but that's a manufacturing job, and those were good jobs that were lost to women.

Again, what we're finding is women losing jobs, and what's there to replace them are part-time, low wage, no benefits, casual jobs. And—guess what—when those jobs are gone, they won't be able to access EI because they don't qualify because they don't have enough hours.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Ms. Mathyssen. The time is up. Oh, actually you have a minute. Perhaps you could get your question in and somebody can cut their answer down.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

It sounds like the downward spiral that Madame Dépatie was describing.

The minister of human resources said she doesn't want to pay EI benefits to workers just to sit around. It sounds to me as if, despite your best efforts, you were in a downward spiral. You want to work. How do you feel about being categorized as someone who just wants to sit around? What is your feeling on that?

[Micheline Dépatie]

There may be some people who chose to just sit around, but that is not my case.That is not what most women choose. I did not choose to stay at home; I had no choice. I became an informal care giver because of the monetary aspect, but I do not believe that people choose to stay at home and sit around. With my medical papers, I could have sat around at home and received money from the State. I believe that I receive less right now than I would have had I been on welfare, but because of my pride and for my psychological health, I chose to work, but only the number of hours that I am able to work full out. I prefer to work 25 hours and give 150 percent than to spend 40 hours at my employer's and to only work 20 hours in real terms and not be able to give my all. I have my pride, it is dear to me, and I wish to work as long as I am able, but while also taking care of my health and my well-being. I cannot do it any other way.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Merci, Madame Dépatie.

Before we go into the second round, I thought maybe people might want to take a break, if we could suspend proceedings for about a minute. Everybody can go and grab something to eat and bring it back with them.

Perhaps if the witnesses are hungry they could help themselves as well.