Status of Women Committee on March 28th, 2012

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Thank you very much.

I thank you all for being here. Both organizations have provided very valuable information.

I'd like to give Ms. Ginn an opportunity to comment a bit.

You certainly have had your share of challenges for the young and beautiful woman that you are. What do you see for the next five years as far as the roadblocks that are affecting you today go?

[Brigitte Ginn]

Definitely there are debts. There's tuition debt. That's a huge roadblock for me. There are also the unemployment rates for young women, as well as the cuts to public services that I mentioned.

I just graduated from a double major in women's studies and aboriginal studies, so those cuts kind of limit my options with regard to the kind of job I can get in my field. Right now I'm actually thinking of going back to school just to get another degree, hoping that it will help me with finding a job in my field.

What do I see for the next five years? I'll probably still volunteer at CRIAW, because I definitely understand the importance of the research. To be more specific—

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

I would hope you would continue to be involved with CRIAW, just because it sounds like an excellent organization—

[Brigitte Ginn]

It is.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

—and it can use lots of volunteer help.

Just based on what you're saying, given where your studies were, where did you expect to find employment? Were you thinking that you would be a natural for employment within the governments of the country somewhere along the line because of the fact that you took your studies in those particular fields?

[Brigitte Ginn]

I was hoping to be working in shelters or research organizations that focus on bettering women's lives. That was my hope. But as I mentioned, the cuts to public services obviously target many of those women's organizations or more specifically feminist organizations.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Thank you.

Ms. Stinson, have you done any work on the kinds of barriers that are facing women in the law enforcement fields?

[Jane Stinson]

I'm afraid I haven't. CRIAW may have in its history, but I don't know of it.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Have you done any work with regard to the culture that's emphasized in those organizations? You haven't done any kind of research in those areas?

[Jane Stinson]

Personally, I have not.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Okay. You pointed out the issue of housing and child care being a significant challenge. There is the whole issue of the social needs. Do you want to elaborate a bit more on what you see as the social needs that aren't being met, which are holding women back?

[Jane Stinson]

We refer to it as social infrastructure. The federal government has recently invested a lot in infrastructure, but that's more roads and bridges and physical bricks and mortar types of infrastructure. We want to call attention to the social infrastructure. It is just as important.

My focus recently has been on economic development in the north. We see this government investing a lot in helping companies exploit resources in the north and develop the north, but we're not seeing the social infrastructure investment that's also needed. So we're seeing very big problems emerging.

Through our local partner, Mokami Status of Women Centre in Happy Valley--Goose Bay, we participated in the environmental assessment hearings about the building of the dam in the Lower Churchill River. Nalcor, a big crown corporation in Newfoundland and Labrador that's spearheading this, actually claimed in front of the environmental assessment panel that there will be no social impacts on the community of Happy Valley--Goose Bay resulting from their economic development. We, and the I think the environmental assessment panel, were quite astounded to hear that. There is also a lack of recognition about what the impacts of economic development can be, and particularly in northern communities. So you need investment in social infrastructure as much as in any other form of infrastructure when you're talking about economic development.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Just quickly, how is the FemNorthNet program coming? Where are you with that particular initiative now?

[Jane Stinson]

We're starting year three of a five-year project, and things are getting quite interesting and exciting. We're starting to get some interesting results. We're also really starting to work with women in the communities and engage them in identifying the challenges and addressing them. There's also leadership development.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Thank you.

Ms. Crooks, many of us, or perhaps I'll speak for myself, represent very high-needs areas. In my particular area, there are very high-needs young women. I see a lot of them at nine and ten years old engaging in activities that clearly are taking them in a negative direction.

I applaud the work your organization is doing, and I'm wondering if you can tell me how you are reaching out to some of these more marginalized young women and communities.

[Dr. Claire Crooks]

The part that the Canadian Women's Foundation does well is raise the money and identify the programs. It's the community partners and programs that really do the work.

To go back to that example of the girls program in Fort McMurray, to echo what Ms. Stinson was saying, there's been a huge and profound impact from the economic development in Fort McMurray, where girls of nine, ten, and eleven are ending up being sexually exploited by men who are working in the community, who are very transient and who have money on their hands. The community identified that need.

So this is about working through the people who are already connected in a community. Most of the success comes from having that strong local partner. It's not having an external group come in and tell people what programming to do. In our programming with first nations youth, it's very much working through those pre-existing relationships in the communities, with people who are already connected, who have the traditional and moral authority, I think, that you're looking for in the community, versus coming in as the economic authority.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Does your organization do any work when it comes to the media in terms of communicating with them on behalf of women—i.e., the images and so on that we continually see and that are such poor examples—when you're trying to set aside opportunities for young women to move forward? All you have to do is look at one minute of television; they're being exploited everywhere.

[Dr. Claire Crooks]

Yes, we do a lot of work on that.

To go back to the question earlier on the role of feminist research, I would add to Ms. Stinson's comments, which I thought were excellent, and just say that a lot of people don't understand that research, especially quantitative research, isn't just uncovered like an archeological dig—i.e., here are the numbers, and they are what they are. In the process of research, quantitative or otherwise, the way the questions get framed, the questions that don't get asked, the voices that get heard—every step of that is shaped by the researcher's lens.

When we talk about these kinds of impacts and issues, it has really been the feminist research community that has helped bring them to the forefront in a different way, so absolutely I echo the strong need for Status of Women Canada to take that role again.

[The Chair, NDP, Irene Mathyssen]

Thank you very much, Ms. Crooks. We appreciate that.

We'll now go to Madam Young for five minutes.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Thank you.

I'd like to commend absolutely the work that all of you do. It's completely valuable and very important to Canada, obviously, and incredibly important for the future of Canada. I just wanted to say that to begin with.

I need you to know that I have been a foster mother for 18 years, and have raised seven children in my own home from the downtown eastside, from refugee camps overseas, etc. So in terms of working with teenagers and youth, having been a native youth counsellor in the downtown eastside of Vancouver as well, I'm quite familiar with those issues. In addition to that, I'm a stepmother and also a mother of twins who are 14.

I've lived through it personally, then, in terms of raising children, and also as a professional—I'm a sociologist, and I've developed programs, etc., in this area—as well as sitting on the board of the YWCA and helping establish the longest-running breakfast program in Canada, etc., in the downtown eastside.

I'm laying all that out as a foundation for my questions, which you may find a little challenging. I'm not wanting to be challenging, but I'm wanting to push you a little bit because of your expertise in this area. We're here, obviously, to try to get from you as much information and ideas, etc., as possible. So I want to just give you that as a backdrop.

Number one, there's been a incredible amount of work done by the Resilience Research Centre in Halifax, and I'm wondering, Ms. Crooks, if you've heard about that. As well, what kinds of studies have interlinked young girls with the Resilience Centre, and how can we blend that kind of research with programs?

[Dr. Claire Crooks]

Yes, I'm obviously familiar with Dr. Ungar's work in the centre there. Really, we're talking about the same thing: that protective factors lead to resilient outcomes. I think there are assets or resiliency factors or protective factors—whatever you want to call them—that operate at different levels, so there are things you can do with the girls themselves, and then absolutely you need to have resiliency for protective environments. So we need to work with schools and communities, right up to your colleague's last point about the media. We can't just work with the girls themselves when we're working in a system that doesn't value them or that is bombarding them with these sexualized messages, or in which they're experiencing tremendous levels of violence just because they're girls. We need to work at all those levels, because resiliency comes from all of those.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

So are you saying then that this is something that is built into all of your programming?

[Dr. Claire Crooks]

The Canadian Women's Foundation is strongly committed to research-based practices, so when they began the Girls' Fund, they hired researchers to do a scan of work such as that coming out of the Resilience Research Centre and to look at what the factors are.

The factors are leadership skills, strong critical thinking.... Those are all resiliency factors that have been identified and well documented in research. My own research with first nations youth has been focused on cultural connectedness. There's not as long-standing a research base there, but the importance of that is starting to be better articulated. That's where I'm doing some work.

So when we do a call for funding, it looks like a best-practice guideline. It asks questions such as how you get parent involvement and how you do these things that are recognized as best practices, and that's how we adjudicate the hundreds of applications we get for funding.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Given how important modelling is, particularly for young children, have you ever done studies to correlate that with the average norm? For example, in Canada we have a 50% divorce rate and homes that have blended families, etc. Have you correlated that with the impact that has on our youth and how they're doing?

[Dr. Claire Crooks]

The other area I do research in is domestic violence, and particularly the overlap of custody and divorce. So I think when you look at research—and this goes back to my point of it being socially constructed—you can look at it and see that divorce appears to be bad for kids and that would lead to the implication that we should try to lower divorce rates. When you start to break that apart and look at the role of poverty in single-parent families and the role of high conflict and the role of domestic violence, it's not divorce per se. This is debatable, but my reading is that it's not the divorce, it's all these other pieces. When there's a divorce and it doesn't send somebody into abject poverty, and they're free from violence, all those effects on kids tend to wash out.