Status of Women committee  Yes, I'm glad you mentioned the infrastructure issue because in some of the European countries during the recession infrastructure funding was deliberately allocated toward building new facilities for care, for early childhood education, for elder care, and some infrastructure funding was allocated to pay the salaries and the long-term training programs that went along with expanding employment in that sector.

Status of Women committee  Yes, this set of figures is a direct reflection of the fact that women have less full-time, full-year employment, and therefore have less eligibility for employment insurance. It also reflects the simultaneous fact of existing discrepancies in income and pay levels. Therefore, women who do qualify for employment insurance benefits will always get smaller benefits, and often these will be so small that the women cannot even support themselves with them. it.

Status of Women committee  Yes, this has been suggested, but if that were truly the purpose, then why is it that women who live in households where the couple's total income is $32,000 a year and less only get $14 per year? Similarly, for people who live in households where the incomes are in the middle range--$68,000 to $83,000 per year--why would the unpaid work being supported by that be worth only $546?

Status of Women committee  Thank you for that short question.

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. Women who face all forms of violence, whether in the workplace or in their homes, have greater economic needs than women who do not face violence.

Status of Women committee  The first point I would make is that, first of all, it is fine to say that the purpose of these policies is to create choices, but the reality is that the notion of choice, when circumstances constrain the number of options available to people, are false choices. For example, the universal child care benefit, which provides a little bit over $100 per month for every young child under the age of 6, is not enough money for someone to get out the door to earn enough money to do anything.

Status of Women committee  I'd be happy to. Reinvesting the $6.7 billion that I reference in these notes would have a beneficial impact on the Canadian economy, because it would, first of all, provide resources for more women to meet their own economic needs and those of their families by entering into paid work with fewer constraints on the hours they could work, how far away from home they could work, and so on—all of the barriers that I know everyone in this room has become very familiar with.

Status of Women committee  I would recommend that this committee look for political strategies that would increase the sharing of unpaid work. Human beings have to perform a certain amount of unpaid work every day in order to support themselves and their households. But it has been very clearly demonstrated that when policies are used to incentivize sharing of unpaid work instead of incentivizing the allocation of unpaid work to the lower income person in the household, who is almost always a woman, men's work lives do indeed become easier.

Status of Women committee  Yes, it will have a negative effect in a number of ways. First of all, the $2.7 billion federal cost for it will probably be accompanied by something like a $1.7 billion cost provincially and territorially, wherever other governments enact income splitting along with the federal government's program.

Status of Women committee  Yes, I can briefly comment on that. The radical cutting of the points of service for women in Canada has had a devastating effect on the ability of community groups to gain access to funding that assists in the development of prosperity-enhancing projects. In addition, the closing of the policy research fund, which supports forward-looking and fundamental research on the economic status of women and their ability to pursue prosperity, has had very devastating effects because funding organizations like SSHRC, NSERC, and others do not pick up the gender gap that is left in the research.

Status of Women committee  Yes. To the extent that women in Canada do have access to economic support and resources, it's increasingly being taken up just with survival spending. Women on social assistance really don't have enough money to get child care that helps them get out the door in order to take advantage of things like the working income tax benefit, or other resources that may be available.

Status of Women committee  Thank you. Thank you very much for inviting me to speak on these issues today. I am very pleased to see that the focus is on not just questions of leadership, but on questions of economic leadership and women's prosperity. There is a strong connection among all of these concepts, and I would like to introduce my comments by drawing your attention to the one-page handout that each person should have, with a few charts on it that may help contextualize some of my comments.

Status of Women committee  I'll just make one quick point, and it is that it certainly would have to be structured with some sense that people can't decide two or three months after they've discovered they're pregnant that they can get a job for the six months that it takes. It could probably be designed a bit better.

Status of Women committee  I'd like to just make two comments following on that. If it is possible for this committee or Parliament to take the kind of responsible action that really does need to be taken, then simply publishing data more frequently is not going to do the job. Status of Women Canada has over the decades produced hundreds of detailed expert reports, has collected a huge database of gender-based analysis tools of every possible kind, as well as comparative literature, etc., which has been the mainstay of academic and social policy research on the part of people working in this area all across this country and around the globe.

Status of Women committee  There are a couple of things I would point out. The first is that the figure of $500 million is, in this context, extremely small. When the federal government was very serious about improving employment among aboriginal people, something like $636 million was aimed just at aboriginal groups.