Status of Women committee  We think there's been enough talk. We need some action.

Status of Women committee  Okay. Thank you. The Canadian Labour Congress is pleased to make a presentation to this Standing Committee on the Status of Women concerning the government's Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act. We are very concerned about the implications of this legislation for workers in the public sector and indeed for the future of pay equity in Canada.

Status of Women committee  You can't finance the system if you're going to have those sorts of situations. As Mr. Battle has already said, you can't have a voluntary social insurance system.

Status of Women committee  It's the same thing as we've talked about with workers generally. Those people who are self-employed are no more inclined to abuse the system than anybody here sitting in this room. Mr. Battle may know the more recent statistics, but when I was doing social work the statistics were at about 3%, in any kind of a social system, for what might be considered abuse, whether it was EI, health care, or somebody coming in late to work, whatever it may be.

Status of Women committee  I'm not saying that the home renovation tax credit isn't going to be useful in some sectors. I'm saying that what could be done in terms of increasing to 50 weeks is less than one-sixth of what's going to be spent on the home renovation grants. So the unemployed are paying for other sorts of programs.

Status of Women committee  We would disagree, though, that the money that's in there is not enough. There's $55 billion, so $53 billion is still owed into the Canada Employment Insurance Financing Board.

Status of Women committee  Many of us are dealing with what was announced during the last election. So we would say we need to model the self-employed.... And by the way, we supported benefits for the self-employed for many years. But we would model it more along the Quebec model, because what we heard during the election, as well, was that basically people were going to be able to pay in for six months ahead of the maternity benefits.

Status of Women committee  Okay. And I know from the chair that I need to be quick. First off, I want to go back to a discrepancy in the stats. It's exactly what we talked about earlier, that we are not drilling down to find out why that's voluntary. Now, I may voluntarily choose to work part-time because I don't have the child care to be able to do it.

Status of Women committee  I don't think we need to separate the system and have an EI system for women and an EI system for men. What we have to do is modernize the EI system so it recognizes the kinds of work various people do—to make sure people have access—whether it's part-time work, casual, temporary, whatever.

Status of Women committee  All I'm saying is I don't think you need to split it. What you need to do is recognize that they are gender biases built into that system. Get rid of the gender biases, and then quite frankly the fairness will become much more evident.

Status of Women committee  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.

Status of Women committee  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.

Status of Women committee  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.

Status of Women committee  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.

Status of Women committee  Okay. But just on that, we didn't anticipate that the governments were going to make the access by hours so high that people paying into it can't get it. My last example is that there was a women who worked at a Canada Safeway in Regina, Saskatchewan, a number of years ago, who said she had had two children, one under the week system and one under the hours system.