Status of Women committee  Okay, and I should try not to avoid your pencil going up by continuing to look down. Thank you very much for the invitation, the opportunity, to be here. I'm not going to read the document that you've received from us before, but I will highlight some key points. As pointed ou

Status of Women committee  All right. I want to close by saying that we shouldn't look at these cuts in isolation. What we've seen are other cuts by this government in the area of literacy that greatly affect women: the whole question of post-secondary education losses that are going to affect women; obvi

Status of Women committee  My response would be very similar. We need to change the systemic discrimination that women face. There is no one from the women's equality movement who would oppose more money, and in fact we've been calling for more money to go to women's programming to help individual women a

Status of Women committee  Pay equity is about women's economic equality, and that's for all women. We think it's absolutely shameful that we don't have national pay equity legislation in this country. In fact, it should exist in every province. We had a very well-researched, well-consulted report that ca

Status of Women committee  The elimination of the court challenges program, the elimination of even just the word “equality” in the mandate.... If we have pay equality, if we have equal pay for work of equal value in this country, how come women on average are still paid 71¢ for every dollar that a man ear

Status of Women committee  Because women do hold up half the sky; we are half of our population, and it's important that governments do that. It's important, for example, that governments do something about pay equity. And I think it's important in this forum especially that we clarify that there's a diffe

Human Resources committee  Thanks very much for the opportunity to be here. We won't be taking 10 minutes, because we want to get into the discussion as well. The key reforms to the EI program that have been advocated by labour and anti-poverty groups are a reduction in the number of qualifying hours to

Human Resources committee  I'd love to say to you that in the studies we've done over the last number of years, things have gotten better for workers. They haven't. The percentages are still shamefully low in terms of who can access benefits, and obviously for women and for workers of colour, aboriginal wo

Human Resources committee  We think there are three things that need to happen with the EI system: the question of access, which we're dealing with there; the question of the duration of benefits, which Andrew has talked about; and the question of level of benefits, so the percentage of what people get. An

Human Resources committee  Well, obviously we do support all sorts of measures for employment, in particular for people from disenfranchised groups, but what we're talking about here are people who have jobs. Sometimes when you look at aboriginal people, women, workers of colour, and workers with disabilit

Human Resources committee  I don't think you can back that up for one moment.

Human Resources committee  Just a moment; just a moment. You know there's no evidence that says that if you allow people access to their EI benefits, they will then refuse to go to work for a crummy $291 a week. I mean, really, just take a look at it: if you have somebody who is offered a job that has re

Human Resources committee  I think the fact is that, first of all, the 360 hours is very important so all women all across this country have the access, because again we go back to how long it takes women to accumulate that time in temporary, part-time, and casual types of jobs. So the 360 hours in terms o

Human Resources committee  Can I remind people, too, that there is a really good study by Monica Townson and Kevin Hayes, which was done for Status of Women Canada, about the question of women and EI. It's an excellent study, and it gives you a lot of the background.

Human Resources committee  What's our recommendation? Our recommendations are these. First of all, you have to include access. We have to extend the duration of benefits and the level of benefits. We have to get back to a system that works for the unemployed during their times of unemployment, whether it