Thank you very much.
The acronym OCASI stands for the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants. We don't have a French name for the moment, but that's a matter of time.
We are an organization of provincial federations with approximately 190 members. These are community organizations serving immigrants and refugees in Ontario. They are highly diverse organizations, which work with immigrant women, certain communities of specific national origins and faith-based organizations. In fact, it's quite a diversified network.
We are not tax experts, but we have seen that the tax reform measures from previous years have had an impact on the populations that we serve and represent. In general, given the poverty afflicting many immigrants and refugees, a good number of the measures and changes made to the tax system in previous years have provided no benefits for these persons.
So in today's presentation, I would like, somewhat as in the text we submitted in advance, to establish the connection between this tax system reform and the need for a Canada-wide anti-poverty strategy. I would also like to establish the connection between the issue of poverty in Canada and discrimination based on race and gender or, as it is called more officially, gender differences.
I draw your attention to page 3 of our brief, where we talk about modern labour market realities in Canada. The fact is that a growing percentage of the present labour market fall into employment categories such as under-employment and unstable employment. This quest for flexibility in labour markets was a strategy used by employers to shirk their responsibilities in labour hiring cost areas. There are studies that outline this situation and establish the fact that immigrants are harder hit by the bad effects of this situation.
I also draw your attention to the study by the Workers' Action Centre of Toronto, to which we refer in footnote 5. What are the effects of these under-employment and unstable employment practices, under which workers have no rights? This is a lack of any right to form a union: no right to conduct collective bargaining, no access to employment insurance, no paid vacation, no coverage for parental leave, no recourse against employers' abuse of power, including against unfair dismissal.
In terms of the link between poverty and race and gender issues in Canada, and the need for this committee to look at that very closely, like any other policy-makers or legislators in Canada, the production and reproduction of poverty are not neutral processes that equally affect the members of different groups of residents in Canada. In this country today, race informs who is most probably going to get cut in the shifting sands of poverty, and gender informs that as well.
The migrant experience, the immigrant experience, is an experience very often profoundly marked by disempowerment and abuses, and it is informed by the combination of issues of race and gender, and this combination yields the disproportionately racialized and effeminized face of Canada's poor today.
I would like to quickly refer to the very well-known studies by Michael Ornstein and Grace-Edward Galabuzi on these matters, and as well, our most recent project, which is called the Colour of Poverty Campaign, of which OCASI is a part with several other community groups, which has produced a series of fact sheets detailing with statistics the situation of poverty and race in Canada. These are accessible on the Internet at colourofpoverty.ca and they are, again, very useful for policy-makers, policy analysts, and legislators.
Over the last 15 years--and the census results that were published just yesterday continue to confirm this--immigrants to Canada have been arriving increasingly from countries in the global south, and thus they are increasingly members of racialized communities and face related forms of injustice.
Earlier this year, Statistics Canada released a study depicting the chronic low income and low-income dynamics among recent immigrants. There's also a study by Evangelia Tastsoglou and Valerie Preston that looks specifically at the situation of immigrant women. The results are that immigrant women are less likely to participate in the paid labour force than Canadian-born women. Immigrant women are more likely than Canadian-born women, and both immigrant men and Canadian-born men, to be unemployed. Among full-time workers, immigrant women have the lowest income, and racialized immigrant women make 20% less money than non-racialized immigrant women, that is, white immigrant women. This does not account for refugee women, who were not part of this study.
Thank you.