Maybe I should explain that acronym. It stands for the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, which Canada has been a signatory to since 1981. The B.C. CEDAW group is a coalition of women's and human rights organizations in British Columbia dedicated to ensuring that Canada and B.C. are living up to the commitments we made in that particular convention to women and girls.
I want to thank the members of the committee for agreeing to hear Vancouver Rape Relief and Justice for Girls and the B.C. CEDAW group this morning. We had some back-and-forth discussion about this. We were not on the list, and we were added at the last minute. We appreciate your doing that. We were consternated to find that on the list, as it was before we made some interventions, there were no women's groups at all. We are also very disturbed that as far as we could see, before we were added to it, the list for the whole country had one or perhaps two women's groups in total.
This is a big concern for us, because women have a lot to say about the budget and a lot of interest in it. Any budget greatly affects women, and we think we should have an equal say in how this budget gets constructed.
We're also very aware of the under-representation of women among the members of Parliament and the fact that there's only one woman on this committee. I'm very glad that Ms. Block is here and that Cathy McLeod and Dona Cadman are with her today. We take comfort from that. It's extremely important to us.
I would suggest, however, considering the general under-representation of women so far in this conversation, that the committee should consider having a special session of pre-budget consultations in Ottawa with women's organizations and women experts on economics and tax policy as part of the preparation of its report.
The first thing I want to say is that we are very concerned about whether deficit reduction strategies at this particular time will result in more downloading of social costs to women. That has certainly been the pattern we have seen since 1995. In the name of deficit reduction, there has been a great deal of cutting of social programs and cutting of transfers from the federal government to the provinces and territories for social programs. We are still suffering from the impact of the erosion of social programs and services under that particular strategy in 1995. We urge you and plead with you not to make things worse through whatever deficit reduction strategies you now feel you're going to consider. It's extraordinarily important to understand the impact that the erosion of social programs has had on women and girls in this country and to not make things worse but of course, instead, to make things better.
I want to point out to you that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in its 2008 note on Canada says that we are distributing wealth upwards and that poverty rates have increased in Canada over the last decade. It says that inequality of household income increased significantly and that poverty increased for all age groups. The OECD also noted that taxes and transfers do not reduce inequality in Canada as much as in other OECD countries or as much as they previously did in this country.
So I would suggest to you there's a profound inequality at work in how we're dealing with the distribution of income in Canada right now. It has a very serious impact on the women and the children of this country. It has an impact on everyone, but it has an impact on women and children in a particular way because it's layered on top of inequality in employment, which is, I'm sorry to say, still the state of affairs for women.
I want to say just a word about two particular things in this province. One is social assistance. It has been mentioned by my colleagues, but social assistance rates here and across the country are so low that the people who are forced to live at those rates cannot feed and shelter themselves adequately. It has profound effects on the gender equality of women who, as has been said, can't remove themselves from often violent situations.
The second thing is civil legal aid; that is, legal aid especially for family law matters. In this province women have virtually no access to it. That means that in many situations where they are in difficult family disputes, they are ending up representing themselves.
These two things that I'm talking about are programs and services that are ostensibly covered under the Canada social transfer; that is, in that transfer from the federal government to the provinces they are supposed to be included in there. We are asking for adequate funds to ensure that these things are truly adequate and support women properly. We're asking for designations inside the funds for those particular things.
Thank you.