Thank you, and thank you for the opportunity to speak to the committee.
I'm here representing the YWCA Canada, as director of advocacy and public policy. For over 100 years, YWCA Canada has advocated for policies and programs that improve the lives of women and girls. As the country's oldest and largest women's multi-service agency, our 34-member association raised and spent over $190 million last year, providing services in communities in nine provinces and two territories.
Our perspective is grounded in first-hand knowledge of the life experience of tens of thousands of women, girls, and families who use our programs and services every year, from Victoria to Iqaluit to Halifax. With over 140 years of history, we are Canada's largest provider of shelter for women and children fleeing violence, and of employment services for women, and the second largest provider of child care.
We welcomed the government's June 2011 throne speech commitment to address the problem of violence against women and girls. Over the last decade, we have conducted extensive research on responses to violence against women and girls, culminating in our 2009 policy report, Life Beyond Shelter: Toward Coordinated Public Policies for Women's Safety and Violence Prevention, with recommendations for federal government action and documentation of promising practices across the country.
We urge the government to review the recommendations of Life Beyond Shelter, with a view to reducing violence against women, and the billions it costs Canadians every year. The strongest recommendation of this report is for policy coordination at all three levels of government. To implement the government's throne speech commitment, Budget 2012 should commit the federal government to leading a process, with input from the women's service sector, to coordinate pilot policies on violence against women at all three levels of government, to ensure women's safety.
Since the 1970s, Canada has developed a mature system of emergency shelters for women fleeing violence, largely violence in the home perpetrated by intimate partners. Initiated by women who set up safe houses in their communities, this community-based response in most of the country has evolved over three decades into a professional social service sector, accessible to women post-violence. However, research has identified crucial gaps in this system. To ensure that all Canadian women who need it have access to emergency shelter as protection from violence, the system needs further development for rural women, women in the northern territories, women with disabilities, and it needs improved cultural and language competency in service provision.
In addition, the housing crisis in all three northern territories profoundly impacts women with children who are trying to escape violence. Housing in the three northern territories has been seriously disadvantaged by the lack of federal social housing funding. Budget 2012 should initiate an annual grant fund administered by Status of Women Canada to address the identified gaps in provision of emergency shelter to women fleeing violence.
YWCA Canada continues to encourage the federal government to take steps to ensure access to child care services for all families that seek it. More than 30 years of uninterrupted increases in women's employment has given Canada a labour force that is virtually gender-balanced, the result of an incremental, but relentless upward trend in women's employment since 1976, which has doubled the number of women employed in Canada. The employment rate of women with children has followed a similar upward trend, from a 27.6% employment rate for women with infants and toddlers in 1976 to 64.4% in 2009.