Thank you.
Good afternoon, and thank you for the invitation to appear before the committee.
As the country's oldest and largest women's multi-service organization, with member associations serving women and girls in nine provinces and two territories, YWCA Canada strongly recommends that the federal government adopt gender budget analysis in the federal budgetary process as a fundamental step at the earliest possible stage of budget development. This process will assess the impact of policies based on gender and permit the government to correct for gender bias.
Supporting women, girls, and families requires adopting policies that work for women, policies based on women's present-day lived realities that include high workforce participation rates for women; a 64% employment rate for women with infants and toddlers; and two-thirds of mothers with a youngest child in preschool or kindergarten; women comprising the majority of university graduates; women continuing to provide the majority of child care; and women and girls continuing to face violence on a daily basis.
YWCA Canada recommends the following policies to support women, girls, and families: a national child care system to improve women's access to work through early childhood education; national leadership on violence against women to improve health and well-being; reducing and preventing women's homelessness to improve health and well-being; and increasing the national child benefit to reduce poverty.
Quebec's low-cost, broad-based child care system—the only one in Canada—confirms that child care is a social policy that addresses poverty among women by dramatically increasing their access to employment. As advocates have said for years, this is a highly effective anti-poverty tool.
Based on the Quebec experience, it is hard to overstate the positive impact of widespread access to low-cost child care on women raising children on their own.
Between 1996, when low-cost child care was introduced in Quebec, and 2008, a total of 69,700 additional mothers joined the workforce; employment rates for mothers with children under the age of six increased 22%; the number of single mothers on social assistance was reduced by more than half, from 99,000 to 45,000; the after-tax median income of single mothers rose by a startling 81%; relative poverty rates for single parent families headed by women declined from 36% to 22%, from more than a third to less than a quarter; and the GDP rose $5.1 billion, or 1.7%.
Quebec's investment in low-cost child care generates $104 for that provincial government for every $100 invested, and $43 for the federal government without any federal investment in the program. Child care is a revenue positive program.
The failure of governments across this country to develop low-cost child care shows gender bias on a dramatic scale. The savings and the benefits are immense.
As the country's largest single provider of shelter for women facing violence, YWCA Canada urges the federal government to lead policy coordination on violence against women at all three levels of government by establishing federal-provincial-municipal tables with input from violence support services and other relevant sectors. Canada needs a national action plan on violence against women that will set national standards for prevention, support services, legal services, and access to justice and crucial social policies, such as safe, affordable housing.
Domestic violence and sexual assault cost our country $334 per Canadian each year. The federal government currently spends $2.70 per capita.
Why do we say that Canadians should encourage the federal government to initiate a national inquiry on missing and murdered indigenous women without further delay, in addition to increasing direct action responses? A national inquiry on missing and murdered indigenous women has the potential to become a public conversation that can change deep-seated attitudes in Canada—and deep-seated change is very much needed.
YWCA Canada welcomed the federal government's 2011 throne speech commitment to address the problem of violence against women and girls. We continue to wait for effective fulfillment of this promise.
Of 210,000 people estimated to be homeless in Canada almost half of them, some 103,000, are women. Violence and poverty are the major drivers of women's homelessness. Four out of ten women leaving Canada's emergency shelters for women fleeing violence do not know where they will live. Women's homelessness tends not to be visible. The streets are not safe for women, and women hide the fact that they are homeless.
The wholesale shift of major funding from the previous homelessness partnering secretariat to the Housing First model needs to be accompanied by a gender-based analysis and resulting strategy to ensure the model is adapted to fit women's homelessness.
The federal government should streamline tax system supports for families into a single increased national child benefit, with a maximum of $5,400 a year, and absorb the universal child benefit into the NCB. Resources now directed to the regressive child tax and child's fitness tax credits should also be redirected to the NCB. With these adjustments, the cost of raising the maximum NCB to $5,400 a year would be reduced to $174 million annually.