I'd like to thank the committee for inviting me to speak today.
Today men and women in Canada have equal levels of education, ambition, and capacity. However, they are treated differently within our economy and our society. Men and women work in different occupations, at different rates of pay, for different numbers of hours, and they perform different amounts of unpaid work in the home. Women, for the first time since we have been measuring, are now more likely than men to be victims of a violent crime.
We need policies that address those differences. If the 2018 federal budget is going to work for men and women, then it needs to invest in the following.
Invest equally in the sectors where men work and the sectors where women work. Invest in occupations where women earn a living wage. That includes, for example, home care workers, where the government is making a significant investment. Median income for home care workers, according to the last census, fell below the low-income measure—the poverty line—for the same year. The government needs to support part-time workers, 67% of whom are women; shift the balance of unpaid care work, because women are still putting in an extra 10 hours a week; and invest in direct funding for women's organizations.
I would be very happy to speak to all of these points in more detail, and I do as well in the written brief that I have submitted. I am going to focus my remarks right now on the last of these recommendations, which is funding women's organizations.
I'd like to speak personally for a moment. I'm in my third year of cancer treatment. I don't know how many more budgets I have to look forward to—I know this isn't the make-a-wish committee—but if I can convince you to take one action to make one change that has the power to change lives and indeed to save lives, while I still have energy to harass you, it is this: invest in women's organizations.
These organizations are in all of your communities. They are organizations like Anderson House in Prince Edward Island, a women's shelter that reaches over 450 families each year; Calacs Estrie, which supports survivors of sexual assault in the Sherbrooke region; and the Calgary Immigrant Women's Association, which has helped over 80,000 women find jobs and make new lives for themselves in Canada.
They are among the most underfunded organizations in the non-profit sector in Canada, yet the research is clear. They are the single most effective means to building better public policy and better lives for women.
To give you an example of what some of that research has shown us, when the Dutch government invested $100 million in a gender equality fund, their investments in local women's organizations reshaped public policy at the national level in 46 countries, influenced local governments in over 38 regions, and changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of women.
When our own government invested in women's funds abroad, they found, according to their own external evaluation, that the women's fund itself is the most successful mechanism we have found for empowering women.
In Canada, according to the federal government's own estimates, violence against women costs our economy $12 billion annually. That works out to about $415 per capita. It puts the economic impact of violence against women on a par with the economic cost of smoking and the use of illegal drugs, yet federal per capita spending on violence against women across departments and agencies, by my best estimate, is approximately $5 per capita.
If we look at the primary federal mechanism we have that provides direct funding to women's organizations as its primary mandate—that's the women's program that's part of Status of Women—their budget represents less than one one-hundredth of one per cent of total federal program spending. It has done so for the last decade. To put that another way, direct federal funding through the women's program clocks in at about a buck a woman.
Women's organizations know how to save lives. We aren't giving them the resources they need to do it. It's like our having a pill that's going to cure cancer and it costs $500, and we're giving everyone 50¢ and saying, “Good luck with that. Please report quarterly.”
Given the urgency of the work these organizations do, given the demonstrable benefit of their work to our communities and our lives, and given the sincerity and the commitment of the women who run them, I find it baffling that we are so unwilling to support them.
It has occurred to me that, after decades of neglect, perhaps fundamentally at some unconscious level we just don't trust women with money. So prove me wrong. Show Canadians that this is a government willing to support the organizations that are delivering dignity and security to women in their communities. Show Canadians that growth and productivity isn't just an abstraction but a means to put resources in the hands of those who want to help each other have a better life. Show Canadians that the future really is feminist.
Thank you.