Thank you.
Good afternoon, fellow members of the panel and honourable members of the Standing Committee on Finance. We thank you for the invitation to appear here before you today.
Once again, my name is Anjum Sultana, and I am the manager of policy and strategic communications at the YWCA Canada. We are the nation's oldest and largest women-serving organization. For nearly 150 years we have been working with women and girls and their families at critical turning points in their lives and providing them with the necessary services and resources to thrive and succeed.
Last week on November 1, over 100 members of the YWCA Canada were here on Parliament Hill and met with over 65 members of your fellow parliamentarians. We advocated for women's economic security. Today we will comment on the contents of Bill C-86. We are encouraged by many of the developments that have occurred in this particular bill, because we see that there is an opportunity to advance women's economic security here in the country.
What we also wanted to share was that we currently work in nine provinces and two territories, and we work with over 330,000 women and girls every year. We're anticipating that by 2020, our 150-year anniversary, we will be working also in our tenth province, which is Prince Edward Island.
What we want to do today is talk about three particular divisions of part 4 of Bill C-86, in particular division 9 of part 4, which pertains to the Canadian gender budgeting act to promote gender equality and inclusiveness by taking gender and diversity into consideration in the budget process. We would encourage, as others have testified to this committee before, that to follow this landmark legislation, it would be critical to ensure that as future standing committees on finance consider pre-budget consultations, there be a target of gender parity. Specifically, others have testified before this committee to the importance of ensuring that at least 15% of future witnesses to this committee be from feminist and women-serving organizations.
The Canadian gender budgeting act marks an important milestone that can be further enhanced by ensuring that at least 15% of the witnesses to this committee come from feminist and women-serving organizations to truly ensure that women's voices are heard in the budget-making process as well as future decision-making processes.
We're also pleased to see inclusion in this bill of division 14 of part 4, which enacts the pay equity act, a call that women-serving organizations have been pushing for for many years, including colleagues from the Equal Pay Coalition, Janet Borowy and Fay Faraday, who appeared before this committee earlier for its consideration of Bill C-86. We fully support their recommendations, and in our brief to this committee we will delineate the specific recommendations, but we fully recommend their calls.
One that we want to draw your attention to is the specific point around the “Purpose” clause, clause 2, which has current language around ensuring that “the diverse needs of employers” are kept in mind. We would encourage that this be deleted, because what we have seen is that this undermines women's experiences in the labour workforce and also undermines the act's purpose and intent of addressing systemic gender bias and discrimination.
We were also pleased to see that in part 4 of this bill, division 18 was the piece of legislation to enact the department for women and gender equality. We were pleased to see that there were many other considerations of diverse social locations and diversities that were embedded in this particular piece of Bill C-86.
We would encourage that there be further inclusion of another identity, which is citizenship. We saw that there was indication that there was an understanding that the diverse experiences of women that are complicated by different aspects of social location such as age, ethnic origin and sexual orientation were considered. We would also encourage that citizenship be another addition to that list. This is consistent with other provincial human rights codes such as Ontario's, which includes citizenship.
Finally, we wholeheartedly agree and support the recommendations of our colleagues at the Canadian Labour Congress with respect to recommendations around leave. We see this in the over 330,000 women we serve every year, many of whom are from working class backgrounds and experience challenges in accessing their entitlement. We would encourage that these recommendations put forward by the Canadian Labour Congress also be considered.
I'd like to thank you again for your attention. We look forward to any questions that you might have.
Thank you.