Good morning. On behalf of the 10,000 members of the Canadian Federation of University Women, I wish to thank you for this opportunity to present CFUW views.
CFUW is a non-partisan, self-funded organization of graduate women and students in 118 clubs across this country. We feel it is extremely important that the committee has chosen to study the issue of deep and persistent poverty within a land that is both abundant and prosperous. Today I would like to speak about poverty's connection to gender.
Women form the majority of the poor in Canada. One in seven, roughly, or 2.4 million Canadian women were living in poverty in 2004. Poverty affects women differently based on many factors. It's a complex issue that includes age, employment, race, sexual orientation, and the like.
I would like to share with you an excerpt from a 2005 edition of the “Women and Poverty” fact sheet from the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women. It says:
A single mother of one child in Ontario receives $957 per month of assistance before deductions. Then she has to spend $675 on rent, $200 on groceries, and has $82 left to pay bills (electricity, telephone, heat), laundry, transportation, school needs for her son.... She has to explain to her son why he can’t go on school trips like the other kids, why he is teased for being dressed in old third-hand clothes, why he can’t go to a friend’s birthday party because there’s no money for a little gift, why he can’t participate in hot dog day at school because it costs money, why the milk tastes different because she’s had to water it down, why by the end of the month they have to go down to the food bank because there’s nothing left to eat. She has to cope with well-meaning higher income individuals who give her suggestions like buying in bulk when she has neither a car nor the financial means to buy large quantities. All of a sudden, how she spends her money and who she dates becomes everybody’s business, and she is criticized if she splurges on a treat to relieve her depression or make her child happy. Being poor limits your choices and is not simply a matter of bad budgeting. Managing on a very low income is like a 7-day-a-week job from which there is no vacation or relief. Poverty grinds you down, body and soul.
This type of grinding poverty disproportionately affects women in Canada. In 2006 lone-parent families headed by women had median earnings of $30,958. In contrast, their male counterparts had median earnings of $47,943. With the number of female-headed families in Canada topping one million, this leads to disparity and drives home the reality that poverty that affects women inescapably affects children.
The Canadian Federation of University Women works at the international, national, provincial, and local levels to encourage elected representatives to stand up for the interests of women and girls. In our 90-year history the issue of poverty has always been with us. We have found, because of this long engagement, band-aid solutions do not work. The issue is complex, it is interconnected, and by this it makes certain groups of women more vulnerable to deep and persistent poverty than other groups.
Women in Canada continue to face a persistent wage gap, which has narrowed little since the 1980s. Today, full-time working women earn 71¢ for every dollar earned by men. Part-time and seasonal workers earn 54¢, women of colour earn 38¢, and aboriginal women a mere 46% of what men are paid.
The trend is worse and the gap is wider for women with post-secondary education. In 1985, university-educated women earned 75% of what men earned, a figure that had dropped to 68% by 2005.
This pay inequity has far-reaching consequences, such as smaller maternity and parental benefits and the greater likelihood of poverty in old age due to reduced CPP and QPP benefits.
CFUW believes that there is already a clear framework in existence to address pay inequity through proactive legislation by the federal government. The 2004 pay equity task force report recommends adopting a new stand-alone pay equity law that will cover women as well as workers of colour, aboriginal workers, and workers with disabilities. The recommendations outlined in the report are comprehensive, provide a clear way forward, and are useful models for proactive pay equity in Ontario and Quebec to build upon. This report has yet to be implemented by any government, and the recent inclusion of the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act in the budget implementation bill risks weakening what little recourse women currently have to pay equity.
High-quality, accessible child care is another important key to getting out of poverty, essential to support employment and learning, a strategy that is critical to women's equality, an important element of reconciliation with our aboriginal peoples, and a key to social inclusion for newcomers in Canada. In spite of this, Canada is the lowest spender on early childhood education of any country of the OECD and ranks last in international assessments of access to and quality of early childhood education and care.
The federal government must address this fundamental building block of poverty reduction through creating a national not-for-profit child care system. This process could begin with the restoration of multi-year federal funding to the provinces through dedicated capital transfers. This money should go to community-based child care services, so that the provinces and territories can begin to build this critical child care assistance.
Standards of care and services among the provinces and territories and between Canada and other so-called advanced countries, including the G8, call out for vigorous and broadly based action.
Currently, employment insurance is an essential program that allows unemployed women to support themselves and their families while they search for a new job. Unemployment benefits are spent on necessities and, when they are provided in adequate amounts, can prevent families from falling into poverty following job loss.
However, the EI program rules exclude or unfairly penalize women because they fail to take into account how women's work patterns differ from men's. While the great majority of adult women engage in paid work, their non-standard patterns of work exclude many from EI benefits, as do periods of time spent away from work while caring for children or others. These responsibilities make it even more difficult for women to qualify. After a two-year absence from paid work, the entrance requirement jumps from between 420 and 700 hours to 910 work hours, or more than six months of full-time work. Consequently, in 2004 only 32% of unemployed women qualified for regular EI benefits, compared with 40% of men who were unemployed.
The gap is much bigger when it comes to average benefits. In 2006-07 the average benefit for women was $298 per week, compared with $360 for men. Women qualify for shorter periods, on average. In 2005-06, 30% of women exhausted their regular benefits, compared with 26% of men. Most telling is the fact that only about one-third of the total dollar amount of regular EI benefits is paid to women, though women now participate in the paid labour force at almost the same rate as men.
CFW is strongly in favour of making three changes to the EI program: a cut-off requirement of 360 hours of work across the country to enable more women to qualify, should they be laid off from part-time or casual work; benefits for up to 50 weeks, so that fewer unemployed workers exhaust a claim; higher weekly benefits, based on the best 12 weeks of earning before lay-off. These changes to the EI program represent critical steps to prevent temporary job loss from becoming a sentence of lifetime poverty.
In closing, I would like to draw the committee's attention to the fact that in its response to Canada's May 2006 periodic report, the United Nations' Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights noted the absence of any factors or difficulties preventing Canada from doing what it needs to do to end poverty. The question, therefore, of ending poverty is not one of resources but rather of priorities and political will.
On behalf of the membership of the Canadian Federation of University Women, I urge you to consider these recommendations to alleviate poverty as it affects so many women in Canada.
Thank you for this opportunity to present.