Thank you very much.
I was able to prepare a report, which I hope has made its way to you. I'd like to say thank you to the translators, who I understand were able to get to it, so merci aux traducteurs.
While I fully endorse the larger programs that have been laid out by my co-presenters today, I'd like to give you a very specific argument that you ought to want to tackle both children's and women's poverty and to recommend that early learning and child care services be a part of the solution to that.
Here in Manitoba, Statistics Canada data show us that almost 19% of children live below the before-tax LICO, and in some regions of Winnipeg the poverty rate is even higher. Google Maps will tell you that just 3.5 kilometres from this hotel you'll find the Daniel McIntyre neighbourhood, and there you'll find the incidence of low income at over 27%. In Mynarski, which is just six and a half kilometres from the hotel, the low-income rate is 30%. This means, as my colleagues have demonstrated, that there is intense spatialized poverty in Winnipeg and it has terrible consequences for children and for families. There are of course obvious human rights concerns when a country as wealthy as Canada has such persistently high rates of poverty and such intense pockets of such deep poverty.
You will know, of course, that children are poor because their families and mothers are poor, because they live in poor families. And work is not always the solution for such poor families. Close to half of low-income children have at least one parent who is in the labour force full time. When jobs are poorly paid and costs are high, then employment is often the cause of family poverty rather than its solution. Data show us that rates of working poor parents have been increasing over recent years rather than diminishing.
Where children are raised by single parents, the parent is most likely a mother. Women in Canada face persistent discrimination, labour force discrimination being one of the worst instances of this, and one of the key obstacles is a stubbornly persistent wage gap. In 2003 Canadian women working full time, full year, earned only 71% of what men working full time, full year, earned, and compared to male colleagues, women are far more likely to lose time at work because of personal or family responsibilities, to work part time, and to work less.
It's important to stress that where child care services are available they can begin to mitigate some of this cost. Where services are high quality and widely available at a low cost, maternal employment will increase. I hope you are familiar with the case of Quebec. Quebec began implementing its very ambitious early childhood care and education program over 10 years ago, and economists have found that the new child care system has had a large and statistically significant impact on the labour supply of Quebec mothers with pre-school children. The proportion of employed mothers now in two-parent families increased by 21% since the provincial child care program began. It is more than double the national average. This tells us that women will work where services are available.
Moreover, recent analysis of the cost of the Quebec program calculated that approximately 40% of the annual operating expenses has been recouped through the increased taxes paid by parents, so the child care program goes a long way toward paying for itself directly.
You will know that Canadian families have changed and that working mothers are now the dominant form of families in Canada, and yet we fail to accommodate working families with the kinds of programs that they need. The gap between the rich and poor widens, and despite increased rates of women's employment, we see that, on average, for every dollar that families in the poorest 10% of Canada earn, families in the richest 10% earn more. This gap is an enormous problem.
To put it together, we find action is needed. It is almost 40 years since the Royal Commission on the Status of Women made its groundbreaking report, and yet women remain disadvantaged on every social index in Canada, and aboriginal women bear an even greater burden. I hope the grief of stolen, murdered, and missing aboriginal sisters is weighing heavily on your minds. Canada has international commitments to gender equality as well as to children's equality that it fails to meet. I think here particularly of CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, and I would urge you to step up to these.
I have two recommendations for you. In recognition that the long-term prosperity and the future of Canada is severely compromised by women's and children's poverty and in recognition that poverty impairs the full social inclusion of poor children and women, I'll recommend two specific actions for you.
The first is that Canada should immediately commit to spending 1% of its GDP on early learning and care services. These funds should be directed to supply side development, aiming to build a high-quality, developmentally appropriate, and inclusive national early learning and care program, knowing that this will bring benefits for all children, and especially for children living in poverty.
Second, Canada should immediately affirm its domestic and international commitments to full gender equality, because this directly impacts on poverty. This would require, I suggest, restoring the equality language in all Status of Women Canada policies, practices, and projects; reversing the cuts to Status of Women budgets; and increasing the capacity of Status of Women and other gender-equality-seeking organizations to advocate for women's equality.
Thank you.