Absolutely. Those are great questions, but big questions for four minutes.
With respect to the child care issue, I can speak from my focus in B.C. I think it's a good case study for how things are working. In large part here, child care has been left to the private market, and it is largely unaffordable for families, even middle-income families. The median cost of child care right now is between $1,200 to $1,300 a month. It's the second-biggest cost for families after housing. When I interview women about their individual experiences, I can see how that cost trickles down into their financial insecurity in so many ways. We know that a targeted subsidy system in B.C. is not addressing those needs.
We have a system in B.C. that is intended to help people afford child care. It's failing because the subsidies are not high enough to meet the escalating costs of child care, so there are huge gaps, even for people living in deep poverty. For example, someone on income assistance who's a single parent of one child and has an income of $900 a month would maybe be left with $300 or $400 in child care costs after a full child care subsidy. It's simply unattainable for people. Also, the caps are too low. The income threshold at which you're no longer able to get a subsidy simply isn't working. Again, I think this is largely a product of it being a piecemeal approach.
I will say there is one very new program in B.C. It is a piecemeal program, but its beginnings show some real promise. It's called the single parent employment initiative. It's for families on income assistance, and it's targeted at single-parent families. The income assistance system pays the full cost of child care as well as tuition costs for 12-month education programs. If the single parent is able to get employment after those 12 months, the system continues to pay the full cost of child care, with no cap, for 12 months after that. We see a real recognition of the fact that the cost of child care is a huge obstacle to particularly single-parent families getting out of poverty. Addressing those full costs of care is key to helping those families get some financial relief to allow them to retrain and work on their independence.
With respect to the flow of funds, in general, flowing funding without a gendered lens often leads to targeted funding for things like homeless shelters, which are obviously very necessary. However, this type of flowing funding doesn't meet the particular needs of women, and it doesn't address the feminization of poverty. I know this is a long-term goal and there have been comments about this being a really progressive realization, but I think part of what needs to happen is that we move away from these practical, real “reaching for immediate implementation” steps we can take. Instead, we need to look at our long-term human rights obligations and figure out a long-term plan to start working towards them. One of those things is to review federal transfers and to potentially attach conditions to make sure that, by using a human rights lens and a gendered lens, the needs of women in poverty are being met.