Human Resources Committee on June 4th, 2020

[Paulette Senior, President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Women's Foundation]

Thank you very much.

My name is Paulette Senior. I'm the president and CEO of the Canadian Women’s Foundation. I'm pleased to be presenting to you today.

The Canadian Women’s Foundation is Canada’s only national public foundation for women and girls and one of the 10 largest women’s foundations in the world. In our over three decades now that we've been around, we've been granting and doing work that has been focused on moving women out of poverty and out of violence and into safety and confidence.

Thank you for the invitation to appear before the committee this afternoon to discuss the urgent question of the government’s pandemic response. I say “urgent” because of the mission of the Canadian Women’s Foundation, which is “transformative change in the lives of women and girls in Canada”, and the COVID-19 pandemic has heavily impacted women. Women’s safety, livelihoods and well-being have all been put at risk, most severely for women from communities that are marginalized by systemic discrimination. The pandemic has shone a penetrating light on gender-based violence, women’s job losses, care work and the need for child care.

The federal government has taken many helpful steps to date. As the economy reopens, federal investments will be crucial to women’s safety, economic security and well-being, and gender equality. Recovery investments must include all women, especially those facing deep systemic discrimination, and continue to advance equality gains. Achieving that will require applying an inclusive gender-based analysis with an intersectional lens to the process of designing government recovery investments.

More than 60% of the one million jobs lost in March were lost by women. April employment figures showed a sharp increase in men’s unemployment as construction and non-essential manufacturing halted, but by the end of that month, women had still experienced greater losses, as 32% of women and 29% of men had lost their jobs or the majority of their work hours.

Those job losses are highly concentrated among the lowest earners. For women earning $16 an hour or less—a highly racialized population—job losses in February to April were over 50%. The top 10%, earning $48 an hour or more, experienced only a 1% loss of jobs, and women lost all of those. Overall, women earning the lowest 20% of wages experienced job loss at 50 times the rate of top earners. This is the type of granular data revealed by the intersectional gender-based analysis needed to support recovery investments.

The majority of women workers, about 56% or so, are employed in occupations grouped as what we call the “five Cs”: caring, clerical, catering, cashiering and cleaning. These jobs are largely either care work directly involved in pandemic response or retail work with an uncertain return-to-work date. How much of the job loss experienced by women will be long term remains to be seen, but it will be significant and likely focused in retail.

This is no time for shovel-ready physical infrastructure projects employing a workforce that is 90% men. Construction has reopened in much of the country, and tomorrow’s employment numbers will likely to reflect that. It is time to implement the social infrastructure that supports women’s return to work.

Quick implementation of the Canada emergency response benefit has been a helpful income support strategy for those who can access it, but a plan is needed for women whose employers cannot reopen after 16 weeks and who are facing long-term unemployment. Employment strategies need an intersectional gender-based analysis and need to address the existing structural issues—like the wage gap—exacerbated by the pandemic. The federal government needs to lead a process to implement the announced 10 paid sick days and to continue to emphasize income supports.

Women—largely black and racialized women—predominate in the care sector in providing front-line support and containing COVID-19, all too often from precarious part-time jobs in high-risk conditions and without paid sick days. Women make up as much as 90% of personal support workers working in long-term care homes and providing home care in the community. More than 65% of—

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

I'm sorry, Mr. Chair—I can't hear the interpretation right now.

I am so sorry to interrupt Ms. Senior.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Don't apologize—it's appropriate to flag the problem.

Just hold for one minute there, Ms. Senior.

Madam Clerk, is there a problem with interpretation? Can it be fixed?

[The Clerk of the Committee, Ms. Marie-France Lafleur]

Yes, just give me one minute. I'll confirm with our tech team.

I'm being told that it's working now.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Ms. Larouche, was there just a break in the flow, or did you miss the whole intervention?

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

I only missed the last sentence. I heard the rest. I must have missed a sentence or two.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Perfect, thank you.

The floor is yours, Ms. Senior.

It appears that the translation stopped working just a few sentences before I intervened. Please go back a couple of sentences.

Don't worry; your time won't be compromised.

[Paulette Senior]

Thanks. I appreciate that.

More than 65% of cleaners working in hospitals, schools and office buildings are women. Much cleaning work, now perceived as essential, has long been precarious: part-time, low-paid, often subcontracted work, lacking job protections, paid sick leave or extended health benefits. Pandemic outbreaks in LTC—which harm residents, staff and their families and can lead to community outbreaks—can be traced to some of these ongoing issues. Where full-time jobs are not available, PSWs may work multiple part-time positions at different locations to compensate, which increases the risk of spreading infection from one care facility to another.

With regard to the government response, the federal government needs to ensure a stable, full-time, long-term care workforce, with sufficient protections—physical and job—to provide care and maintain their well-being. That will benefit both the workforce and the residents, who are mostly women, and the community at large. This includes working with the provinces and territories to ensure that employment standards are sufficient and fully enforced, including a sufficient supply of PPE and honouring refusals of unsafe work; to ensure full-time positions at salary levels above a living wage; and to ensure a full, open-ended review of the structure, management and ownership of long-term care, keeping in focus the women who work and live in LTC facilities.

The closure of child care centres and schools placed a triple burden on many mothers doing full-time jobs from home and managing both children and household tasks. The pandemic has highlighted that child care is now integral to the community. Without it, Canada doesn't work. Child care has been revealed as an essential service that cannot be shuttered. Provinces that closed all child care centres quickly reopened some to accommodate workers considered essential during the pandemic. However, the child care sector is fragmented and underfunded, much of it not stable enough to withstand the drop in parent-fee revenue resulting from pandemic closures.

Many centres are not committed to reopening. While the need for physical distancing changes the economics of child care, it remains essential to economic reopening and to gender equality. The federal government needs to ensure that funding is in place to safely reopen the child care sector at pre-pandemic levels of service and to continue to expand until universal access to affordable child care is achieved. The bilateral process with provinces and territories needs to move to a near horizon of three or five years.

As the lockdown increased the risk of domestic violence and decreased women's ability to leave abusive homes for the safety of women's shelters, it highlighted the importance of the violence prevention sector. The Canadian Women's Foundation welcomed the federal government's announcement of $50 million to assist women's shelters and sexual assault centres with their pandemic responses. We partnered with Women and Gender Equality to distribute some of those funds to sexual assault centres and broader gender-based violence organizations. In the process, we heard once again about the extent of need.

As the executive director of one busy sexual assault centre, describing their transition to working remotely, said, “We had to invest in a phone system as ours was a donation from 1980. We didn't have funds for PPE for staff and volunteers accompanying women to hospitals, police and doctors...the funding helped us purchase PPE…a phone system, and food for some clients. As much as I'm grateful for the 25k; I must be honest with you, it's not enough. …we need to invest in a web chat system for youth asking to text… we had to do home visits as we fear for some clients' lives and despite reporting to police, nothing has been done. We are running out of PPE…Volunteers have begun to show signs of burn out and we are averaging 60-80 crisis calls a day.”

The federal government needs to develop and implement a well-funded national action plan on violence against women and gender-based violence that recognizes this work as essential to society and gender equality.

By “well-funded”, we mean commensurate with the multi-billion-dollar annual cost of violence. The federal government also needs to complete development and start implementation of a national action plan to address violence against indigenous women and girls without further delay.

To summarize, this is not the time for small asks. The pandemic has shone a very bright light on deep fault lines of inequality in Canadian society. The government's response needs to be similarly deep. The structural change outlined will respond to needs of women marginalized by systemic discrimination: black and racialized women; first nations, Métis and Inuit women; women with disabilities; and LGBTQ2S and gender non-conforming people. It will strengthen our social systems to provide sufficient care in times of stress, including for an aging population that is largely women, and continue to advance gender equality.

Thank you for your time and attention. I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you, Ms. Senior.

We're going to begin with questions and/or motions.

I'll recognize Mrs. Kusie from the Conservatives.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Again, I want to move my motion, which I had put forward previously. Can I dispense? Everyone has the motion, or I can read it:

That, in the context of its study to the government response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development, and the Status of Persons with Disabilities send for the following documents to be provided by the Government by June 30, 2020.

1) All briefing notes, memorandums, emails, guidance and documents related to the Canada Emergency Response Benefit between March 1, 2020 and May 28, 2020.

2) All briefing notes, memorandums, emails and documents related to the eligibility requirements for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit between March 1, 2020 and May 28, 2020.

3) All briefing notes, memorandums, emails and documents related to potential fraudulent cases of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit between March 1, 2020 and May 28, 2020.

4) All legal opinions sent to the government by briefing notes, email, documents or other forms of communication related to the Canada Emergency Response Benefit between March 1, 2020 and May 28, 2020.

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you very much, Mrs. Kusie.

Just to advise the witnesses, the motion is in order and it is appropriate for the committee to deal with it, so please bear with us.

To my colleagues on the committee, if you wish to speak on the motion, please use the “Raise Hand” function, and I'll develop a speaking list.

I see Ms. Kwan. Go ahead, Ms. Kwan.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'm hoping we can dispense with this quickly. I have a couple of proposed amendments to the motion.

I think getting information is important and I think we would all support getting that information. However, I would like to propose that we change the timeline. I know and understand that officials at this moment are very busy trying to provide services to Canadians, and perhaps we can change the timeline to the end of August, August 31, for the materials to be made available to the committee. That's one amendment, Mr. Chair.

I have another proposed amendment to the motion. In terms of the documentation, these kinds of motions have been moved in other committees as well, and instead of having the documents to be retrieved for this committee apply to every staff person, perhaps we can limit it to ministers and senior officials. “Senior officials” means deputy ministers, assistant deputy ministers and directors of departments. I think that will limit the scope somewhat, but nonetheless we'll get the pertinent information for the committee's perusal.

Last but not least, Mr. Chair, I would like to suggest that the request for legal opinions be deleted at this time. I believe that's the fourth item in the motion.

Hopefully, these will be deemed by Mrs. Kusie to be friendly amendments.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you, Ms. Kwan.

We have three amendments, and the debate is now on the amendments. I recognize Mr. Housefather.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

First of all, I want to thank Ms. Kwan for her amendments. I agree with all three of the amendments, and of course, Mr. Chair, we can only deal with one amendment at a time. In addition to what Ms. Kwan has put forward, I will have at least one additional amendment, perhaps two.

If the first question is to Mrs. Kusie, who put forward the motion, does she accept the three requests by Ms. Kwan as being friendly amendments? We need to know whether we actually have to deal with the amendments, because if we do, we should be going one by one so as not to confuse things.

Perhaps I can yield the floor back to Ms. Kusie to answer that before I continue.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Ms. Kusie, do you consider the amendments to be friendly, or do you wish them to be debated individually?

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

I consider the amendments friendly.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Okay. That being the case, the motion is now amended in the manner proposed by Ms. Kwan.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm going to ask Mrs. Kusie if perhaps she would agree to two other amendments that I hope she will consider to be friendly, and I want to again thank my colleague Ms. Kwan for having put forward those three.

In other committees—the health committee and, most recently, in governmental operations—there was also an exemption made for matters of national security, matters related to solicitor-client privilege and matters of cabinet confidence.

I would propose that the deleted section, the fourth section, which related to legal opinions, be replaced by the following:

Irrespective of the foregoing, matters of Cabinet Confidence, solicitor client privilege and National Security shall be excluded from the request and that the documents be redacted as may be necessary to protect the privacy of Canadians citizens and Permanent Residents whose names and personal information may be included in the documents as well as public servants who have been providing assistance on this matter.

I believe this to be consistent with what was adopted very recently as an NDP motion at the governmental operations committee and by the health committee as well.

My second proposal to Mrs. Kusie, if she would consider it to be friendly, would be to simply delete the word “emails” from sections 1, 2 and 3. It would be to leave all of the other documents but exclude emails. The number of emails that would be covered here, given the millions of Canadian citizens requesting these benefits who have gone to these departments and the fact that everybody was communicating only by email during this period, would be exceptionally voluminous. I believe that it is again consistent with other committees that have not included emails but have included briefing notes, memorandums, guidance and documents.

Those are my requests to Mrs. Kusie. If not, I'll bring them forward as amendments.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Mrs. Kusie, are you comfortable with those being considered friendly amendments, or shall we debate them individually?

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

I certainly feel that removing section 4 does address the solicitor-client issue. I could agree to the cabinet confidence and the national security. My only question would be regarding the emails. Would it not be significantly limited, now that we have changed the scope, and given the friendly amendment from Ms. Kwan regarding ministers, senior officials and directors? That's just a question. I wonder.

As provided by the government, I agree that's a very large scope, but it seems to be more limited now with ministers, senior officials and directors. It would seem to me that the briefing notes and memorandums would be information that would be largely for public consumption already, whereas emails might provide us with more information.

I wonder if there is a way we can edit the emails so that we're both comfortable with that because, as I said, I feel we've taken care of number 4, and I can agree with the cabinet confidence and the national security, but for emails, I wonder how we could address that a little bit further. As I said, it seems to me to be more addressed, given the more limited scope that Ms. Kwan provided us with.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Mr. Housefather, I'd like to come back to you.

I think what we heard is that with the amendment you've proposed, parts of it are considered friendly, but there are problems with the other parts.

Can we resolve this, or should we simply proceed with the debate on the amendment that you put forward?

Go ahead.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you, and I thank my colleague Madam Kusie for her consideration.

I think what I understood is that she's comfortable to substitute number 4 to deal with solicitor-client privilege and cabinet confidence, and also to redact for privacy issues. Again, this is consistent with the other two committees. I think she was okay with that.

I think her issue was with the second issue that I raised with respect to emails.

What I would suggest to Ms. Kusie is that when people prepare official documents or documents that relate to guidance, I think they're thinking about the issue at hand. Emails, even between two people we've named in this, can be emails that people are flippantly sending to one another. That can include all kinds of comments that they would never have considered relevant to the subject, but they would be part of a larger email that may contain excerpts related to the CERB or something else.

I'm wondering if perhaps we could start with the deletion of “emails”, and if there's something you think then is missing, we can work back. I just don't think that we need all the emails that have been exchanged.

Again, remember that this is not only emails between these named people; any email that the person exchanged with a third party that related to that subject matter would then also be included. I think that's a pretty wide scope. Again, I don't think that's consistent with what's been requested at other committees.

I would humbly request that you might consider just removing the word “emails”. If not, I'm happy to propose it as a separate amendment, and we can debate that amendment.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

We'll go back to you, Ms. Kusie.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

As I said, I don't....

I'm getting some new information from my colleagues.

Anthony, I guess they're feeling that we don't...they're not as concerned about the national security or the cabinet confidence or the emails. I guess then that I would say that now we don't consider it friendly.

I'm sorry, Anthony.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

You don't consider either of them friendly?