Thank you so much.
Members of the committee, my name is Sharleen Stewart. Thank you for hearing from me today.
The Service Employees International Union, SEIU, represents two million members across the United States, Puerto Rico and Canada. I proudly serve as international vice-president of our union, as well as president of SEIU Health Care, which represents over 60,000 frontline health care workers in the province of Ontario.
As I stated to your colleagues at the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates last year, our elder care system, [Technical difficulty—Editor] more broadly, has failed. It has failed working women, who make up the vast majority of frontline staff. It has failed seniors, who were robbed of dignity and life. It has failed their families, who rely on the care economy for that which they cannot do themselves. Again, the care economy is failing Canadians. We should examine the reality and the solutions through the lens of people, not partisanship.
Conservatives who hold dear the idea of the family unit ought to be outraged at how our sisters and moms and their children are robbed of economic stability and social cohesion. The Bloc Québécois platform presented itself as resolutely feminist, and rightfully so, as what we're talking about for the most part is a population of mostly elderly women who reside in nursing homes, a care economy labour market, the vast majority of whom are women, and child care, which again often falls on the shoulders of women. It was the NDP, as I understand it, and specifically Ms. Bonita Zarrillo, who challenged this committee to examine the care economy.
I want to thank Mr. Michael Coteau for informing me of Ms. Zarrillo's work to have this committee examine what the Canadian government and its parliamentarians can do to support women in the care economy. I also want to thank Liberals, under the leadership of Prime Minister Trudeau, who in the most recent federal election echoed the words of distinguished research professor of sociology, Pat Armstrong, that conditions of work become the conditions of care. That—the conditions of work in the care economy—is what I wish to focus on today.
I wish to paint a picture for you of the journey of so many care workers, starting with immigration. Canada has a robust immigration system, on which we rely for so many things, including economic growth. The truth, however, is that too often it is the start of an exploitative system. As a country, we devalue women's work, and we see that in the wages and working conditions of women in the care economy. After opening our country's borders to care workers, we do the opposite and forget them. What we enable is a system of poverty wages that denies them job security and basic benefits. These working women include personal support workers, domestic workers and child care workers.
Those in the health care system, like PSWs, are the women I'm proud to fight for in our union. Unfortunately, in the past, public policy has often been distilled down to campaign-style tax credits. Let me be clear: Boutique tax credits are not the solution to ending systemic exploitation. Those are consumer-side savings that do nothing to confront the conditions of work. We need provider-side solutions that give the women who care for our families the economic means to also provide for themselves and their own families. We need to support their efforts to unionize, because within a union, they can speak up collectively without fear of being fired or worse, threats of deportation.
Let me remind you of one such example of care economy exploitation in our nation's capital. There [Technical difficulty—Editor] during the day, living in a homeless shelter at night. These anecdotes are everywhere. We don't need more data, we need action. Now that the pandemic has brought into focus the everyday experience of care workers, as well as our reliance on them as a societal safety net, I'm urging this committee to bring actions to words, to reform the conditions of work for care economy workers in your community.
As far as solutions go, I want to acknowledge those honourable parliamentarians who voted to support the financial resources to fund a new framework to deliver child care in Canada. Foundational to the national child care framework are good-paying jobs that put people before profits. We should extend that child care framework into health care, a system in the midst of a worsening health human resources crisis. It's on that basis that I look forward to working with you all to support the women who care for all of us.
Thank you.