Thank you.
Thank you very much for making it possible for me to participate in this important discussion. I am going to focus on five points that I think are becoming of increasing importance as the continued existence and growth of various wage gaps has been more and more completely documented over the intervening 12 or 13 years that have passed since this was a major issue for the government.
The first point that I want to emphasize is that while it is much more complicated to come to grips with the impact of visible minority, aboriginal, immigration, and disability status on gender wage gaps, they are rapidly compounded when those intersecting, so to speak, characteristics come into effect. I've included for your reference a set of tables that I have been developing that try to really pinpoint these kinds of issues. Table 11 shows that, for example, the visible minority and aboriginal women gender wage gaps can be as high as 38% to 47% on a national level. This really escalates the barriers that are faced by women who have these multiple barriers and forms of discrimination. I think that there is sufficient information on this to bring this into the picture now as this committee continues its deliberations on this issue.
The second point is that I would like to definitely reinforce and dwell upon the fact that we now know, through extremely comprehensive research carried out in many different countries around the world at different levels of development, that pay gaps are not just a sort of here-and-now problem. They are an intergenerational problem. They are a systemic problem. They are a problem that affects everyone in the whole country their whole lives. This is something that begins before young women even become old enough to earn any money. It becomes pronounced when women go into education and find that their part-time work, their summer jobs, are not paying as much as men's. They have to borrow more money for their higher education. They take longer to pay back their loans because they have lower wages when they do graduate and go into their full-time earning years.
They find that when they go to take maternity leave, they're often not able to take full advantage of the income security programs that do exist because employment insurance will only replace 55% of their wages, and their wages are much lower than young men's. So of course paternity leave is going to be popular because it's going to be more profitable for families. It's not that it's a bad thing that men will take paternity leave, but it just underscores the fact that women are disadvantaged even in an area where their needs are supposedly a priority.
As their lives unfold they will have less ability to form savings to get them through emergencies and periods of unemployment or to augment their maternity leave incomes. They will have less ability to save for their own retirement, even as public and private pensions have been cut back more and more. Not surprisingly, the more children a woman has, the less likely she is to be able to re-enter paid work in a way that will really maintain an upward trajectory. Women's peak earning years are shorter and have lower incomes in them than men's do. This is a systemic problem and it affects everyone all the time.
The third main structural point is that our whole tax transfer system is now built around the assumption that women are not going to be able to maintain themselves with sustainable incomes. At last count there were at least $25 billion being spent annually, including this year, to subsidize women's unpaid work in various ways all through their lives, but less than $2 billion is currently spent federally to fund the child care expense deduction. That's how lopsided things have become.
Table 7 shows that the new child benefit is actually going to exacerbate the male breadwinner model because child care expenses will eat up the largest part of the child benefit for single parents and for dual income, equal income, and low-income couples who are both in full-time work. The only people who will really be able to use the child benefit for what it is intended—to improve the quality of life for children—are going to be those who have parents who are living on one relatively high single income, ie., usually the male breadwinner model.
Table 8 demonstrates that, in fact, we are imposing a tax on women who are single parents or who are in dual-earner income couples because they literally have to pay on top of their usual taxes on their employment income, a tax in the form of child care expenses that they simply cannot recover in any other way.
The fourth point is that pay equity laws and child care subsidies could actively grow the economy of Canada in very specific ways. Table 6 demonstrates that even if just one province, the province of Alberta, were to engage in partial and beginning pay equity adjustments, that would produce between a half a billion dollars and $4 billion in federal revenues more each year, beginning in 2016. If you were to multiply that impact across the country, and then take the provincial tax and revenue effect into consideration, you would be seeing even larger amounts being generated, and over time this would accumulate.
My last point is that comprehensive research has also made it perfectly clear that countries that do systemically support women's paid work as a priority, and prohibit wage discrimination, occupational stratification, and other forms of workplace discrimination, have more durable economies because, on the whole, individuals and households have more durable sources of income, are less vulnerable to downturns, and now, provably, are intergenerationally transmitting not discrimination but gender equality, including economic gender equality.
Those are my comments. Thank you.