Status of Women Committee on Feb. 7th, 2007

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

I'll call the meeting to order.

Today we're having two panels, as discussed. In the first panel, which will take us from 3:30 to 4:25, we have from the Antigonish Women's Resource Centre, Lucille Harper. We have Madame Stéphanie Lalande representing Réseau des tables régionales des groupes de femmes, and Sonja Greckol representing Toronto Women's Call to Action.

The committee wants to make this an interactive session, which is why we have limited your presentations to five minutes each. After that, we will have questions. Each questioner will be given five minutes to ask their questions, and they will interact with you if you are not answering what they are asking you.

We will start off with Madame Harper. Could you give your presentation for five minutes, please?

[Lucille Harper, Executive Director, Antigonish Women's Resource Centre]

What I'd like to do is start with the conclusion to make sure I get it in. That's what we would like to see.

I'm here on behalf of the Antigonish Women's Resource Centre, which is a small community-based organization in rural Nova Scotia. I'm speaking as well for other women's centres in Nova Scotia that work with rural women.

We would like to see the government reinstate advancing women's equality as a primary goal of Status of Women Canada. We would like to see you reinstate social advocacy research and capacity-building into the terms and conditions of the women's program; maintain the 16 regional program officers and program offices; implement the recommendations made by the parliamentary committee on the Status of Women Canada in its third report to the 39th Parliament, which includes an increase of 25% to the budget of Status of Women Canada; and mandate Status of Women Canada to permit funding of equality-seeking, unregistered, non-profit women's organizations.

My particular interest in being here today is to deepen the analysis of the impact of the cuts on women living in rural communities and on the equality-seeking women's organizations that work with them.

On a daily basis we work with women who live in deep and persistent poverty, poverty that is often generational and racialized. We work with women and adolescent girls who experience violence and abuse, and we work with women and adolescent girls who live in very rural communities and who are trying as hard as they can to put their lives together, to establish economic independence in a region where there are few opportunities for employment, to provide and care for children and family members with limited access to child care and support services, and to further their education and seek training opportunities where there is no public transportation system.

On top of this, as best they can, they are holding their communities together by performing many hours of unpaid community labour along with their household labour.

In our part of Canada, we are living with the devastating and ongoing impact of the closure of our fisheries and the demise of our primary industries. While out-migration has been a way of life in many parts of Nova Scotia for decades, the increased numbers of people leaving for other parts of the country has increased the dismantling of our rural infrastructure. Our small communities have lost public services, schools, hospitals, post offices, grocery stores, and banks. Our roads are deteriorating. Out-migration has taken the heart out of our communities and has left us with an aging population that is less educated and has poorer physical and mental health outcomes, shorter life expectancies, and a higher risk of living in poverty.

As I noted earlier, it is women who are trying to hold their communities together. Their task is daunting, and it is exacerbated by the creation, by necessity, of new family structures that see men in the family leaving for months at a time to earn income elsewhere. Many times the men set up lives elsewhere and do not return to their wives or to their families or to their communities.

What does this have to do with Status of Women Canada? It's not news to you that poverty is gendered. However, for rural women the challenge of moving themselves and their families out of poverty is more difficult and is complicated by both federal as well as provincial policies and programs that not only create and maintain poverty, but also privilege urban centres and urban approaches.

In Nova Scotia, funding for the women's program has enabled women in rural communities to come together to talk about and to document their experiences, to organize, and to advocate for change at the community, provincial, and federal levels.

Rural women's organizations work with a broad diversity of women; have developed a valuable expertise on and unique insight into women's social, economic, and justice issues; provide community and region-specific information about women's situations and needs; and amplify the voices of vulnerable and marginalized women to the public and the policy decision-makers. Without social advocacy, the voices of the most vulnerable women go unheard.

We need to maintain our regional offices because program officers working out of the smaller regions are better able to reflect the uniqueness of the different areas of their region.

This is particularly important for rural women as there are significant differences in the issues that women face in rural, coastal, agricultural, northern regions, in primary- or single-resource-based communities, and certainly urban centres.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Ms. Harper, we have to cut off here. There will be a question and answer session, and you will have time to do your closing remarks, as well.

Madame Lalande.

[Stéphanie Lalande, Representative, Outaouais Region, Réseau des tables régionales des groupes de femmes du Québec]

Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee.

I appear before you today on behalf of the Réseau des tables régionales des groupes de femmes du Québec. This network comprises 432 member groups and 241 individual members working under 17 coordinating committees.

We are a women's rights collective that addresses women's interests and rights issues. Its role is to act as a liaison between the round tables and various levels of government and decision makers. I have come here today to talk to you about the reality that the women's network faces on the ground.

Over the years, members of the Réseau des tables have mobilized around the maintenance and development of Quebec structures in support of women such as the Secrétariat à la condition féminine and the Conseil du statut de la femme. In addition, we demand the establishment of a comprehensive policy and action plan for the status of women as well as the funding to implement them.

As you know, certain structures have remained in place. Last December, we produced a policy paper entitled “Equality Rights: Turning Theory into Practice”.

Therefore, we are here to add our voices to those of our sisters, and stand opposed to weakening Status of Women in Canada by weakening its actions and funding.

The Réseau des tables is also very concerned about women's place in the corridors of power. We urge the establishment of a proportional representation system along with specific measures to encourage the election of women candidates to the National Assembly. We would like this reform to take place at the federal level as well.

Political representation of women is 31.2 per cent in the National Assembly of Quebec, and 12 per cent of mayors and 25 per cent of councillors in Quebec municipalities are women—a level of underrepresentation that is still cause for discussion. Given that the Canadian Federation of Municipalities has set a target of 30 per cent female representation by 2030, one can definitely say that there's still work to be done.

In addition, we are also concerned over fair representation of women within regional development bodies. These regional development bodies, also known as regional conferences, have representation made up of only 20 per cent of women. Very few of these conferences use gender-based analyses to determine whether or not projects meet the needs of women and men fairly.

The Réseau des tables is also greatly concerned over the health and well-being of women. The network would also like to ensure adherence to ministerial objectives and action strategies for the regions.

Recent structural upheavals have left a democratic vacuum. Therefore, we are here to make sure that women's needs are being heard.

In recent years, the Women's Program has always been an important source of funds for the regional round tables. However, recent changes to the program's eligibility criteria and funding conditions are incompatible with the defence of women's rights. In fact, national actions that aim to defend rights and influence the federal and provincial governments have been excluded from this funding.

The mission of both the regional round tables and the Réseau des tables is to defend the fundamental rights of women, and our actions centre on advocacy and influence.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Excuse me Madam, can you please read more slowly.

[Stéphanie Lalande]

Yes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

You are reading very quickly; simultaneous interpretation is difficult.

So go a little more slowly.

[Stéphanie Lalande]

Yes. Pardon me, I thought you were asking me to speed up. Very well.

Is this all right?

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Yes, that is fine.

[Stéphanie Lalande]

Good.

We must stop minimizing the need to fight against discrimination against women, assuming that systematic discrimination against women is a thing of the past and that it only remains to help those who are weaker and less well fit to cope with their problems, as some people still believe.

To facilitate women's involvement in Canadian society, as is stated in the mandate of the Women's Program, cannot be done simply by offering direct services to women with problems, but also by changing the structures that govern this society.

We have handed out a table which provides a breakdown of funds for the Women's Program. You will note that these amounts are considerable, and changes to eligibility criteria may lead to a 13 to 40% decrease in funding.

In conclusion, the actions taken by the Réseau des tables régionales des groupes de femmes du Québec has an impact on improving the living conditions in our areas. Nonetheless, we do not provide direct services to women. We carry their voices, defend and assert their rights, and encourage federal and provincial governments, municipal administrations to change their systems, which failed to include women in the past.

We ask you to not force us to take a step back, and have to resort to creative semantics so that we can receive the critical funding needed to run a participatory democracy such as ours. We are not lobbyists; we are simply a women's rights collective and work to achieve greater social justice.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you very much.

We'll now go to Ms. Greckol.

I know I've given you five minutes, but you'll have to respect the fact that the translators have to listen to what you're saying so they can translate. So pace it out and try to finish it in five minutes. Thank you.

[Sonja Greckol, Founding Member, Toronto Women's Call to Action]

Thank you for the opportunity to outline the concerns of the Toronto Women's Call to Action to this committee. We are a diverse group of women who have been meeting since 2003 in this particular forum to try to restore the visibility and audibility of women in the government of the city of Toronto.

We advocate anti-racist, anti-poverty, gender mainstreaming for Toronto. Gender mainstreaming is part of the Beijing Platform for Action to empower women and bring equality and equity to issues of decision-making, control over resources, budgets, benefits, and rewards.

We work at the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, class, ability, sexual and gender identity, and aboriginality. We do this work so that we can people and so that we can woman the policies and practices of the city government, which is, after all, one of the largest governments in the country.

We work in six priority areas: affordable housing, governance, violence, policing, child care, and the environment. We identify these priorities because each impacts women's and men's lives differently in different communities. We do what we call “Where are the Women?” surveys of policy and research documents and find that the experiences of women are not reflected.

Concretely, poor women who are disproportionately racialized women have fewer choices in housing, in transportation, and in child care. The nexus of these limited choices on a long waiting list for social housing, for example, and subsidized day care, along with single-ride transportation costs, make paid work, family work, and community work impossibly difficult for many women. Gender mainstreaming, however, requires that we bring precisely these women into the political process.

Health impacts, for example, of polluted environments on poor families disadvantage them further in the labour force and in the community. What happens to a mother's capacity to support her family when a child with asthma or environmental sensitivities requires specific care on an intermittent basis, when policing strategies don't respect women's safety needs and/or profile specific youths without recognizing their mothers' and sisters' realities? The communities are marginalized, and the women are bereft of services. What happens to mothers and daughters when a household is preoccupied with how sons will navigate the public and social world of street and school? What happens to mothers and daughters when sons are under house arrest?

Women in all their diversity of race, ethnicity, age, ability, status, and language are 52% of the population of the city of Toronto. Our representation at the policy tables is critical to the development of effective policy.

We know that Canada has signed the Beijing declaration as well as the CEDAW protocol on the elimination of discrimination against women. We know that all party leaders signed the declaration of support for CEDAW during the most recent election campaign.

Let me cut straight to the cuts at Status of Women that affect us concretely. The concrete impacts on our equality-seeking activities in our priority areas are on public education and voter engagement, and on the gender mainstreaming, gender budgeting, and accountability in local government.

The method of this second area, gender mainstreaming, requires that governments include the voices of women in their policies through outreach consultation as well as research and data collection. These provide the tools that policy-makers can use to reflect the voices and experiences in policy-making and budgeting. How different would our elder care, our long-term care, our neighbourhoods be, if we could imagine differently the ways that communities can provide for needs of aging parents, recovering partners, and children, apart from being in single-family dwellings and apartments requiring private cars? We need the education process and we need the advocacy process to bring gender mainstreaming into the mainstream.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Perfect timing.

We will now go on to our first round of questions. The question and answer session is seven minutes.

I will start off with Ms. Minna.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

There are so many questions; I'm going to try to get started. I'm sure my colleagues on this side will have lots more and we'll have more rounds as we go along.

When the minister appeared in front of this committee just last week, she said that women had been funded for 25 years for advocacy. Basically, she said you've had 25 years; that's plenty. She didn't put it in those words, but that's what she suggested, because she said you've had 25 years of advocacy. She also said that advocacy and equality work and all of that can still take place. There's no reason why it can't take place; it just shouldn't be paid for by government.

Some of you have already given some reasons that this is the case, but I'd like to hear from you, because that seems to be the position of the government and the minister at this point. I'd like to hear from you, because everybody keeps asking, well, how exactly? Why can't they advocate? This is not the core. So I'm asking two or three questions.

First, tell me exactly what suffers. Some of you have already alluded to that, but tell me exactly why women can't do advocacy. Why do they need the money after 25 years? I'm being the devil's advocate here. Why do we still need money for research and advocacy after 25 years?

It's a simple question, but go ahead. Ms. Greckol can start, or Ms. Harper, and Madame Lalande can finish up.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

I believe Ms. Greckol would like to begin.

[Sonja Greckol]

Well, 25 years later, women are still working. We used to talk about how women worked two shifts. Now we find that women are in fact working three shifts. We do paid work, we do family work, and we do community work. The paid work and the family work are fairly self-evident. The third piece of work is the advocacy work in the community, because services don't reflect our needs. It's that simple. So in order to get services to in fact reflect our needs, we need to continue to advocate.

We are not visible in services; we are not visible in a whole range of services. If we think about immigration services, what happens to immigrant and refugee women who come into the country? They are disqualified from many settlement programs by various kinds of limitations that we impose. Why is that? Their needs are not reflected in the policy of the government. We need advocacy because it seems governments can't understand.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

The minister is saying, well, you don't need the government. The government should not be funding the advocacy part. Why should the government fund it? I know why, but I just need you to put it on the record. Sorry.

[Lucille Harper]

Well, one reason is that--and particularly with marginalized women and women living in small communities who don't even have access to computers, etc.--coming together to do advocacy really takes a level of organization that requires support. It requires support through any number of different measures, basic transportation being one, particularly in rural areas. Photocopying, report writing, etc., really does take some basis of funding to do it.

One of the things that have been so fantastic about the women's program historically is that it has sought out and made funding available for women who have not had a voice to be able to organize and to be able to have that voice. In recent years that ability has been reduced for these very small communities, but essentially those voices then were able to identify issues that had not been previously identified.

The only funding that has been available specifically to women to do that kind of organization and to bring that voice to public attention, at whichever level, has been through Status of Women Canada. When we lose that, we really are silencing women and making it very difficult particularly for the most marginalized groups to come together.

So well-funded women's organizations, whoever they are--I don't know any of them, but whoever they are--I'm sure can do advocacy without support. But because equality-seeking women's organizations--let me be specific--are raising some of the most difficult questions, the areas that society has pushed under the carpet, has not wanted to recognize, has hoped would go away and disappear, these are not fundable through either private companies or—

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you, Madame Harper.

Madame Lalande, I know systemic barriers still exist for women in terms of accessing, whether it's programs or what have you. Could you give us an idea of what some of those systemic barriers still are, and how advocacy helps to get rid of them or is needed to assist in getting rid of them?

[Stéphanie Lalande]

Allow me to cite three statistics: women earn only 70% of what men earn, have only 30% of political representation, and 80% of the victims of violence are women. I believe these figures clearly show that there are collective rights to defend. We are not talking about individuals, nor are we talking about specific women, we are talking about all women. In fact, systemic discrimination is still ongoing; perhaps this is not deliberate, but the systems which have been in place historically continue to reproduce the same thing. Therefore, we have to change these structures.

I would like to add something to what I said earlier. We believe that the best services, either in health care or other areas, are those which directly appeal to women's needs. I am the director of the Outaouais round table, but we number 17 throughout Quebec. You can believe me, when we have the opportunity to get together and send out the same message, we have much more power.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

We'll go now to Ms. Demers.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Good afternoon, ladies. Thank you for being here. It is very important to us that you accepted our invitation to talk to us about the difficulties encountered as a result of the budget cutbacks to the Women's Program.

I was just appalled to see that the government still refuses to recognize that systemic discrimination still exists. The government refuses to recognize that there are rights to defend and battles that are still to be waged by women. We must do our utmost to advance the cause. To my mind, the cause is not obsolete and not over. Isn't it difficult to convince women in our own environments that these causes are still worth fighting, when our own governments do not believe in them?

The question is for all three panellists.

[Stéphanie Lalande]

We are talking about a critical mass of female representation of 33%. We are still very far from this target. It is obvious that women working within the structures may have a hard time changing the agenda. That is why we are working very hard to increase women's representation.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Ms. Harper or Ms. Greckol, I am very concerned about the situation of first nation communities, and more specifically the situation of women. The programs we used to have allowed us to reach the women. In Kashechewan, there were 21 suicides in the past month. I can imagine what the reaction of the mothers of these children might be, and I can very well imagine that there is a lack of resources and that this can bring about these types of situations.

I might also point out that there is a website that reveals the addresses of women's shelters. This is a site where men reveal the addresses of women's shelters. They post photographs of women's shelters and give directions for getting there.

I am wondering if the programs we used to have would have enabled us to defend ourselves better against these types of assaults since right now, advocacy groups are not being accepted for projects.

[Lucille Harper]

That's a really big question.

The situation with aboriginal women in this country is abominable. I think that's been pointed out very clearly by the United Nations Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; and the lack of action has also been abominable.

I do not pretend for one minute to speak for aboriginal women, because aboriginal women speak so clearly and so well for themselves, although I do think we need to very seriously listen to what aboriginal women are saying and be very clear about the absolute critical need in this country to support aboriginal women in the ways they have said that they need support, which is both for services as well as for support in the many campaigns that they have.

Violence against women in general is huge. Sexual violence is.... I live in a small university town, and the sexual violence that is never reported is huge and it is increasingly hideous in many ways in the way it plays out. We do not see sexual violence as being a serious issue in this country unless it's something like the Picton case. But the sexual violence to which women are exposed every single day is huge, and it's the same with intimate partner violence. That will not be changed through services.

Do we need services? Absolutely. Do we need well-funded services? Absolutely. Will violence be changed because we provided services? Absolutely not. That's one of the reasons we need the support, and the funding, and the focus of Status of Women Canada to be able to make any imprint on this whatsoever. We've been advocating on that whole question for 25 years, but 25 years is such a small period of time when we think about the barriers and the levels of oppression, and discrimination, and exclusion, and the levels of violence that women have been facing.

One last thing and then I'll stop. When I first participated in the women's movement 30 years ago I thought, innocently, that it would be different for my daughter. I thought it was the fact that people didn't have the information, and if we provided the information, then of course policies would change; it would change. It's been a hard lesson to realize that it's not simply about not having the information, it's about attitudes of misogyny that permeate our policies.