Status of Women Committee on March 20th, 2007

[Bernard Dussault]

Well, what I understand from what you're saying is that what the company does is not manage the plans to make its design more palatable for the survivors; it's just a matter of investments. It's my understanding that in lieu of the employee, they decide where and how the amounts will be invested, but if that's correct, then it doesn't do anything more or less for survivors.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Well, it does. They manage the investment portion of it, but you can also set it up so you have your payouts managed, as well, whether they're set up as annuities or whatever, so you get a--

[Bernard Dussault]

Okay, the only thing I know in that respect is that some defined contribution plans allow the employee's contribution to be put in a spousal plan. But otherwise, I'm sorry, I'm not aware that some employers would go beyond that. I was not aware of that.

[Ruth Rose]

May I say something on that? My understanding of a defined contribution plan is that it's very much like an RRSP. That is, when you retire, you must make a choice as to what your payout is, and provincial laws as well as federal laws require that at that point, you make a choice as to whether there will be a spousal prolongation, that is, a joint survivor benefit. And when you get into that situation, you're in very much the same situation as you are in with the defined benefit plan. The difference is that for the defined contribution, what you get out of the defined contribution--your annuity and so forth--depends on what interest rates are at the time you retire, whereas defined benefits give you a guaranteed amount of money based on what the plan provides.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

We now go to Madame Demers.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much for being here, Ms. Rose and Mr. Dussault. I have a great deal of admiration for the work you do, Ms. Rose. I am more familiar with it. I have not met you before, Mr. Dussault.

I often wonder what we as politicians are doing to really improve things for people. When I was a little girl, my father always told me that it was not the end of the world to make mistakes, that we had to get up again and to continue moving forward. He thought it was important to acknowledge one's mistakes. I have always kept that in mind.

And I often wonder why the government does not have the same attitude. Some policies were introduced in good faith, but have not produced the results they were supposed to produce, because they were not the appropriate instruments to improve things for people. I wonder why, when a certain party is in power—and I can speak freely here, because the Bloc Québécois will never be in power—the government, whatever its political stripe, cannot admit that it made a mistake, and say that it will drop the policy in question and introduce one that will work better. I think that for women, economic security begins when they are young, not at age 60 or 75.

There were two policies mentioned in yesterday's budget, and I would like to know whether you think they might help women enjoy better economic security. One of the measures is an income supplement for people earning more than $3,000, but less than $21,167. Another is a child tax credit of $2,000.

Do you think these measures will really help women who are lone parents and all other women to have a better economic situation when they are older?

[Ruth Rose]

I admit I was very disappointed by the child tax credit, because it is non-refundable. However, the budget documents show that people earning less than $30,000 a year will receive absolutely nothing, whether they are lone-parent families—and most of them have an income of less than $30,000—or families where there are two parents. The government can still change its budget; I therefore hope that it will convert this credit into a refundable credit, so that all families can really benefit from it.

The earned income supplement is a measure that has been in place for a long time in places such as the United States and Quebec. In Quebec, it is somewhat more generous. The most important thing, however, is that after having a very similar program for years, the government is now going further in the income scales and is recovering this income at a rate of 10% rather than 15%.

I'm not opposed to this measure. It may help some people on low incomes, particularly the heads of lone-parent families, but the fact remains that it is a rather modest measure that involves some administrative problems. Women earning less than $21,000 who have one child will get nothing. There again, I would have preferred a direct benefit for children and an improvement in benefits for all low-income families.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you very much, Ms. Rose.

Mr. Dussault, earlier, you spoke about a case where a woman had married someone who was already receiving a public service pension.

If the spouse receiving the benefits dies, his widow is no longer entitled to benefits. Is that correct?

[Bernard Dussault]

Let me describe a typical case for you. A married man who worked for the public service retires and begins receiving benefits. His wife dies. If this man remarries, his new wife, unlike the first one, will not be entitled to half of his pension because the second marriage took place after the man retired.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

So his first wife would have been entitled to 50%.

[Bernard Dussault]

Yes, that is correct.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Merci.

We now go to Ms. Mathyssen for five minutes.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I have a quick question with regard to the disparities between levels of government. For example, the federal parental benefit is one year, but provincially regulated child care centres won't take children until they're 18 months of age. Is there, do you think, a need for better cooperation between the levels of government, and how would that cooperation assist women in terms of their economic security? Have you given much thought to that disparity?

[Ruth Rose]

Some child care centres will take children at nine months. Some won't take them until they're potty-trained.

Of course, we need a national child care program that makes child care accessible and affordable to everybody. Back in the 19th century we asked whether the government should be paying for education for all children, and we answered the question long-term. In particular, Quebec was one of the last provinces to adopt it. We said we want all our children to be educated.

We should be at that point now with child care. All of our children need the care but they also need the educational experience. One of the most expensive things is for infants, because they need a high staff-to-child ratio. But we're a rich country; we can afford it.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

I quite agree.

You talked about salary discrimination in your remarks. I know that you've written and spoken about the fight for salary equality being far from won.

We've got a complaints-based pay equity system or model at work in the country. I'm wondering how you would compare that to a proactive pay equity program that was advocated by a special committee in 2005.

[Ruth Rose]

Quebec has one. Ontario had one. I'm absolutely in favour. The problem is that with the complaint-based situation, because a model of evaluation to establish what is comparable worth is fairly complicated, the burden of the proof is on the group or the individual who filed the complaint. And the experience on both the federal and Quebec levels when we had only the complaint-based was that it took 15 or 20 years to solve these cases, and that was in the public sector, where there were very strong unions fighting for it.

The experience we've had in Quebec as well is that while the unionized sector has made considerable progress in getting pay equity implemented and the child care sector also--and it was true in Ontario too, where they managed to get government to recognize that this was a publicly subsidized area and therefore the government was responsible for pay equity--there has been relatively little progress in the private sector.

So we need not only proactive pay equity plans, and I think the federal government needs to go ahead with this and show leadership, but we also need considerable work to provide the instruments and the mechanisms of enforcement for the non-unionized sector.

In countries like Sweden or Australia, which have reduced the pay gap between men and women, the reason they've done it is because they have nationwide bargaining and they reduce salary differentials across the board for everybody. That's a way to attack poverty.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

You have about half a minute.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Then I'll be very quick.

We heard from rural women that they face incredible challenges with regard to isolation because they don't have access to public transit, and we haven't seen much in terms of a real investment in the kind of public transit that would make a difference both to the environment and to women's ability to access services and have some freedom.

I wonder if you have given much thought to the transit question.

[Ruth Rose]

I admit that, for environmental reasons, we should be involved in various kinds of public transportation. Maybe a subsidized taxi system is what you need in the rural areas. I know that even in small towns, women can't take jobs because they can't get to work, so of course we have to work in those areas.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

We will go to Mr. Stanton for five minutes.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to our panellists this afternoon.

I have a couple of questions. The first is to Madame Rose. In the brief you gave us today, one of the bullet points in your observations is that while you recognize the gap is diminishing between men and women in terms of labour force participation and so on, you note that the wage gap is due in large part to wage discrimination. How do you qualify that?

In our studies on gender-based analysis, some of the early findings we had from a Statistics Canada panel in our opening meeting on this topic suggested that in fact things are coming together. Based on the wage rate gap, we're up to about 86% and continuing to narrow. What do you have that would qualify that statement--that it's still based on discrimination?

[Ruth Rose]

There's a huge economic literature on this question, and of course there are disagreements. One of the reasons women earn less than men is that they are more likely not only to work part time, but also, when they're working full time, to work fewer hours. It's related to the problem of the sexual division of labour, but I wouldn't call that wage discrimination.

What we find--and this is what the pay equity applications do--is that when you actually go down and evaluate the kinds of jobs women do--for example, secretarial work or certain kinds of manufacturing--on an objective set of factors, we're still finding gaps of the order of 10% to 15%, which is not the entire.... That's why I used the qualification “to a large extent”; I didn't say “entirely” due to wage discrimination.

The evidence from the economic studies is that there are still prejudices and historical distortions of the value of the service jobs that women do, and that they are still not paid for comparable worth.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

We have seen some positive signs there, and that's why I raise it. We've seen in the public sector, for example, that in the case of women under the age of 35, when you look at just the wage gap, it is now down to 2%. That is not to say there aren't differences in earnings because of the choices and the availability for women to participate in the workforce, although that is even increasing. There has been some terrific improvement.

I want to move on. One of the other graphs you have here--I think it was graph 3--pertained to the contributions. This is the RRQ. I'm not familiar with that term. Is that the Quebec Pension Plan?

[Ruth Rose]

That's the Quebec Pension Plan.