Status of Women Committee on March 22nd, 2007

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

I would add that one of the other parts of this discussion, which I think shouldn't necessarily be left out—I know this sometimes gets lost in the shuffle of pointing fingers at different levels of government—is that in the end, provinces have the ability to undertake some of the interesting and I think very novel and creative innovations to social services that you talked about. They should be looked at, and in fact provinces have the ability to do that. They have taxing power. They have the jurisdiction to devise and improve and expand on programs that they currently have, and nothing prevents them from doing that.

From the federal government's point of view, it's important that provinces have the fiscal capacity to do that, that they be able to tax for the kinds of programs that are important to those provinces. I, for one—and I'm sure this view is shared by my colleagues—wouldn't want to see the federal government trying to impose its will on provinces.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

There will be no answer for that one, Mr. Stanton. Thank you.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

I know. It was an editorial comment.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Ms. Barbot, you have five minutes.

[Vivian Barbot, Bloc, Papineau, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you for being here, Mesdames. I'm pleased once again to meet those of you whom I knew well in another life.

Good afternoon, Ms. McGowan. You said that institutions were not good for people. Can you elaborate on your remarks? In my opinion, institutions aren't good if people only use them as a last resort. But when people have gotten to the point where they really need institutional help, it is important that they get it. By enabling people to stay at home longer, your organization is becoming much more appealing and important for people who want to stay at home. You have to take into account people's wish to stay in their home environment for their own well-being. I'd like to hear your comments on that.

Ms. Lévesque and Ms. Desjardins, since we've been talking about the fight against poverty, we've seen that, ultimately, nothing has changed. Measures are taken here and there and, when things move to the left, they then take a turn to the right.

Is that because we, as women, have not yet managed to become aware of the situation of poverty in which we find ourselves as a group and to take action so that measures actually correct the situation. We really get the impression that all we're doing is helping people live better in poverty, whereas the purpose of all these struggles was to get people out of poverty and to ensure they didn't return to it.

[Mary McGowan]

Can I go first? I'll try not to take up all your time.

Yes, I agree that we must have institutions and that they must be good and they must be humane. We have to have institutions for, essentially, two kinds of people: the people who can no longer make rational choice, who are predominantly the people with dementia, and the people who genuinely choose to give up their independence. There is that group of people, and I don't want to take that choice away from them.

We need to support the choice not to be institutionalized. In most situations, in the situation you talked about, there is no choice. It's not “Shall I go to the institution or shall I stay home?” It's “Shall I go to the institution or stay home without anything?”

We have the idea that you're either independent or you're institutionalized. What I'm saying is that there's a bridge, and the bridge is community support.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Ms. Lévesque.

[Sylvie Lévesque]

I'd like to go back to the same subject, and then we can talk about the fight against poverty.

You talked about the communities, but, at the same time, we shouldn't replace the public systems. In Quebec, as in the rest of Canada, we realize that we have to fund and support community or collective systems so that people can stay as close to their families as possible. Prevention will mean that health and social service costs will be lower for society over the long term. It is important to bear that in mind.

In Quebec, we've observed a slight improvement in the fight against poverty. We've come a long way with regard, for example, to women and single-parent families. We need more comprehensive and coherent family policies that help in the fight against poverty. We've denounced the fact for a number of years and a number of studies confirm it: single-parent families are poor.

Everyone knows that more action must be taken. Future generations will attend school more, and poverty will therefore be reduced. Other measures are needed, but there still has to be employment and the necessary resources to improve the situation. That requires major investments over the long term.

[Lorraine Desjardins]

Those investments stem from a societal choice that we should make. The current fashion tends more toward the argument that the debt is so enormous that social programs increase our debt and that we're paying too much in taxes. We must make societal choices and invest. Instead of viewing social programs as expenses, they should instead be viewed as investments. In education, for example, if we enable a woman head of a single-parent family to earn a diploma, she will get a job that will provide her with a decent salary and she will ultimately pay taxes.

[La présidente, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you very much.

We'll go to Ms. Mathyssen, for five minutes.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair. I'd like to give Madame Desjardins an opportunity to answer my question about EI, proactive pay equity, and minimum wage.

[Lorraine Desjardins]

I'd like to talk more about the minimum wage. Today, we presented the short version of our brief, since we only had 10 minutes to present it. Soon you will have the full version translated into your language.

In the fall of 2006, Mr. Harry W. Arthurs, of the Federal Labour Standards Review Commission, tabled a report concerning the minimum wage, among other things. That report recommended that, in 2006, the minimum wage in Canada be $10.22 an hour. And yet, this is not a left wing group. The Commission examined the question and determined that it was more socially cost-effective to increase the minimum wage. That's a very strong argument. I couldn't talk about the study in detail, because I haven't read it from start to finish.

Increasing the minimum wage is of course a key factor. The connection must be made between increases in social assistance benefits and an increase in the minimum wage. We often hear the argument that, if social assistance benefits are increased too far, they will be too close to the minimum wage and that, consequently, that will not encourage people to go off welfare and to enter the labour market. That at least is what we hear in Quebec. That reinforces our argument in favour of increasing the minimum wage.

In Quebec, earning minimum wage and working 40 hours a week does not even enable you to get out of poverty. We have to ask ourselves some serious questions.

[Sylvie Lévesque]

One woman talked about pension reform. Should we increase the guaranteed income supplement? That affects women, most of the time. Every year, I laugh when I receive a notice telling me the amount I can contribute to an RRSP. I say to myself that it will take a long time before I can get to that point. That mainly concerns more well-to-do families.

Single-parent families have average incomes of between $25,000 and $30,000. So they won't be able to contribute to an RRSP overnight. Over the long term, that pushes back the age at which they'll be able to retire.

In Quebec and elsewhere, when people talk about reforming pension plans, there's increasing talk about people retiring much later. They want to raise the retirement age rather than lower it. Women, among others, are very much affected, because most of them are already poor. They don't want to stop working, because they won't have any money and won't have contributed enough to a pension plan. Until what age will they be working? What are their living conditions and quality of life? People are living longer and longer, but are they increasingly rich? That's another question. In my view, we also have to consider that point?

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

You have one minute.

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

Okay.

I appreciate your answer with regard to the minimum wage. In Ontario, we have heard this dire prediction that the sky will fall and 60,000 jobs will be lost, when we know in fact that when we increase the minimum wage, people spend that money in the neighbourhood. They create jobs and they create wealth, because they don't have those offshore tax havens that some people have.

I have one more question. Should the government introduce employment-related measures to bring more women into standard employment, with adequate social benefits, and should there also be a recognition of women's unpaid work?

[Sylvie Lévesque]

I'll answer the second question.

Some women find themselves in a situation where they can't work because they have children. In general, the couple decides quite quickly that the mother will stay at home, even though it is sometimes the father. Demands are being made, together with other groups in Quebec and elsewhere, for there to be social recognition, even though it is not in the form of a salary for people who stay at home, of the fact that people take care of children during that time. It is mainly women who see to the upbringing of children during that period. In financial terms, those women do not have any incomes. We must increasingly consider what measures that should be taken in this regard. In my opinion, we must recognize not only that they are doing good work, but that they have contributed financial to society during those years. This is an important social job.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Merci.

We'll go to Ms. Smith, for five minutes.

[Joy Smith, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Thank you.

Thank you, presenters, for coming today. Your insightful comments have been very useful.

I have a particular question for Mary McGowan. I was really interested, Mary, in what you have said about that bridging between the nursing home and the woman living in her own house. But there's another aspect. In my riding we've had meal programs started, and the big benefit from those is from people getting together socially. They're just at bare cost. They were able to really come out of themselves and feel better, not only psychologically but physically too. Also, if a partner was lost with one of the couples, they had those social supports.

Could you expand a little bit more on what you envision, something like that, through some of these programs that would be put in place? Because it's hit and miss all over the place.

[Mary McGowan]

It is, yes.

Comprehensive seniors services run a pretty broad range. There are social-recreational programs for the healthy senior. You know, that's where you go and you have tai chi and cribbage and things like that. There are also any number of types and varieties of congregate dining. Congregate dining seems so very cold, but we have breakfast programs and lunch programs and supper clubs and diners clubs. People like that, because sharing food is so fundamental, and you tend not to eat very well if you always eat alone. You don't eat very much, and you certainly don't eat much variety.

Moving up the scale from that is personal support. You need personal support for laundry and shopping and transportation. Transportation is huge, so fundamental. If you can't get to the doctor, you call the ambulance and you end up in emergency. You know, it's that kind of thing. If you're not regularly going to the doctor, if you can't get the prescription filled at the pharmacy, you end up sick again. So it's community transportation.

It would be supportive housing, where the unit is designated and personal support workers go in on a regular basis, or adult day programs for people with dementias. You shouldn't be put into a nursing home as soon as you are diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. There is a progress of the disease, and certainly in early stages, they're perfectly able to stay in the community. There's also meals on wheels, for sure that kind of thing.

But the biggie is what we call client intervention and assistance. That is the community worker who ties all the pieces together, works with the client to determine what that client needs, finds where that service is available if the agency doesn't provide it, and ties them all together.

And sometimes, you know, as I say, it's not, strictly speaking, health care. We have a client who had sold ice cream at Maple Leaf Gardens, and all he wanted to do was go back and watch a hockey game. Well, I tell you, it wasn't hard to find volunteers who would take him, and Maple Leaf Gardens, I'd like to say, provided the tickets. It made him happy.

So does that explain it? You need the cluster of services and you need the community worker to tie them together.

[Joy Smith, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Do I have some more time?

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

You have one minute.

[Joy Smith, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

I'm really interested in the immigrant women's situation, where they don't actually have the—I wouldn't say courage, but just the support systems to get to a doctor. Could you comment on that a bit in terms of how it might look making that happen?

[Mary McGowan]

I think if you look at many of the culturally specific agencies--and I think there's a culturally specific agency for just about every immigrant group--if they were funded or mandated to provide seniors services, they'd already have the networks to find the people, and presumably they'd have the correct cultural sensitivity to address the problems.

It's phenomenal. We have newcomer support, and our first newcomer support person was Iranian. Well, heavens above, did we ever have a lot of Iranian newcomers attached to the agency. Then when she went on maternity leave and we had a Guyanese person replace her, wow—now it's Guyanese. And there's no way around that. You will have good access to a community only if you can speak the language—and not just be able to “speak” the language, but to speak the “language”.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

We have time for one more question, because the bells will start ringing at 5:15 and we have some committee business.

While Ms. Minna is asking the question, prepare in your minds what you would like to say as your closing remarks.

Ms. Minna.

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

Thank you.

I'll go back to my original question on the list of potential pensions. Madame Lévesque and Madame Desjardins weren't able to answer and I would really like to know. Do you want me to repeat it? Yes.

On the question of pension reform, I talked earlier about RRSPs. They don't do it, so we need to look at the potential expansion of CPP. There's the dropout rate for childbearing and caregiving—that's another one to help women. There's pension splitting at the time of retirement, increasing the threshold of GIS, and allowing stay-at-home moms to pay into CPP or some other....

Which of those—or a combination—would be most effective? Have you thought of other things? I'm looking at pension reform. We're talking about income security for women and what that's going to look like at the end of the day.