Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Ms. Tittley, for allowing us to come before this committee. It's been a while since we've been here. I want to thank Ms. Minna and Mr. Stanton, who separately made sure that we appeared.
Today we've been asked to talk more about the income security of immigrant women. That's a broad subject in itself. Accordingly, we will focus our observations on newcomers, that is to say women who have been living in Canada for 10 years or less.
At the risk of seeming irritating, the National Organization of Immigrant and Visible Minority Women of Canada maintains that newcomers and their families have a problem of income security and impoverishment. They suffer from having to enter a flexible labour market and from getting only unconventional jobs. A disproportionate number of immigrant women suffer the consequences of this state of affairs.
Immigrants are an urban phenomenon in Canada, Toronto being the destination of choice for most of them, followed by Vancouver, then Montreal. Newcomers are swelling the ranks of poor workers.
What does income insecurity look like to newcomers? From where we sit at the National Organization of Immigrant and Visible Minority Women of Canada, of which I am the executive director, immigrant women and their spouses arrive with higher qualifications than their Canadian counterparts but are consigned to something we like to call “McJobs”, jobs that are low-wage, dead-end, and unskilled.
Immigrant families arrive here as middle-class professionals with their life savings clutched in their hot little hands, which are soon eaten up in subsidizing their basic needs, with little chance of requalification and upgrading. Shortly after landing, they join the ranks of the working poor, with little hope of escape within a decade.
If, within a family, one person has to requalify, it is usually the man, who generally holds the visa for the family. And even then, they hesitate to take on that level of debt, knowing that some day their children will have to assume debts of their own for their education.
Some immigrant women are fortunate enough to find employment in a variety of small or medium-sized immigrant-serving agencies, and they lurch from contract to contract. Much of the settlement work in Canada is carried out by poorly remunerated workers, often working part-time, often without any benefits.
Men usually will not consider such jobs, preferring to drive cabs. At least they escape from the home that way.
In a family I know, of immigrant origin, the university-aged children jokingly refer to their engineer father as “that subsidizer”, not only for them but also for their mother who works in settlement services.
Chen, Ng, and Wilkins, in 1996, studied the effect of immigration on immigrants' health. Immigrants arrive here healthy but lose that advantage compared to native-born Canadians over time. It is our contention that much of this can be attributed to the erosion of their standard of living and the quality of their lives. Working-poor immigrants are underemployed while being overqualified, stuck in McJobs that are seasonal and part-time, that carry no benefits, no employer-sponsored health and life insurance, dental plans, or drug plans. Immigrant families live in constant dread of workplace-related or other accidents, of illness brought on by the stresses and strains of making ends meet, and of worrying about their children's future.
Income insecurity means no money to put into RESPs for their children's education, so they cannot benefit from the changes to RESP contributions as put forward in the last federal budget. It also means that parents will deny themselves and take on two or three other jobs in order to ensure that their children get an education and get ahead.
For these people, income instability means very few or no opportunities to save for their old age by investing in RRSPs for their eventual retirement. In the medium and long terms, this segment of the population will eventually constitute a heavy burden for Canadian society.
Sector workers expect that the frustration caused by under-employment and the stress of holding more than one job and of shift work will put enormous pressure on family life, causing conflicts between spouses and between parents and children often leading to marital violence and the break-up of relationships.
We also wish to emphasize that violence against women and children, particularly girls, is unacceptable in any circumstance and that such acts cannot in any case be justified on the basis of culture and tradition.
Employment insurance, as it is structured presently, does not allow the majority of immigrants to access EI benefits. Employment insurance does not recognize the exigencies of a flexible labour market. It hearkens back to an era of stable jobs for life.
A CLC undated study shows that 20% of immigrant men who experience at least two weeks of unemployment received EI benefits in 2000, compared to 32% of non-immigrant men. In the same period, only 19% of immigrant women collected EI benefits, compared to 30% of women of non-immigrant origin.
It is likely that immigrant women are ineligible because of the work they do and because child rearing and caregiving responsibilities cause them to detach from the workforce for extended periods. Newcomer women usually do not have the bonding capital or network that can support their nurturing roles. Isolation is the newcomer woman's curse.
Income splitting is not a solution for the newcomer population. NOIVM believes that the social costs of income insecurity of immigrant women and their families has never really been computed. Such a study, NOIVM believes, belongs to the domain of a joint meeting of the standing committees on the status of women and citizenship and immigration. They need to commission a study of the social costs of income security on immigrant families.
I thank you for your indulgence.