Status of Women Committee on March 29th, 2007

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Thank you so much. We really appreciate your presentation.

Ms. Bose, could you please give us your presentation?

[Dr. Anuradha Bose, Executive Director and Project Manager, National Organization of Immigrant and Visible Minority Women of Canada]

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.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

I thank you so much for your presentations today.

Now we are going into round one. Seven minutes--that is the question and the answer period.

Could we start with Ms. Minna.

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

Thank you. I wasn't chatting. My colleague and I were sharing different pieces of information here, so I didn't mean to insult the presenters.

In any case, I have a lot of questions, and a lot of the information I do understand with respect to the immigrant and visible minority women's.... Both organizations have been very familiar to me, of course, for many years.

Let me start with Ms. Lucya.

There are a lot of aspects I want to get at, but one of them, in particular. You earlier mentioned the average and the median incomes, and you were talking about immigrant families. I think you said $28,000 was the median, but then it was much lower, at $23,000, for certain immigrant families. This brings me to a question of how we try to help families.

Under the most recent child credit, for instance, if you're making $35,000 and up, you get the $310, but below that you don't. It's peanuts, and then it goes down lower, so you actually miss out. So are you telling me today that in essence the majority of immigrant families, a very large number anyway, are not going to benefit from that?

[Lucya Spencer]

Yes, exactly. Based on the information we have received through our research, we do believe that many immigrant women will definitely not benefit from it at all because of their employment situation.

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

Because the work supplement or the work credit actually dies at 21, there is a big chunk in between, and then it starts to peter out anyway. I forget the exact numbers, but I have a table that I've drawn out. It goes, I think, up to $12,000, and then it starts to go out. So actually there is a big chunk of families that are just kind of stuck in that.

[Lucya Spencer]

They're stuck, yes.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Are you talking about individuals as opposed to families?

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

I'm talking about the child credit, for starters, which doesn't apply to them at all, actually. So they're losing out on the jobs, and now they're losing out on the benefits, which is a huge problem. I just wanted to highlight that, because it is very important to look at.

One of the things I have tried to push for a long time is to use the gender lens when we do policy, and also the gender-racial lens or immigrant lens. Call it the multicultural lens, or whatever you want to call it. Without using that, we really miss out on a whole lot of things. Obviously this is one good example of how we're missing out on those families.

The other question is about income splitting, and that was mentioned by you, Ms. Bose, and actually also by Ms. Fyfe. With respect to farmers, it's the same thing, actually. Income splitting doesn't really help, because there isn't a lot of money. Income splitting for the purpose of income tax is pension splitting. According to the analysis I've looked at, which the Caledon Institute did, if you have pensionable earnings of $100,000, you save $7,000. Then when you're down to $30,000 pensionable earnings, you are at a lower rate, and then you start to really peter out until you have none.

Most of the families that are arriving, actually because of their number of years here, have very little of that.

In farming, again you mentioned, Ms. Fyfe, the need for a homemaker's pension or a pension for farm women. Actually, many European countries do in fact have that for women, which they can pay into.

My question to all three of you, though, when we are talking about women's economic security, is whether you have--whatever you call it--a homemaker's pension or strictly a pension for women.

In your case, you're working on the farm. How would you structure that? That's my first question.

Ms. Bose and Ms. Spencer, could you include in your answer how you would deal with the fact that most immigrant women come here at a certain age, an adult age, so that they actually don't have a full work lifetime to contribute to this kind of scheme?

[Karen Fyfe]

I'll have to admit that this is a relatively new tack for the National Farmers Union to take, looking at pensions for farm women.

Because we're so few and spread across a large country, we do a lot of networking and a lot of coalition work. The B.C. Farm Women's Network has taken it under their wing to look at exactly how pensions for farm women would look. They are the group of women who are analyzing this and are coming up with some very workable solutions.

As I said, this is my second round of being an elected official with the National Farmers Union. Back in the early to mid-1990s, I worked with women like Linde Cherry from the interior of British Columbia, as well as Carolyn Van Dine in New Brunswick. We pushed, first of all, for a recognition of farm women as professionals equal to any other women in professions out there in which women are working, and we deserve our own pension plan.

Many of us are working three jobs. We are working at raising a family, so we're stay-at-home moms; we are working at our jobs on the farm; and we are working off the farm. Then we are volunteering to keep what's left of our little rural communities alive.

So if there is some way of having all of that valued in terms of the monetary or financial contribution, and then looking at how to set up a pension that captures all of that economic activity we've generated and all of that wealth we've produced, that's the type of stuff the British Columbia women are working on, and it is certainly a project that I'm willing to undertake.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

You have 30 seconds left.

[Dr. Anuradha Bose]

For us it's again a very new field, entering into the whole question of pensions and financing of RESPs, etc.

One thing I should have said is that neither income splitting nor pension splitting means very much to newcomer families.

One thing that might be looked at is the whole question of portability of pensions. I'm speaking from a personal point of view. I've worked in four countries, and there are two countries with which the government does not have a bilateral treaty, so there is money in a pension fund somewhere that I cannot access because there is no treaty governing these two countries.

This is something that will require more study than we have resources for. It is something that I think needs to be done.

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

We just got rid of the research department at--

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

We're out of time right now. Can we go to Ms. Demers, please.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

The position of chair suits you well, madam.

Mesdames, thank you for being here today. Thank you very much for the courage you continue to show in believing that you can really change the way policies are developed for women. Thank you for believing in us, thank you for believing that your presentation is important for us.

Ms. Spencer, I have a question for you that can also be put to Ms. Bose and Ms. Fyfe. Ms. Spencer, you told us about immigrant women of all ages, but we know that, as we age, it's even more difficult because we have fewer means, fewer pensions and so on. One bill currently under study, Bill C-36, limits access to the Guaranteed Income Supplement for immigrant women who are still being sponsored. To date, the act enabled those women to access the Guaranteed Income Supplement.

Do you believe this change is positive? Do you believe it can help immigrant women, if a bill further limits their access? Personally, I find it contradictory, but we're told this is better for immigrant women. I'd like to have your opinion on the subject.

[Lucya Spencer]

I'm not too familiar with Bill C-36 at this time, but I'll attempt to respond to your question.

You're saying that this bill, to make sure I have it correctly--

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

That restricts—

[Lucya Spencer]

--will limit the access of immigrant women.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

—access for immigrant women who are no longer being sponsored. Those who are still sponsored would no longer have access to the Guaranteed Income Supplement.

[Lucya Spencer]

That is pretty sad, because what we are looking at here is women who have come to the country for a particular reason. Yes, some of them have come to the country sponsored by a partner or a husband; we know that sometimes a number of things happen within the family that cause a breakdown, and they have to separate from that particular partner or husband through no fault of their own. To actually limit the access these women have to this other source of income will be penalizing them on top of the situation they have gone through.

If that's the direction the government is thinking of going in, to me it's a bit unfair to this particular group in society.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Fyfe, I acknowledge your courage all the more. I know how it is: my father was raised in Saskatchewan, on a farm in Shaunavon, and today there are no more farms or villages in the entire region. It's very small, virtually no one is left, older people are still there, and that's all.

You told us a lot about the advances you've made. You told us about a pension fund which you, women farmers, and farmers' wives, can access. It's true that it's thanks to you that we eat every day. I like eating, so I want you to continue existing; that's important for me.

But you told us some things I don't understand. Last week, when the Wheat Board was transformed, 62% of farmers voted in favour of that transformation. You're telling us that's not a good thing, that it's not right that it was transformed. So I don't understand. Yesterday there were questions on the subject in the House, and we were told that no farmers were talking about it. Last night, I listened to a Liberal Party debate on the subject. They said that the Liberal Party wasn't putting farmers...

You're a farmer. Can you tell us how that changes your situation? How does the fact that the Wheat Board has been changed make the situation tougher?

[Karen Fyfe]

Thank you very much for the question.

I won't use language that's too complicated or try to be too critical, but I think sometimes being critical might be a good thing. This is an issue that will lead to more rural poverty in Manitoba and Saskatchewan and the higher grain growing areas of Alberta where those grain farmers are removed enough from the Canadian-American border that their transportation costs are higher.

There is a saying that no matter what set of figures you're looking at, you can interpret them to suit your own agenda. If it would please you, Ms. Demers, I could leave you with an article that our president, Stewart Wells, has written to Mr. Strahl about the smoke-and-mirrors campaign on the Canadian Wheat Board.

There were three valid questions on the ballot that were put to the grain farmers.

One, do you want the Canadian Wheat Board to continue being the buyer and seller of Canadian-grown barley? That means all barley except feed barley would continue going through the board.

Two, Do you want to be your own buyer and seller? Instead of having the board doing it, you'd have all the individual farmers out west finding their market and then selling.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Excuse me, this must be relevant to what we're talking about.

[Karen Fyfe]

This is very relevant, Joy. We're talking about the economic security of western farmers.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Joy Smith]

Madam, your time is up, but you can continue with your next questions. I try to be fair to all presenters. We're all so enthusiastic about everything we say that we could have a week's seminar on it.

Thank you so much. Not to be rude, but we must go on.

Mr. Stanton.