Status of Women Committee on April 17th, 2007

[Robert Wright]

Not directly, as regards the Department of Finance. The Treasury Board usually has responsibility for making commitments that significant. As I just told your colleague Ms. Minna, we had the opportunity, in the context of the last budget, to work in cooperation with the other departments on our analysis

on gender balance.

So we've engaged. In terms of keeping stock of everyone's progress, including Finance's, that is Treasury Board's responsibility. But yes, we are engaged in providing some leadership and support for that analysis. We're just not in a lead role.

[Johanne Deschamps, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

On a completely different topic, is there a rebalancing of government measures in favour of women, particularly regarding housing, employment insurance, child care centres and pay equity, to ensure that the problems women are currently facing are corrected?

[Robert Wright]

I can't really speak about other government programs. Madam Beckton perhaps would be better equipped to talk about that.

I can tell you about some of the measures in our last budget. Again, our focus is on the overall economic health of the economy, the generation of jobs.

We have good news on the impact the economy is having on women's work.

Over the last five years, employment growth has been about 30% faster for women in terms of new job growth and job growth. Wage growth has been about 25% faster every year for the last five years, on average.

So the economy is generating great opportunities for women. We're seeing some catch-up, I'm sure. We track overall economic impact, but in terms of a broader range of policies, the minister responsible for the Status of Women is probably a better place to go to get an overall assessment.

[Johanne Deschamps, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you. I have nothing further to add, in view of the lack of time at our disposal.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you for being here, Mr. Wright and Ms. Éthier.

Ms. Éthier, when were you appointed?

[Mireille Éthier]

I've been working on this issue for nearly two years, since 2005.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

We haven't yet received, in any way, any concrete results from what's been done to date. I'm sure you are working very hard, but we'd like to see concrete results. If you conducted a gender-based analysis in cooperation with Status of Women, I'm sure action was taken in certain areas, and that should appear somewhere. But it appears nowhere.

Can you explain to me why?

[Mireille Éthier]

The work we did with Status of Women was first to develop the expertise to conduct gender-based analysis. We had to train the analysts. Part of the work consisted in making the analysts understand that policy development had to include a gender-based analysis component. That was a large part of the work.

Then we made sure, as Mr. Wright said, that all proposals made to the minister included an analysis. The work with Status of Women that I was referring to consisted first in training the analysts. We are also in virtually permanent contact with Status of Women. When questions arise, we discuss them. We want to move toward a model whereby we will examine more specific issues. That's really part of the development.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Ms. Demers, your time is up.

Mr. Wright, I need a clarification on something you mentioned. To a question that Ms. Deschamps asked, I think you said that there was a $10 million investment in 2007 to the Status of Women. I don't want to put words in your mouth; the $5 million was to put back the 2006 money, reinvest it, and the other $5 million was...?

[Robert Wright]

To supplement their programming for women, for the benefit of women.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Okay. So you wouldn't be aware of what programs it went to.

[Robert Wright]

No. The point I had wanted to make was that they certainly have a strong interest in maintaining the leadership with us on gender-based analysis.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Fair enough. Thank you.

We now go to Ms. Smith for seven minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Wright, and Ms. Éthier, and I applaud you for your work on this issue.

I'm particularly gratified to hear several things that have come up, when you talked about the training for gender-based analysis, for example. I mean, that's never been done before. To see that growth here through your initiatives is very commendable.

Also, when you talk about families, anything that benefits families of course benefits women. The tax initiatives you were talking about are good for the whole family—and certainly women are a very big part of any family. With pension splitting and things like the targeted tax cuts, the GST textbook credit and the credit for families with children involved in physical activity, we've never done those before.

So I applaud the Department of Finance for looking at things on the ground that really affect women. I know, as a mother of six children, that anything I can do for my family like that in the real world is very good.

Today when we talk about gender-based analysis, there's another thing we haven't touched on, and that is pay equity. I was very, very gratified to see that for the first time supervisors were put in places and businesses to look at pay equity, seeing how it was dealt with in different kinds of businesses, and to see the supervisors' role in doing that.

So perhaps you could talk a little bit more, first, about the training for gender-based analysis because, certainly, people should have been trained long before 2006 and 2007, and I appreciate the initiative that has been put forth on that. And, secondly, on pay equity, never before can I remember in the history of Canada a concerted effort by supervisors to actually go into businesses and take a look at pay equity and analyze exactly what's going on at all levels.

So perhaps you could address these two issues today.

[Mireille Éthier]

Thank you for your question.

Yes, we've been doing gender-based analysis, in some sense, without using the word, for a very long time. In doing the child tax benefit, for example, or changing the child care expense deduction, and things of that nature, we've always been conducting gender-based analysis. However, it wasn't called that, if you wish, and maybe it wasn't systematic in other areas, or areas that are more social in nature or more geared towards the family.

So for training, we and Status of Women did some case studies with the analysts, using some real life case studies and putting everybody together in a room and asking, if this is the kind of measure you have to analyze, how would you go about it? It was really formalizing something that people were doing in certain cases, but at least making the analysis systematic and presenting it in a systematic way in every proposal put forward.

From that perspective, we now have a vocabulary of gender-based analysis that everybody understands and can actually use, and they know what the ramifications of that are. Also, by putting it in every proposal, this raises its profile, because along with strategic environmental assessments, it's now part of the format, if you wish, or template used to present every proposal.

We plan to do some more training as well. What's interesting is that it's not training in gender-based analysis in a conceptual world; it's actually working with the analysts and asking how they do it in their day-to-day lives and add to the process.

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

How much time do I have, Madam Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

You have two and a half minutes.

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

I had another very important thing. We did not have cuts to the Status of Women. What we did was take a look at the money and put it into on-the-ground projects for women so they could be successful, projects such as the Crossing Communities Art Project, which I had the pleasure of being at. The fact of the matter is that there was $165,000 put into that project. This is a project for women who have been abused.

I talked to some aboriginal women at that particular announcement, and I'll never forget this one girl, Jacquie, who took all the pain she felt and put it into her art and she told her story. There were stories and stories and stories about how these women had built new lives and things like that.

This just happened last weekend. I was very gratified to see that the thrust in Status of Women into providing on-the-ground support for women and women's organizations was very, very good, and that came out of the finance department.

Would you mind elaborating a little bit more on the financial part of what has been put into programs on the ground for women all across the country? I know there was another announcement of $5 million made by the minister--I believe it was on April 1, in Toronto--on this particular issue.

[Robert Wright]

I would just say that it's in the finance budget. It was followed on a very strong case made by the minister responsible, to Minister Flaherty and to the Prime Minister. So it was an additional $10 million that was put out to ensure this programming can keep going, and in a number of other areas, including the $300 million for cervical cancer, which had a huge impact.

As I mentioned, in the tax balance of things, including WITB, which is a low-income tax benefit allowance to get people off welfare, much of that goes to—

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

So there seems to be a lot of support all across the ministries, certainly in Status of Women but also all across the portfolios. Can you comment on that?

[Robert Wright]

There is. The minister has set the broad priorities. He has engaged his colleagues, and they've weighed up the approach in the budget. So the budget had obviously a focus on supporting families with children, but also there was a broader gender approach, an environmental approach, but a very strong economic approach as well. As I just mentioned, the economic drivers to grow the economy for the benefit of all Canadians have had, over the last five years, a very material impact on the livelihood and prosperity of Canadian women. That's something we also keep our mind on.

So the process is that the minister sets his broad objectives, and he engages broadly with his cabinet colleagues, with Canadians across the country. He met throughout his caucus, certainly, but in every region of the country, looking for ideas of what are the barriers to growth and what does it take to build a stronger, better, and more economically viable Canada, and on that basis he acted.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Ms. Smith, your time is up.

Mr. Wright, you just made a statement about getting women off welfare. You're talking about income levels, of low income and middle income. So while you're doing that analysis and you're presenting an analysis to us, could you also explain to us how a person earning $22,000 is too rich to get the child tax benefit and too poor to get the working income benefit, just so that we know? We need to understand those nuances of the budget. I'm an accountant by trade, so I know these things. So we have to work this out to say, how do we reasonably understand and move forward with it?

Ms. Mathyssen, for seven minutes.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you for being here. I have a number of questions, and some of them come from the testimony so far. You talked about the purpose of the budget being the generation of jobs, and you went on to say that employment growth among women is 30% faster than it has been in the past. I've wondered if you've looked at who these women are who are entering the workforce. Are they single women? Are you talking about women without children? Are you talking about women who have perhaps finished raising their children?

[Robert Wright]

Well, actually I was saying that it's not just 30% faster than it was in the past, it's 30% faster than the growth for men. So I was saying that more women are entering the workforce and finding employment. Not only that, the wage growth for women has been about 25% faster than the wage growth for men.

So there are some important things going on in the workforce, but I'm afraid I don't have the detailed analysis to follow up on the observations you've just made.

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

Okay.

We heard from Stats Canada, and they discussed this in relation to the increases women had seen, and basically it was women in the under-25 age group who were experiencing these increases. That led me to wonder if you had done any research or analysis on the impact on women who are at that child-bearing age who may find themselves unable to remain the workforce, or to have the same number of hours as their male counterparts, because either they're looking after children or they're caught in that sandwich generation where there are elderly parents who are dependent on them.

The reason I ask is that there was an additional study presented to us, and it indicated that women, even women with higher education, professional women, were still only at about 48% of their male counterparts because they were very often unable to secure child care. And certainly for poorer women, finding affordable child care impacts on their ability to enter the workforce.

So these are all important bits and pieces, I think, of the statistics, then. I wonder if you could clarify any of those.