Status of Women Committee on May 10th, 2007

[Colleen Purdon]

It means that if you are at home with your children you know you're going to have money. So if it comes as a social security or welfare payment, there will be enough money coming in to pay your expenses. We don't have national standards any longer for things like welfare. Each province organizes it the way they want. In Ontario they cut welfare rates by 20%, and people can't feed their families. So I think there needs to be some agreement that we want children to have enough to eat in our country, and provincial and federal governments need to get their acts together to make that happen.

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

But it's not all just a matter of welfare rates, is it?

[Colleen Purdon]

Well, it's disability, welfare, and employment insurance, where there is a huge area for reform. Why are women who are self-employed not eligible for maternity benefits, for example?

There's also the issue of pension levels, disability pensions and pensions for women. For a woman like my mother, who stayed home and raised eight children and never worked, she's not eligible. My mother now gets to live in poverty, because my father has died.

These are the kinds of things we need to be looking at.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you very much.

We now go to Ms. DeBellefeuille.

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry, QC]

Thank you very much.

I represent a rural riding. There is a farm women's union that is currently fighting for the recognition of their role as a financial partner; they want the fact that they work alongside their husband and contribute to the farm to be acknowledged. Over the years, they have managed to gain official positions in various agricultural unions in Quebec.

For a number of years now, farm women have been fighting for access to maternity leave benefits. There have been improvements to parental leave provisions in Quebec. Thanks to federal transfers, we have been able to develop a rather acceptable system of parental leave.

The problem is that farm women, because they are self-employed or are considered spouses, are not eligible for parental leave benefits when they have a child. This often leads to financial hardship for the family because, after the child is born, the woman must hire someone to do the work that she would normally be doing on the farm.

I am well aware of what Quebec farm women are doing to fight for this change to the Labour Code so that they will be recognized and will be eligible for parental leave, and so they will not incur any type of financial penalty for having children.

I don't know if the situation is the same in other provinces, but what is strange is that the father is eligible and is entitled to five weeks of parental leave, while the mother has no right to any parental leave whatsoever. The woman gives birth to the child and the man is given leave! That is the struggle that Quebec women are engaged in. I think they will succeed, because these women have never been shy about speaking out.

Does your research show that women from other provinces are experiencing the same type of thing? Have they told you that having children makes them poorer?

[Diane Martz]

I would say certainly. It's related to all the other things we've been talking about here, in that farm women with children don't have a whole lot of options in terms of child care and the other things they might need to enable them to either take a job off the farm or to work full-time on the farm as an equal partner in the farming operation.

So it sounds like a really interesting thing that the women in Quebec are fighting for, and I think it will be great news for women across Canada who are also trying to fight for some recognition on the farm.

[Colleen Purdon]

I think it's the same for self-employed women. Many women in rural communities are self-employed, because there are no jobs. They're very innovative; they make a job and they do it. They don't make much money, but they make enough to keep themselves together and feed their families, but then when it comes to maternity benefits or pensions, or if they get sick, they have nothing to fall back on.

So I think we need to be looking at more supports in rural communities so that women can work in rural communities and contribute to their communities and their families, but have some security to fall back on when things happen—or when they want to have a baby.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Is that all? Thank you.

Madam Mathyssen for five minutes.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

We've heard about the depopulation of rural Canada, which a group of women from rural Nova Scotia came here to talk about. What they proposed was that since health care services and child care and all the services we do have are calculated by population rather than need, it should be inverted and service provision should be based on need.

How would that help rural women? Would that make a difference?

[Diane Martz]

I think it would make a huge difference, in that this scenario should put some of those services back into rural communities. In terms of the lost health care services in rural communities, women are doing an awful lot of backfilling there--running their parents into the city for doctors appointments, looking after their day-to-day needs. One of the women who works with me goes to see her mother every day at noon. It reduces her mobility in terms of a job and so on.

This loss of services is really critical, both from a service perspective and also from an employment perspective, because the good jobs in rural communities were teachers and nurses and those kinds of jobs, in which they got decent wages.

[Colleen Purdon]

I think we need to rethink rural communities as places to live; we need to recognize that we might need a different approach to policy and funding for rural communities from urban communities, and that actually one size does not fit all. I think we all know that, but we just seem to keep doing it. If we want to keep rural communities as viable places for people to live and work, we're going to have to approach funding and program and policy differently. We just have to do that.

I live in a rural community, and I would love my children to live there, too, but it's rather unlikely that they would because they're not prepared to live on almost no income. Again, it's one of these big questions. We can't all live in Toronto. So why can't some people live in Grey and Bruce?

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

Ms. Gabriel, one of the recommendations in your presentation was to:

Provide awareness training on Aboriginal culture to managers in the federal public service and to managers of private companies that come under the jurisdiction of the Employment Equity Act to demystify issues regarding the hiring of Aboriginal employees....

Could you expand on that and explain that particular recommendation?

[Ellen Gabriel]

The royal commission has stated very clearly that services need to be reflective or accommodating to the cultural realities and the values that aboriginal people face; otherwise it's been proven that it does not meet the needs of aboriginal women or aboriginal people in general.

I forgot my train of thought.

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

You once told me that language was absolutely essential to first nations. Unfortunately, we've seen cuts to language programs.

Can you elaborate on why language is key to the community and to the security of women?

[Ellen Gabriel]

Well, a lot of women speak their aboriginal language, and in Quebec it's a little bit problematic because we have to learn French or English. Sometimes the services are not offered in English; sometimes they're not offered for the aboriginal people, especially from isolated communities. So the services need to really meet the needs of aboriginal women, become more reflective of the values, because we're losing our language. We are forced always into little boxes that are taking away our identities. It's eroding our identity constantly.

I'm sorry, I think I'm just tired, because I had something to tell you. I'm sorry, I know my time's running out.

There are informal economies as well. Some people think people don't have an interest. For instance, the Cree take time off in the fall to go hunting. So you have informal economies with which people subsidize an income, to do arts and crafts. But also these kinds of activities that happen in communities, of hunting, of going away to pick medicines--these employers think there's not an interest, but there is an interest.

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

I know exactly what you mean. It was the same with the kids I taught in the school, where there was a huge population of first nations kids—

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you, Ms. Mathyssen.

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

—and they would leave and it was, “Oh, well, they're not interested in school”.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Ms. Smith, for five minutes.

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

Thank you.

I want to thank each presenter here today for your very insightful comments and your sage advice. I commend all of you for your very hard work.

I grew up in rural Manitoba, and we were very poor growing up, so I know a great deal of what you're talking about.

That's why we invite people to committees, for solutions. I know some of you have been involved politically because you feel very strongly about your views, and I commend you for that, especially to see women do that.

Ellen, if you would bear with me for a few minutes, I was very interested in a comment you made. My son is married to an Ojibway girl, and we're a multi-ethnic family. I was very interested...you just said a brief sentence, but it had such a big impact because it's what I'm hearing over and over again, when you talked about culture and education. I've had the opportunity, as a former teacher, to work on reserves.

Could you comment a bit on...? We talk about dollars and cents and we talk about political programs and about this, that, and the other thing. But the real root, the heart and soul of aboriginal people, is the culture. Could you make some comment in terms of the culture and its importance in the education of the children and their well-being so they understand their roots?

[Ellen Gabriel]

Sure. We talk about colonization and its impact, and one of the things that is very important to groups like Quebec Native Women and other organizations is the reinforcement of identity, the reinforcement of culture and language, as you were talking about.

For us to be a proud people once again, we need to have that back in our schools. We need children to learn the value. They need to learn their roles in society. This is the role of women, this is the role of men, and each one should be respected. Each one is dependent upon the other.

If we look at the problems we face in our community, it's because there's been an attack on our culture. There's been an attack on those values of how we organize ourselves socially.

Until people really understand how important it is for aboriginal people to retain that, we're not going to succeed. We're always going to be a problem, the Indian problem in Canadian society.

That's not what we want. We want to be independent people, people who are taking control of our destiny.

Until we get that in the schools, until we sensitize the public.... All the efforts we've tried have not changed the attitudes of the public much. But until we get that going, we're going to be struggling and, in a sense, spinning our wheels in the mud.

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

Thank you.

How much time do I have, Madam Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

One minute.

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

Could you also speak briefly about the very important role of women in aboriginal society? I think that role has been lost in some ways, which is sad. Could you comment?

[Ellen Gabriel]

The role is to pass on the language, to carry on the culture, to teach those values. My society is a matrilineal society, so we were title holders to the land and protectors of the land, because we're like Mother Earth; we nourish.

Those are the kinds of things we have lost because of colonization. The role of the women has always been equal to the men. As I said, we were the inspiration for feminists because they saw that aboriginal women took an equal part in the decision-making process and in keeping the nation strong.