Thank you for the opportunity to be here. I'm here today as a volunteer representing UNPAC Manitoba. UNPAC is the United Nations Platform for Action Committee.
In Winnipeg I am self-employed. I do research, much of it focused on gender and women's health and social and economic situation.
UNPAC Manitoba has existed since 1995, when 45 Manitoba women who attended the UN Fourth World Congress on Women in Beijing returned and were keen, as Armine has talked about, to carry on the work and to really hold the feet of government to the fire here to ensure that Canada lives up to its commitments under the Beijing Platform for Action.
UNPAC has existed since that time. From 2003 to 2007 UNPAC received funding from Status of Women Canada for its gender budgeting project. UNPAC has also received funding from the Province of Manitoba and hopes to again receive funding from Status of Women Canada to continue its work. Currently, all staff have been laid off because of these funding cuts.
I want to talk a bit about UNPAC's gender budget project, the overall goal of which is to reduce women's poverty. We're not interested in abstract studies of federal and provincial government budgets. Government policies and budgetary decisions can either alleviate or exacerbate women's disproportionate burden of poverty.
UNPAC has used education, consultation, and working with decision-makers to reach its goals, adopting a treetops and grassroots approach, working both with government decision-makers, the treetops, and with local women, the grassroots.
The grassroots part of this strategy involved 46 workshops over two years from 2005 to 2007. The workshops were held across Manitoba to introduce mostly low-income women to government budgeting processes and to learn from them about their priorities for government revenues and expenditures. They were designed to be fun and interactive.
UNPAC also developed a cartoon character, La Femme Fiscale. If you have my written presentation, she's on page 2. La Femme appeared in cartoons and in postcards, to popularize these issues. She also appeared in person at the Manitoba legislature to comment on the 2006 and 2007 provincial budgets.
Those 46 workshops held across our province over two years identified a number of issues. The themes—Armine and I did not plan this—sound remarkably similar. The first was housing, housing, and housing; the second, child care; the third, affordable public transportation; the fourth, employment, work, and income—decent-paying jobs, pay equity, and better employment options for women—health, including a greater focus on prevention; intersectionality, that is programs that recognize the ways in which all of these factors combine to hold women back; government programs with long-term stable funding, adequate resources, and staff sensitive to the needs and experiences of low-income women; and government revenue.
As the previous two speakers have mentioned, the perspectives of the women who attended these workshops are not really in sync with current federal government initiatives. They called for increased corporate taxes, higher personal income taxes for high-income earners, luxury and sin taxes, such as a tax on junk food, and green taxes.
That was the grassroots part of UNPAC's work. What about the treetops?
The treetops part of the strategy was designed to get the message about the importance of gender analysis and the priorities of women attending the workshops to key decision-makers.
At the close of each workshop, women had the opportunity to write a letter to their local MLA, asking that gender analysis be made part of the budget process and naming their own specific budget priorities. Letters were copied to the Minister of Finance and the Minister responsible for the Status of Women.
UNPAC also met with our provincial Minister of Finance, the Hon. Greg Selinger, and other key ministers, such as the Minister responsible for the Status of Women and the Minister of Family Services and Housing.
With the assistance of the Minister of Finance, these meetings were followed by ongoing meetings with senior staff to discuss options about how government could use the results of the grassroots consultations.
As a result of these initiatives, the Minister of Finance expressed an interest in improving gender and diversity analysis skills among provincial civil servants. UNPAC encouraged these efforts and supported the idea of pilot projects as a way to both test the usefulness of GBA and to build skills internally.
At the first stage, the province prioritized analyses of the situations of aboriginal women and men and boys and girls, and women and men and boys and girls with disabilities. And in my professional life, I was contracted to lead this project.
We began with training in gender and diversity analysis for program managers and policy analysts, and this was followed by four pilot projects on priority issues that were identified by departments, one with Aboriginal and Northern Affairs, one with the Public Library Services Branch, one on housing that I will describe to you in more detail, and one with Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Initiatives.
In the remainder of my presentation I would like to focus on the portion of the work done in the Manitoba Family Services and Housing pilot project. The department was interested in learning more about the demographics of those Manitobans living in what Statistics Canada calls “core housing need”.
And if you have the English version of my written brief, that definition appears in a footnote at the bottom of page 5. It deals with three elements: affordability, suitability, and adequacy of housing.
Manitoba Housing was interested in understanding more about the population living in core housing need in order to better plan for the development and redevelopment of social housing in our province, particularly in Winnipeg.
Usually, data about core housing needs are published about households. This seems to make intuitive sense--people live in households--but it masks the sex differences in the incidence of core housing need.
If you look at figure 1, which is on page 5 of the English version of my brief, you'll see a standard presentation of that. In Winnipeg, as in Manitoba and Canada as a whole, the percentage of households living in core housing need increased from 1991 to 1996 and then decreased from 1996 to 2001. Since 1996, Winnipeg's core housing need rate has been lower than that for both Manitoba and Canada. So where is the problem? Why are all you women complaining?
In 2001 there were just over 60,000 Winnipegers living in core housing need. By including gender in our analysis, we discovered that women had a higher incidence of core housing need. In Winnipeg and in Manitoba as a whole, for every 100 males living in core housing need, there were about 125 females. So at the very outset you can see just simple sex disaggregation of the data makes a big difference to our understanding. That's shown in figure 2, which is on page 6 of the English version of my brief.
We also wanted to examine core housing need among males and females through the life course. We found that the largest group of Winnipeg residents living in core housing need were children, almost 21,000 of them, and young adults aged 18 to 44, particularly young women. About 13,600 young women lived in core housing need in my city in 2001. This is shown in figure 3.