Eight minutes, all right. I think what I'll do then is probably start with the recommendations and then try to move to the context.
First, what I'd like to say is how pleased I am to be here on behalf of the Antigonish Women's Resource Centre and to have an opportunity to speak to the realities of the life of women in some of our very rural east coast communities, women who are struggling to keep their families together and their communities alive, and for whom the employment insurance system is really not working well. So I really feel I need to give you a bit of context for the lives of women in rural Nova Scotia, but I really do want to get to the recommendations first.
In preparing this brief, I spoke with women working primarily in women's centres and other women's organizations that provide services in rural communities. One of our recommendations is that the EI system and EI programs are better recognized and become a more integral part of the social safety net if they address the poverty of women head-on, because without that, we're really dealing in a very piecemeal way with systems that are not supporting women in our rural communities.
I think the other question we have to ask ourselves is, do we want our rural communities to survive? And if we do, then we have to start to pay attention. But right now, we're not paying attention to our rural communities. If we want our rural communities to survive, then we have to understand the role that women play in those rural communities; it's integral, absolutely integral, in holding together family and community. Women do hundreds of hours of unpaid work in communities that are increasingly under-serviced and increasingly losing their infrastructure, and that are losing the types of good-paying jobs that women were doing. As I say, it's becoming increasingly difficult.
So one of the things we would like to suggest right off the top is that it's time for Canada to consider the implementation of a universal guaranteed livable income program, of which the EI system and EI programs are primary pieces.
We need to set the threshold for EI eligibility at 360 hours for everyone. What we're finding in our rural communities is that women are working casual, part-time, low-paid jobs and they're not eligible for EI. They can't even enter the EI system because it's so difficult to amass the number of hours required to enter it.
We need to provide benefits at a rate that is 65% of the best 12 weeks of someone's earnings, because what's happening with women is that as employment peters out and they're doing two and three jobs, then often their last 12 weeks of earnings are their worst 12 weeks. So when they're doing low-paid work, the last 12 weeks are their worst 12 weeks—and then they're only receiving 55% of that income. They're living at a level very significantly below the poverty line.
So what we also want to see is that EI be set at a rate that is at least 10% above the low-income cut-off for any given region. If we're setting it lower than that, then what we're saying as a Canadian society is that it's okay for people to be living in poverty, that we're cool with it. So if we aren't happy with that, then we have to set an EI rate that is at least 10% above the low-income cut-off.
We need to provide benefits to a maximum of 52 weeks in all regions, including areas where unemployment is above the national average. And believe me, in rural Nova Scotia it has been significantly above the national average during our boom times. So now what's happening when we're going into an economic recession is that it's again increasing significantly. So we need to increase the benefit period accordingly.
We need to ensure that there are sufficient programs in place so that retraining programs are accessible to the women living in rural under-serviced areas. When we have retraining programs that are town-centred and we don't have public transportation systems, women can't get to these programs. In rural communities, particularly with low-income families, they're dependent upon cars for transportation. Often those cars are older cars requiring high maintenance, and often there's one car per family. So when you have to get to a retraining program in one town and child care in another town, and you have one family vehicle, and your partner—if you do have a partner—is working in another town, then it's virtually impossible to access retraining programs. We really have to think this through with a rural lens.
One of our suggestions is that we make summer student programs accessible to all students regardless of age, so that women who are going back for retraining and trying to upgrade their skills can get some experience through summer work in the same way as under-30 students can. Also, we need to look at making some of these opportunities available to women who are over 55 so that they can access some of the summer student programs in the same way as students can, particularly when they're seeking to try to upgrade their skills so they can re-enter the workforce.
We want you to develop and implement a federal poverty reduction strategy that uses a rural lens and is grounded in providing for the social as well as the economic well-being of people in communities, and to establish a poverty line that accounts for transportation and the additional cost of living in rural and isolated areas of Canada. When we're looking at EI, particularly if we are saying, okay, we need that to be 10% above the low-income cut-off.... The low-income cut-off doesn't include transportation. As I said, when you're living in a rural community and you're car dependent, that's really expensive, and it needs to be thought through and included in that.
We want to forgive student debt. What we're seeing right now in our rural communities is that in rural Nova Scotia we're already coming from a province that has been substantially poorer than many of the other provinces in Canada, so family income is low. The average income is below the median income, and unemployment is higher. We have the highest student tuition in our universities in the country. Students who are struggling to try to get to university are coming out with massive debts. It's very difficult for them to stay in the province. They end up leaving for the west. That needs to be integrated in an overall plan.
The other thing is that we need to provide current, insightful, independent research that is specific to rural communities and specific to women in marginalized groups living in rural communities. We need to ensure that policies and programs introduced to stimulate employment are linked to improving women's equality.
I hope you have a copy of this, because what I want to say about rural Nova Scotia is that we've been in a situation where we have been able to take advantage of the prosperity in the west and in Ontario by sending our families and our workers west. Well, now our workers are returning home, and they're returning home to no employment and no employment possibilities.