Thank you very much.
I'd like to thank the members of the committee for inviting me here this morning to give me the opportunity to talk about one of the most important policy issues affecting Canada, affecting women particularly, today.
I'm an economist by training, but for the last 35 years I've been a professor in the faculty of social work at the University of Toronto. I left mainstream economics because I was very frustrated with its inability to go beyond looking at numbers, and teaching in the school of social work gives me the opportunity to interact with what's going on at ground level, with what's going on in the world.
I'm in regular contact with students who are doing placements in social agencies, recent graduates who are working in social agencies, so I have the opportunity to see and to hear essentially first-hand what the consequences are of cutbacks in the welfare state in general and particularly in the substantial exclusion of women from the EI system.
I've also been doing research for the last seven years, research funded by SSHRC, in which we've been looking at the impacts of precarious work, most specifically in Ontario. By precarious work, of course, I mean work that is insecure, unstable, of limited duration, part-time, contract only, no benefits.
I'd like to begin with two anecdotes that follow from that, both of them experienced yesterday. I stayed at the Lord Elgin Hotel last night, and when I arrived a group of union members were demonstrating outside the hotel. I had to cross a picket line to go into the hotel, which made me very unhappy. They were mostly women. They were employed by the Holiday Inn in Longueuil, and this hotel has the same ownership, apparently, as the Lord Elgin. They've been locked out for eight months. That means over the winter.
I talked to them for a while before I crossed the picket line, which I thought was the best thing to do under the circumstances, and they're mostly women and they are asking for a salary increase of 3% a year for four years, which does not strike me as unreasonable. They have been offered 2% a year for six years, which of course will just further lock them into poverty.
Anecdote number two: I came into my room, turned on my TV, and saw that Premier McGuinty had just announced $9 billion in infrastructure, essentially in construction, that's going to help the TTC build a lot of streetcars and things like that, and of course this is all men who are going to benefit from this. I believe women constitute about 7% of the labour force in the construction industry.
The important thing to understand is that impacts of the cuts in EI are not gender-neutral. They affect women far more than they affect men. Historically, EI was an intermediate.... I view it as a trampoline, that if people lost a job, they would bounce onto EI. If they were lucky, they could use that time on EI to go back into the labour market. But if that middle tier, that tier of EI, is removed, they go directly onto welfare, and welfare is what I've been studying for the last seven years. It's not something a lot of people study, but its experience is subject to a wide variety of different rules and regulations and constraints and intrusions that people on EI don't experience.
Not very long ago women on welfare were subject to the spouse-in-the-house rule. An unnamed former premier of Ontario made the comment after he was elected in 1995 that a one-night stand was sufficient to constitute an ongoing support relationship. This is what life on welfare is like.
In Ontario today, a person on welfare is subject to an asset ceiling of $500. That means that if someone loses their job and they don't qualify for EI, as large numbers of women don't, they go right to welfare. Before they can claim welfare, they have to divest themselves of all assets except for $500. That means in many cases they can't even keep a car, which they need in order to look for a job. Welfare unfortunately is still caught in the Victorian poor law mentality of blame the victim, not really wanting to give people a hand up, but rather more like giving them a kick in the head.
If EI is not there to protect them, they go right on to welfare. Once they're on welfare, it is a hard system to get off. It is increasingly a hard system to get off as the economy deteriorates.
I have some data that looked at the welfare caseloads in the city of Toronto. In December 2008, 71% of the people who applied for Ontario Works were recycling, meaning they had been on it before. Why? What does that mean? What that means is that 71% of the people who go on welfare have not been able to make a break from welfare. They are stuck; they are trapped. They get a precarious job--they get hired by Sears in November and then they get laid off in January, or they only have part-time work.
I did manage to run off some data--and I'm sure you're familiar with this data and you've had it presented to you--that is based on the 2006 SLID survey. One-third of women work less than 250 hours. That compares to 21% of men who work under 250 hours. So women aren't going to qualify for EI. Among those who have permanent jobs, it's men who have the full-time jobs and women who have the part-time jobs. I've got the numbers, but if I just read them out, they won't mean much. With the part-time jobs, again, they don't qualify for EI.
If we think about going forward and the kinds of recommendations--because I want to get these out on the table--the idea of extending the eligibility for those who receive is not going to help women, because women don't receive it in the first place. It's a male-supportive policy from a government that seems singularly insensitive to the needs of women.
Increasing the replacement rate is also not going to do it, because increasing the replacement rate will only benefit those who get on the system. The way to benefit women is to reduce the hours of eligibility. That's the solution. That's the only way that the EI system is going to start to meet the needs of women.
The other issue, of course, is that women often can't do the work they're expected to do, or would like to do, because of child care problems. One hundred dollars a month is not going to buy child care for anybody. In Quebec, the situation is different. They're very fortunate, and I am envious. I wish the rest of Canada had a program like that. In the rest of Canada, because women don't get child care, because this government killed the child care program that was in place and replaced it with nothing, women are increasingly put in a situation where they won't be able to work, and they won't be able to qualify for the hours.
I think that probably takes care of my ten minutes. I'll quit there. Thank you very much.