Evidence of meeting #13 for Status of Women in the 40th Parliament, 2nd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was job.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Lise Zarac Liberal LaSalle—Émard, QC
As part of the employment insurance program, should we not be providing training that is designed to prevent people from becoming welfare recipients?
Professor, University of Toronto, As an Individual
Somebody should be offering training so people don't wind up on welfare. EI is part of it, but I think it also has to depend on the education systems and a variety of other systems. But in the long-term, training is the only way we're going to break the cycle of people going into short-term jobs, then back on welfare, short-term jobs, back on welfare. There is no alternative to training, and training is rather appallingly delivered in most cases today.
Liberal
Lise Zarac Liberal LaSalle—Émard, QC
Thank you.
Mr. Baker, I really like your comments. I have two grandchildren and I believe that we need to give parents an opportunity to spend more time with their children at the beginning. Thank you for your concern.
Do you believe that Quebec's program enables women to remain with their children who develop better as a result?
Professor, Department of Economics, University of Toronto, As an Individual
I'll probably be better prepared to answer that question in a year. Kevin and I are currently working on exactly that project. The Quebec reforms offer a couple of really good opportunities. One, as has already been mentioned, is this period of time reserved for fathers. One huge gap in research is the possible effects of paternal care during early childhood. We don't have a lot of evidence. Intuitively, it seems good that fathers are at home, but we don't have a lot of studies that look into that.
The other big gap in the literature--again, some of this might seem odd, and we don't have a lot of evidence on it--is how people's choices respond to income replacement rates. The Quebec reforms offer shorter leaves, with higher replacement rates. We're hoping to use those changes to see how people respond to them to get some idea of how much more likely it is that people stay home. Do they stay home longer if their incomes are replaced at higher rates?
Kevin may be writing those data today.
Liberal
Lise Zarac Liberal LaSalle—Émard, QC
We will have to ask you to come back again.
I have another question. Do I still have time left?
Liberal
Lise Zarac Liberal LaSalle—Émard, QC
Ms. Schirle, you stated that only 9% of women choose to work part-time. That concerns me somewhat because there are factors involved. Are you looking at the factors that influence these choices? Someone may decide to return to work on a part-time basis because there are no day cares or they are too expensive. Have these factors been studied? If so, which factors have you studied?
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University, As an Individual
I can speak to those statistics.
I'm a numbers person, and that number comes from the February 2009 labour force survey. I took a sample of all women who are currently employed part-time, and 9.3% of them said they were working part-time because of business conditions and they couldn't find full-time work, and they had looked. In comparison to that, 38% of women working part-time are working part-time because they're caring for their own children.
Liberal
Lise Zarac Liberal LaSalle—Émard, QC
I am sorry to interrupt you, but we do not have much time. Did that study look at specific questions? Did you dig deeper in order to find out whether or not there were significant factors that influenced the choices those women made. A woman may choose to work part-time, but perhaps she does so because she has other responsibilities. Was there a real attempt to dissect the reasons why she made that choice?
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University, As an Individual
No.
This is raw data from the labour force survey. They ask people questions like why they are working part-time, which is less than 30 hours per week. First they are asked if that's because they want to. If they want to, is it because they want to care for their children, or is it because of a personal preference and this type of thing.
Liberal
Lise Zarac Liberal LaSalle—Émard, QC
As I said, there may be many different factors involved.
Thank you very much.
Do I still have time?
Conservative
The Vice-Chair Conservative Patricia Davidson
You have eight seconds left.
We'll move on now to Madame Demers for seven minutes, please.
Nicole Demers Bloc Laval, QC
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you very much for coming here today. We have been working on this employment insurance study for a few weeks already, and we are always learning something new. So I am very pleased to welcome you here.
Professor Lightman, I was particularly moved by your study on welfare. We know that it is currently a real scourge. In Quebec, we are now even on a third generation of people on welfare. I find it very unfortunate that women do not have access to training so that they can get off welfare.
In Quebec, we set up the Chantier de l'économie sociale in 1995. This led to the creation of small businesses that see themselves responsible for providing opportunities to welfare recipients. This program works quite well because these people are given at least a year or a year and a half to get used to holding a regular job.
Last week, we heard a witness from a rural community who told us that the program set up by the government was wonderful for women because it enabled them to work in non-traditional trades, such as construction. This also enabled them to obtain training, and so on.
You do not appear to agree with this premise. In your opinion, what are the shortcomings or flaws in this program? Could you tell us how we could better serve women from rural and urban communities?
Professor, University of Toronto, As an Individual
The question didn't follow directly from the comments.
One of the problems with studying welfare is that it varies so much from province to province. I'm not an expert on Quebec, but I do know that the attitudes in Quebec, in general, are much more progressive than they are in the rest of the country in terms of most social problems.
I have a PhD student now who is looking at the problems of precarious work in northern, rural, isolated areas. She's looking mainly at northern Ontario and northern British Colombia, and she's finding that most social policies we develop are based on a city-centred mentality. The notion on welfare, for example, of having to do a job search, as required to look for jobs, works fine if you live in the city and have a bus pass, and you can go around from door to door. But if you live in a small town, if you live in a rural or an isolated area where there may only be one employer, and if that employer shuts down, the concept of a job search really has no meaning.
She hasn't got her conclusions yet, but clearly a lot of the policies, in general, have an urban bias to them. And when we apply them to rural and isolated areas they just don't fit; they don't work.
It appears from meeting with many of the welfare administrators who work in the northern parts of Ontario that the way they deal with these problems is they just ignore the rules that come from Toronto. On issues like job searches, they understand that this is meaningless. It's never written down, and I can't prove this, but what they are telling my student is that everybody just ignores it because it's a waste of time and it's demeaning.
Even training opportunities under EI are much more problematic in isolated areas because a person may have to drive four or five hours to get to a training site. So I'm not convinced that widespread training is going to be viable in really isolated areas.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
Bloc
Nicole Demers Bloc Laval, QC
Thank you.
Professor Baker, today is Autism Awareness Day, in Canada and around the world, I believe. In the cohort of children you studied, were you able to determine whether having the mother at home with her child for the first few months of life made it easier to detect a problem with the child such as autism, for instance?
Professor, Department of Economics, University of Toronto, As an Individual
Unfortunately, the data we are using are from the national longitudinal survey of children and youth. It is not primarily a health survey; it's a survey of children's development.
In Canada we lack a large-scale children's health survey. As a consequence, the number of ailments actually covered in these other data sets is not large. There is no information on autism in the data we looked at.
Bloc
Nicole Demers Bloc Laval, QC
I must tell you, however, that in Quebec, we will certainly be paying more taxes because the parental leave program is more expensive. But we are happy to do it because it is important to support programs like that. We understand this in Quebec. So my money goes to the right place.
Ms. Schirle, I was also very surprised to hear your statistics on people who choose to find a job and adapt it to employment insurance rules. You mentioned it too, Ms. Vincent. I find that very surprising, because according to what Professor Lightman was saying, there are welfare recipients who find a job, even if it is only for two months, not to have access to employment insurance, but to feel better about themselves, to work. People want to work. I believe that it is human nature to want to be part of society. And in order to be part of society, you have to be in the society. So I find it somewhat surprising and even shocking that you would say that people find jobs that will give them access to employment insurance, and that this is the only type of employment that some people look for.
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University, As an Individual
I realize that I probably sound very cold-hearted in my comments.
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University, As an Individual
I realize this.
I am very sympathetic to people who are in circumstances that make it very difficult for them to work. That is not a majority of the population. I think there are a lot of women who choose to work part-time. They like spending time at home with their kids. They like being able to take the kids to school every morning and meet them after school at the end of the day. That's why they work part-time. Is that a bad choice? No.
Conservative