Thank you. You've certainly set the bar for all of us.
Thank you very much for the invitation to be here.
We've handed out two documents. I'll be referring mostly to the single page, but you also have a more detailed document beside it.
With me is Joel Harden, who works in our social and economic policy department. He will be able to answer a number of technical questions that you may have for us.
Having appeared before this committee on other issues, it's not any surprise that women continue to be at a significant disadvantage compared to men when it comes to income, and obviously that means to pensions. If you're working at a smaller income your whole life, you're going to end up with a smaller pension. We still earn less than men—about 70.5 cents on the dollar—and as you know, that gets worse if you are an aboriginal woman, a woman of colour, or a woman with a disability. We also end up shouldering the unpaid caregiving responsibilities. We are concentrated in non-standard, poorly paid jobs that offer little hope for a decent pension.
The issue sheet you have in front of you, which is part of our retirement security program, offers both the good and the bad news about women and pensions. It starts to explain why we think our campaign can deliver the change women deserve.
The good news is that we've made some pension gains in recent decades. This is particularly true of women in the public sector and women retirees accessing public pensions. The number of women in workplace pension plans tripled from 1974 to 2004. Almost all the increase in workplace pension plan membership came from women joining unions and gaining decent pensions.
We've also fought for better pension legislation. We won part-time worker access to workplace pensions and better pension vesting rights. We won fair Canada Pension Plan rules for those who stopped work to help raise children. We won a battle to index CPP and old age security benefits to inflation so that the value of public pensions would hold steady over the course of one's working life.
These victories are reasons why fewer retirees—not every retiree, but fewer—today live in poverty. In 1980, the retiree poverty rate was twice the rate of the working-age population. By 2004, retiree poverty was half the rate of the working-age population. That means that there are a lot of people who are close or barely over. I don't think we should be saying to people who work their whole lives that what we're aiming for here, folks, is that you can live close to the poverty line. I think we should be looking for something that has a little more dignity to it.
The bad news is that, despite the positive developments, there is still a major gap in pension income between men and women. Between 1991 and 2001, for example, retired women still earned 60% in pension income relative to retired men. By 2004, 7.3% of retired women still lived in poverty, which was more than double the rate of retired men. That gets even worse when you look at single, divorced, widowed--known as unattached--elderly women. A 2004 study found that an astounding 45.6% of women in these circumstances still lived in poverty.
There are lots of things to explain it. We've talked before with this committee about the question of equal pay for work of equal value. We've talked about the need for women to have full-time, full-year jobs and that they want that. We've talked about the need for women to have pension plans that actually address their needs.
We have a statistic here that the majority of working-age women are on the job and comprise 46% of the Canadian labour market. We think that number is probably going to need to be adjusted just because of the changes we've seen. But we should be very clear that when you look at those numbers, it doesn't mean that all those women are in full-time, full-year, good jobs.
While the expectations on working women have changed, caregiving expectations have not. Women still shoulder, as we said, the bulk of unpaid caregiving work of children and seniors. In 2002 over two million Canadians offered personal care for seniors; three-quarters of those people were women.
So in the absence of affordable child care and dependant and elder care, women have been put in very stressful and frustrating circumstances. I have already pointed out the dominant role we have in low-paid, low-quality, precarious work. Indeed, 40% of women work in these kinds of jobs and they really don't get much, if any, pension. A lot of women—over 60%—don't have access to a workplace pension.
If I can just stop there for a moment to say that when you look at our longer document, you'll see on page 4 that we have some key demands about doubling the benefits for the Canadian Pension Plan; increasing the low-income pensions, the GIS, by 15%, so that no senior lives in poverty; and also protecting Canadian pensions through a federal system of pension insurance.
If we're going to raise up all women and men, we think the way to do it is to actually do something about the Canada Pension Plan again—and the Quebec Pension Plan, obviously. This the fairest way. It's a transferable plan, so it doesn't matter where you work or which province or territory you're in. It's fair, it's inflation protected, and it can be generous.
So what we need to be doing here, really, instead of talking to people about RRSPs or private pension plans—through which we have just seen people go through a disaster from the fall in the markets—is we should be saying, our responsibility as Canadians is to create a Canada Pension Plan that works for all seniors.
I'll leave it at that, unless Joel wants to add anything. But we'll get into some of that in the questions.
I don't think I met my time limit, but....
