Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to the members of the committee who are attending to discuss this extremely important issue.
I was surprised that apparently no other element of the federal government had taken these issues so seriously and relieved to see that this committee has begun at the place where I think everything should have begun when the discussions about how to adjust federal policy to the new economic realities began several months ago.
I'd like to make a series of points, all of which lead to my desire to convince you that although ten years ago Canada was rated number one in the world amongst all countries on the UN human development index, which measures key elements of social and economic development, and number one in the UN's gender development index for a period of four years, Canada has, for the last several years, been repeatedly singled out, studied, written about, and chastised by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD, which consists of 30 plus an extra couple of the most industrially developed countries in the world, by the International Monetary Fund, and by various agencies of the United Nations, including the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.
Canada has come so far in moving away from the things that, as my colleague has just pointed out, had brought it both to a high level of economic development and also to a high level of equality between women and men on a number of other fronts, I think people still don't see the reality. I'll just give you one figure that stunned me a couple of weeks ago when I found it.
I was looking at the United Nations development program page that gives country updates. It was doing a 2008 update in order to bring the current economic situation into the frame. I was shocked to discover that as the UN statisticians developed a new index called the gender disparity index, which measures the sort of factual difference between the economic and social development that women enjoy as compared to that of men, Canada was ranked number 83 out of 157 countries. This is a long way from number one. It's a serious problem.
The problem arises very fundamentally from the way in which the employment insurance rules operate at the present time. The problem is not going to be solved by the strategies being proposed by the current government to deal with the issues. Until bold steps are taken to treat women as if they were full citizens and members of the human race in Canada, right along with men, and are equally as important, it's going to remain a very serious situation. I'll go through this as succinctly as I can to make this point.
In the handout that I've distributed, I've included a little graph on page 6 that shows the reality of income distribution in Canada. This is based on 2004 statistics. It could be updated for 2005; the picture won't look any different. If anything, it'll look a little bit worse. This represents the shares of cash money that flow through male versus female hands in Canada. This is the starting point of the problem, because women and men can come up with a thousand reasons why this is, or why it should be so, but the fact of the matter is that it hasn't always been like this in Canada. It doesn't have to be. It isn't in other countries. In fact, a very few social policy decisions would dramatically change this picture.
But the reality within which the employment insurance rules operate is shaped by the existing access that women and men have to money. The employment insurance rules are constructed within the existing reality and they simply recreate and reflect back the status quo; they can't change it. Except, as my colleague outlined, it did manage to happen in stages, beginning with the changes in the 1980s and the 1990s to the employment insurance system.
The key thing that has changed is that over the years the employment insurance system in Canada has been increasingly restricted to what we could call the standard employment model. It presupposes that everybody who works for money works in standard employment--a full-time permanent job with full benefits, 12 months a year, going on forever into the future or until something better comes along.
But a closer look at what has been happening to women as they have entered the workforce in staggering numbers over the last 30 years shows that we actually have two workforces. We have the standard employment workforce, which is substantially male dominated, however you look at the numbers. Here, men receive 60% of the cash money to be earned and women are left with 40%, and men hold over 60% of the full-time jobs and women have fewer than 40% of the full-time jobs. It's a segregated economy in which women have 69% of the part-time jobs and men have a very small share. So it's a very lopsided economy, and it explains why, if you look at the three main indicators of the status of women, women cannot work their way out of the spot they're in. Women already have to earn their 40% share of income by working part-time, sometimes in multiple jobs, sometimes in not-so-secure full-time jobs, and in addition they have to continue doing two-thirds of all of the unpaid work that gets done in Canada. That's a long work day, and they're poorly paid or not paid at all. And it's a work day that leaves the person who's worked the hardest with the least money in their hands.
What does the employment insurance system do to meet the needs of this extremely vulnerable group? At this point, based on the sequential changes that have taken place over the last 20 years, women have to approximate full-time employment to be able to receive maximum benefit from the employment insurance system. But even if they do that, because their own earnings will determine how much of an employment benefit they will get, they will only get employment insurance benefits that are approximately two-thirds or three-quarters of the amount that men will get. Men's maximum weekly benefit would be $413 a week. Women's would be approximately $312 a week, and that would be for a woman who is in a good situation. All the rest of the women are not getting employment insurance benefits. Women started out with coverage figures that were described by my colleague as more than 70 or 80%, but now some statisticians have calculated that only 32% of women who used to be covered by employment insurance would be now.
Those are the main points I wanted to make. As soon as you take the larger context of recent social policy and fiscal policy changes into consideration, and as soon as you start looking at the impact on women with multiple disadvantages, you begin to see that in fact the average woman that I've been talking about is a lucky woman.
Thank you.