From a woman's perspective, many women are working part-time because they have to fit everything around the family. That is just a reality. You work around the schedules of your children, around the schedule of your husband, around the schedule of everybody else. In order to make that work, you work on a part-time basis. Subsequently, the part-time work and full-time poverty is very accurate for women. It's a big part of the reason women are in the situation they're in.
To Ms. Byers and Mr. Battle, we very much appreciate your comments and your desire to see changes. I can only imagine that when they made the changes to the EI system earlier, the region-by-region benefits.... If you live in Toronto, you are much more apt to be able to find a job much faster than if you're in Thunder Bay. It is a very dangerous area to change. We know that. Many people have paid a price for changes on the EI issue, in a variety of ways, politically.
In trying to find a system that's fair, in particular for women.... Listening to you folks today, it makes me think we have a maternity and EI situation for women when they're on maternity benefits, but maybe we need to have a separate system for women, recognizing all the issues women have to face.
We can say we're equal. We can talk all we want. The reality is that women face a whole lot of other obstacles to being able to be in full-time employment. If we're talking about change and reforming the EI system, should we be isolating women? I say women because we're talking about women in particular, but should we try to reform the system to recognize more specifically the challenges women are facing?