Status of Women Committee on Nov. 16th, 2010

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

I understand that, but what I'm saying is that the surveys that you're doing on an annual basis are going to give us the rich kind of data that people are looking for on a more timely basis. We see things changing in our world so quickly that--

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Ms. Brown, could you put your question, please? We're over two minutes now with your question.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Well, it was more just a comment, Madam Chair, that you are providing the information that is necessary in society, on a timely basis, to the people who are looking for it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

Now we go to Madame Brunelle, for the Bloc.

[Paule Brunelle, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good morning, everyone.

Mr. Goupil, just like this committee, Status of Women Canada focuses on equality between men and women. As we know, the equality of women is measured mainly by financial independence. It seems to me that not talking about unpaid work has a significant impact on the life of women, and this is a problem for me. I find this situation very serious. All we have to do is think about women who are single parents. They are the poorest people in our society. Informal caregivers often do unpaid work. And this is the woman's role. Also, some women work in family businesses.

How will you manage to further the status of women when you will no longer have reliable data on unpaid work?

[Sébastien Goupil]

I would just like to point out that Status of Women Canada has always been in favour of the idea of documenting unpaid work and has continuously recorded it. We recognize the importance of women's unpaid work and how valuable it is to the Canadian society as a whole. We strongly believe in the need to keep track of this work. These data allow us to understand the relationship between paid work and a wide range of other factors that have an impact on the participation and status of women in society, including their ability to do paid work, to get an education and so on.

[Paule Brunelle, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

That is all very well, but where will you be getting the data from since that question will not be asked? Participation in the questionnaire will be voluntary. We could infer that less data will be available. That is what I mean.

[Sébastien Goupil]

As data users, we turn to the experts at Statistics Canada. As we said earlier, the sixth edition ofWomen in Canada will include a chapter on the issue of unpaid work, going into more depth than previous editions. We rely on Statistics Canada's expertise to be directed towards the appropriate data sources and to collect the most relevant, significant and rigorous data to document this situation.

[Paule Brunelle, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

What I could suggest...

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Madame Brunelle. I think we've gone over the two minutes now.

Now we'll go to Ms. Mathyssen, for the NDP.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Again I need some clarification. There wasn't anything at all in the “2011 Census Content Consultation Guide” about unpaid work. It's well known that these data are very important to women's equality and that we need them. If unpaid work supposedly came up in feedback, what steps were taken to ensure that the data would be added, or were these closed consultations?

[Rosemary Bender]

The consultations that we conducted for the 2011 census were quite a broad and open process. We met with government officials at all levels of government, including federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal. We went across the country and met with an awful lot of local organizations as well, and there was an open invitation through our website, where consultation materials were displayed so that people could write in with their own feedback.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

This was spontaneous. Without ever mentioning it, people just said, “Oh, unpaid work; we don't think we need a question on that.”

[Rosemary Bender]

In our consultation materials, we did put forward certain issues that we had heard over the years. Consultation for the census and for our statistical program is an ongoing process. When we do our consultation reports, we highlight certain issues that have been mentioned over time, and over time, for the past couple of censuses, we have heard that far more data users generally went to the general social survey in support of all of the research and work related to unpaid work. It was the general social survey that was the main source of information, rather than the census of population.

We had been hearing this for a number of censuses, so this is why this item had a particular focus as we prepared for the 2011 census content.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much, Ms. Bender.

Before we move on and before I thank the witnesses, I have a question I would like to ask as chair.

You say that you believe, and that you've heard from people, that doing the general social survey will give you the kinds of data you require, and Status of Women Canada has suggested that they will be depending on Statistics Canada for good information on unpaid work. Given that your general social survey looks at metropolitan areas, how are you going to understand the difference between rural and urban, given that your sample size is 25,000 and that it's a telephone survey? There are many people now who do not utilize telephones in the same way. How are you going to be able to get that information? That's my first question.

Second, we know that the issue of unpaid work came about when Canada brought it forward in 1995 at the Beijing conference. Canada has been pushing very hard for unpaid work questions to be put into general statistics in many countries of the world; therefore, how are we meeting our United Nations and CIDA obligations when we do not ask questions on unpaid work in our Statistics Canada survey?

[Jane Badets]

In regard to the general social survey, we can and do produce quite a bit of detailed information even with that smaller sample. As we've found, it was being used in a lot of reports, so it's still robust.

Yes, it is a smaller sample, and we will not get the same level of information that we would with a larger sample. Still, what we heard back was that it was still the data source that was being used because it was giving the more detailed indicators or measures. It was meeting most of the needs.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Would you comment on the diversity issue and the rural and urban issue, Ms. Badets?

[Jane Badets]

Rural and urban information we can, to some extent, produce from the GSS. It just depends on the amount of data required or the detail of the analysis. We still produce estimates on rural and urban--maybe not for every province, but we still do that from the GSS. We can still produce that information.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

What about the United Nations and CIDA obligations?

[Jane Badets]

Statistics Canada is still providing that information. It does so through the general social survey, so I don't....

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you. You've answered my question. Thanks very much.

Now I want to thank the witnesses, because we have another group of witnesses coming on. I want to thank you very much for coming.

We will have a suspension for about a minute while we wait for this change of witnesses to occur.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), this committee is undertaking a study of the cancellation of the mandatory long-form census and its impact on women's equality in Canada.

I'd like to welcome: Ivan Fellegi, former head of Statistics Canada; the Association féminine d'éducation et d'action sociale, with Céline Duval, president, and Madeleine Bourget, vice-president; and the Canadian Federation of University Women, with Samantha Spady, communications coordinator, and Robin Jackson, executive director.

The rules are simple. I know that Mr. Fellegi knows them by now. You have 10 minutes as a group, so you can decide how you divide up your 10 minutes. After your 10-minute presentation, we will begin a question and answer section. Because we have only an hour in which to undertake this, I will give you a two-minute signal so that you can tighten up your presentation, know what to leave out at the end, and get a sense of where you're going.

I shall begin with Mr. Fellegi.

Welcome, Mr. Fellegi. It's nice to see you again.

[Dr. Ivan Fellegi, Former Chief Statistician of Canada, Statistics Canada, As an Individual]

Thank you, Madam Chair. It's good to be here. I'm very pleased that I've been invited.

I'll be talking about the national household survey. My views on that issue are well known. I just want to say why I've chosen what I have to say.

First of all, it is because of the certainty of serious biases affecting the resulting data. The percentage response rate to the traditional long-form census was in the mid- to high nineties. Statistics Canada's working assumption about the response rate to the voluntary national household survey is 50%.

This would not matter much if the lost responses were evenly distributed over all population groups, but we know this is not the case. Past experience from Canada and elsewhere shows that underprivileged groups, such as aboriginal people, new immigrants, visible minorities, and, generally, people with low incomes, will respond at a disproportionately low rate--and no extra sampling will compensate for this disproportion.

But these are not the only people likely to be under-counted. Youths generally are likely to be under-counted. So will working mothers with serious time pressures on them, and others about whom we can only speculate.

In fact, this is precisely the main problem. Bias is so pernicious because, in the overwhelming number of cases, neither its magnitude nor even its direction can be ascertained. Statistics Canada states--and they are right--that the results will be useful for “many purposes”. The trouble is that we don't know now, and we will not know after the survey, what are the cases for which they are safe to use and what are the ones for which they are not.

This leads me to my second point. Since we know that the data can be seriously biased, but we will not know which data are affected and by how much, we will regrettably, but quite appropriately, be suspicious of them all. That will be a tragic outcome, because up until now we were able to focus on the substantive issues of policy, having taken the data for granted. Following the national household survey, we can spend just as much time arguing about the data as we can debating the issues of concern.

Coming to my last point, with a 50% response rate, biases of five to ten percentage points can easily distort any estimate, which is serious enough if you want to know the number of people in a certain group, but it can be devastating when our focus is on how the number changed over the last five years.

Indeed, human populations evolve slowly. A change of two to three percentage points over five years is often regarded as major. But clearly, if the bias can be two to four times as big--that is, five to ten percentage points--the real change can be grossly under- or overestimated. Not only will we be in doubt about the magnitude of the estimated change, but even its direction can be reversed by the bias.

To give you a relevant example, I have no idea how, after 2011, we will estimate the change over the last five years in the earning differential between women and men doing similar work and having similar qualifications. The same applies to estimates of the change in the education gap between aboriginal and non-aboriginal groups, whether we are getting more or less successful in economically integrating our new immigrants, and so on.

The issues are significant, and I am concerned about the passing time.

Thank you for your attention.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much, Dr. Fellegi.

Now we'll go to the Association féminine d'éducation et d'action sociale.

Madam Duval.

[Céline Duval, President, Association féminine d'éducation et d'action sociale]

Good morning.

Last July, immediately after the Canadian government had announced its intention to remove the obligation for Canadians to fill out the long-form census questionnaire in 2011, AFEAS, like stakeholders from the scientific, municipal and business circles, protested against this underhanded decision.

In August, during the annual meeting of the association, 450 women representing the 12,000 members of AFEAS in Quebec felt compelled once more to express their complete dissatisfaction with the decision that threatens to deprive organizations like ours of reliable data for supporting their action plans and demands for equality between men and women.

This summer, there was a real outcry in Quebec against this measure. The Coalition québécoise pour l'avenir du recensement was born. AFEAS is one of the members together with organizations from all areas: politics, university, research, think tanks, demography, genealogy, the francophonie, business, teaching, history, municipal administration. The Quebec government has even adopted a motion opposed to removing this obligation. Similar opposition was encountered across Canada. This summer, the Canoe website reported that more than 360 groups, including the leading statisticians in the country, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, the Canadian Medical Association, university researchers and the Anglican Church, asked the government to reverse its decision.

Removing the obligation to fill out a long-form questionnaire will deprive all sectors of our organization of valid and solid data. No voluntary survey can yield results as reliable as a mandatory census questionnaire. The Chief Statistician said so himself when he resigned:

I want to take this opportunity to comment on a technical statistical issue... the question of whether a voluntary survey can become a substitute for a mandatory census. It cannot.

A voluntary survey will produce skewed, unreliable and unrepresentative data that will make it impossible for us to compare it with data from previous years.

The long-form census provided solid statistics that allowed women's groups to conduct gender-based analyses on education, family, work and income. These types of analyses are vital to developing sound action plans in order to eliminate inequalities.

AFEAS is particularly concerned about the fact that statistics on invisible work will no longer be available. In fact, all questions on unpaid work, or so-called invisible work, from the new long-form census were withdrawn. AFEAS had only succeeded in getting questions aimed at measuring this invisible work, especially work done for children or loved ones with reduced independence, as part of the long form for the last three censuses, in 1996, 2001 and 2006. The data compiled allowed us to measure the quantity of work, especially the way in which it was divided between men and women. Our analyses along with supporting statistics have shown that the economy relies to a large degree on this invisible work, which keeps the social and family life together allowing individuals to have paid jobs. The work-family balance is a fundamental issue.

How can eliminating these questions be justified when last April, the Parliament of Canada unanimously adopted a motion declaring the first Tuesday in April the Invisible Work Day? As a result, Canada became the first country in the world to create this day. How can this work be recognized if we cannot measure it?

From now on, it will be difficult for Canada to say that it respects the Beijing Declaration that it signed in 1995 at the World Conference on Women, stating that it was convinced of the following:

Equal rights, opportunities and access to resources, equal sharing of responsibilities for the family by men and women, and a harmonious partnership between them are critical to their well-being and that of their families as well as to the consolidation of democracy...

How can we share something that we refuse to measure?

Depriving organizations of reliable data that allow them to support their arguments in all sectors is the same as muzzling or destroying their work of assessing Canadians' needs.

Non-profit organizations like AFEAS need reliable data and objectives to understand problems well and to be able to change mindsets and policies. Statistics Canada must have the means to publish such data and make them available.

Thank you.