Thank you very much.
The Canadian Federation of University Women is a non-partisan, voluntary, self-funded organization of close to 10,000 members--women university graduates, students, and associate members in 113 clubs across Canada--that works to improve the status of women and human rights, education, social justice, and peace.
CFUW holds special consultative status with the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women and belongs to the education sector of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO. CFUW is the largest of the 67 affiliates of the International Federation of University Women.
CFUW calls on committee members to support the reinstatement of the mandatory long-form census. The mandatory long-form census is a critical tool to monitor the status of women and to formulate policy to advance women's equality. CFUW calls for the inclusion of census questions on unpaid work. CFUW members are aware that the mandatory long-form census is a critical tool for governments, agencies, and civil society to monitor and understand what is happening in Canadian society.
The gendered impacts are especially important to emphasize. All of the markers of how women are faring will be less reliable and impossible to track and measure from previous years if the mandatory long-form census is cancelled. The lack of reliable information will severely reduce the amount of effective research and gender analysis. Both are crucial in order to address gender inequality.
CFUW is concerned that we will lose a tool to measure and track women's equality. Statistics have told us the story of women's inequality in Canada. We know what gains have been made and where there is still much work to be done. For example, using information from Statistics Canada, we know that twice as many women as men become victims of spousal violence, or 61% for females compared to 32% for males. The same analysis found that almost four times as many women as men were killed by a current or former spouse.
We know that 81% of single-parent households are headed by a woman. Of these households, the poverty rate for single mothers under 65 is 42.4%, compared to 19.3% of single fathers in the same group. We know that a lot has been done to reduce the poverty of seniors in general, but that poverty for single senior women is persistent, and these women are twice as likely as are senior men to be impoverished.
Because of reliable and accurate statistics, we know that poverty in Canada is gendered. Of the nearly four million people in Canada who live below the low-income cut-off after tax, 54% are women.
Using this information, women's organizations such as CFUW and others monitor and report on how women are doing and put forward policy solutions to the problems we find. This data is also used to measure the efficacy of initiatives and programs to combat poverty, barriers to full participation in the workplace, and violence, and to determine how they can be improved. It is obvious from the preceding statistics that women are more likely than are men to experience violence and poverty, and it is imperative that we know by how much and know which segments of society and which regions are affected.
Once this data is no longer of the same quality and can no longer be compared to data for previous years, data critical to addressing gender inequality will be lost.
Using the parliamentary testimony of former chief statisticians of Statistics Canada, Dr. Munir Sheikh and Dr. Ivan Fellegi, and briefs from the Statistical Society of Canada and the National Statistics Council, we have concluded that the changes will undoubtedly affect both the quality of data collected and the ability to compare data from one year to the next due to the inherent bias of voluntary participation.
In his July 27, 2010, testimony to the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology, Dr. Fellegi alerted the committee that “they”--that is, the census after the change from mandatory to voluntary participation--“really become unusable for purposes of making comparisons in terms of what has happened since the last census”.
In this meeting, Dr. Fellegi and Dr. Sheikh also discussed how the existing voluntary surveys would be less reliable because they would not be able to test them against the census data.
CFUW cannot support the cancellation of the mandatory long form, as it makes census data unusable. Comparisons from year to year are the cornerstone of monitoring and working for progress of women's equality.