Status of Women Committee on Nov. 18th, 2010

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

I will be calling the meeting to order, so I'll give everybody an opportunity to come and sit.

Ms. Brown.

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

Madam Chair, I wonder if we could take a moment. Three of us have students from McGill, from the Women in House program.

I'd like to introduce my student today, Laura Jones, who's with me for the day.

I believe there are others.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Good morning, Laura.

I have two students who could stand up.

Where are they sitting?

Hi, guys. They're from McGill as well.

Ms. Neville.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

I have Megan Webb, who is shadowing me for the day.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

There's another student with me. Her name is Jade, and she's from McGill.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Good morning.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

We're ready to begin.

I want to welcome the witnesses, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), to a study of the cancellation of the mandatory long-form census and its impact on women's equality in Canada, which is being undertaken by this committee.

This morning we have five witnesses. We have Kathleen Lahey, professor, Faculty of Law, Queen's University; Martha MacDonald, professor and chair, Economics Department, Saint Mary's University; Sheila Regehr; Beverley Smith, editor of “Recent Research on Caregiving”; and the Canadian Women's Foundation's Mary Mowbray, co-chair of the board of directors. Good morning.

Here are the rules. You each have five minutes to present. Because there are so many of you, we have to fit this into the timelines of the committee. When you finish your presentation, there will be a question and answer session. I'll give you a one-minute warning. So it's a five-minute presentation this time.

Thank you.

We're going to begin with Kathleen Lahey.

Professor Lahey.

[Prof. Kathleen A. Lahey, Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen's University, As an Individual]

Thank you very much for this opportunity to address these extremely important issues.

I would like to go directly to my main point, which is that the changes that are being made to the census are a failure on a massive scale and at a fundamental level of Canada's commitment to carry out gender-based analysis of every policy, practice, law, and program in the country.

In a written brief I will be providing the committee with the specific legal references to the international charter, constitutional human rights, and other obligations that form the human rights framework within which these violations are taking place, but I'd like to go to my second point, which is that these violations of human rights that flow from the failure to carry out a gender impact analysis of the changes being proposed to the census are all the more egregious because this is the second most disastrous economic period of crisis that Canada has faced in a century.

One of the things that made it very difficult and challenging to cope with the current situation was the dearth of usable social science information as to how the Great Depression affected various vulnerable groups in Canada. So if we change the census at this point to remove both the scope and the validity of data that is otherwise available to us, as a country we impair our ability to understand what is happening right now, to translate it for future generations, and to learn and grow from the experience.

The gender impact is severe and goes beyond the prospective damage that would flow from the current economic crisis. First of all, the right of Canadians to have access to the best statistical tools and policy analysis techniques just when they are most needed is a concrete human rights guarantee. And if the government fails to continue providing the best data possible, that itself is a violation of rights, because important sources of data that would otherwise have been available will be gone permanently and cannot be recovered, as other witnesses have already testified. But the core of the government's justification seems to be not the human rights justification, which is that women are already totally endurably equal; the government's justification is that this is all right, they can use the data for unpaid work from the general social survey.

I'd like to use the remaining minute of my time to make a couple of points as to the inadequacies of the general social survey unpaid work data.

First of all, question 33 on unpaid work in the 2006 census, which is being cancelled regardless of which form of national instrument goes forward, is the tool that was designed to find the gendered unpaid work in Canada. The general social survey does not do that. In the question period, I can give examples of such differences in the sampling methodologies and some of the other techniques used in the GSS that make it a far less useful instrument for evaluating who does unpaid work in Canada and what type of work that is.

There are huge omissions from the general social survey. For example, it does not even attempt to cover elder care issues, which are covered in the census, and there are a number of technical problems with it.

The last very quick point that I would like to make is that I and other witnesses here today can give personal testimony to the fact that Statistics Canada was not being very accurate when it took the position two days ago that when it looked around to see if anybody was using the data from question 33, it found that, “no one was using that data”. It took the position that there was “no academic work” using that data. I'm here to testify to the contrary.

Those are my submissions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much, Professor Lahey.

We now move on to Martha MacDonald, professor and chair of the economics department at Saint Mary's University.

Professor MacDonald.

[Dr. Martha MacDonald, Professor and Chair, Economics Department, Saint Mary's University, As an Individual]

Thank you.

I'm very pleased to speak to you today on this crucial issue.

I'm an economist who specializes in research related to understanding gender and equality. I have experience using Statistics Canada data.

I'd like to speak first of its importance for economic analysis.

The census is the single most comprehensive source of data for analyzing the socio-economic situation of women and the issue of equality. Economists and other social scientists use the census to examine inequality in education, earnings, incomes, and other considerations. Work done on the feminization of poverty and the ongoing labour market inequality has relied on the census.

To analyze these kinds of issues, three kinds of data are essential in addition to individual income and earnings characteristics. The three kinds of data that are essential and that the census is particularly good for are as follows.

First, unpaid work, which has already been mentioned. It is essential to understanding women's economic inequality. Women’s organizations worked very hard to get questions on unpaid work into the census. Canada is a leader and a model in so doing, and the results have been invaluable for research on women’s equality.

The large sample and wealth of related variables in the census make it an important alternative to the time diary method from the general social survey. The quality of the summary data collected by the census has also been shown to be good in comparison with the time diary method. They're both good, but they're useful for different kinds of questions and they aren't replacements for each other.

The second kind of data that the census is good for in terms of analysis of gender inequality is the data at the household and family levels. You can't just look at the individual to understand the situation of women. Economic outcomes depend on household decision-making. Many other surveys only have data on the individual, which makes it harder to understand the processes that give rise to labour market and other outcomes.

The third kind of data in the census that is essential is data on ethnic origin, immigration status, language, geographic location, disability, etc., and other markers of social location. Women are not all the same, and the census allows one to analyze multiple dimensions of inequality.

In my own case, I've relied a lot on the level of geographic detail that's available in the census. For example, you can look at small communities, rural-urban differences, and you need that kind of reliable sample and detail to get at that level.

A voluntary survey will have a high likelihood of underrepresenting marginalized and vulnerable groups in the population. As the non-response rates have been shown not to be random, we're going to have a skewed sample from a voluntary survey.

I'd also like to speak about policy analysis and the importance of the long-form census.

Policies related to women’s equality require the availability of data to analyze the problem in the first place and demonstrate the need for policy intervention. Without that data, the case can't be made that the inequalities exist, nor can one design effective policy without understanding the underlying causal relationships. We can't plan for the future in policy areas such as health, education, and pensions without accurate demographic information.

Without data one cannot evaluate the impact of various policies on women. This includes policies aimed at addressing inequality and also policies that are aimed at other issues but that impact on women. So virtually every policy that we have does impact on women. For example, an analysis of budgets from a gender perspective is not possible, nor is an evaluation of the gender impacts of programs like EI or pensions, if we don't have this kind of good data.

Of course, advocacy on women’s equality relies on the data from the census. Without it, groups will have difficulty making their points and women’s ongoing inequality will become invisible.

Finally, I will comment on the impact of dropping the mandatory census on other Statistics Canada data.

It has been pointed out by Statistics Canada officials and other economists that the loss of the long-form census impacts the other surveys that the government is saying they can use. In terms of their sampling frames and the weights they use for analysis, the other surveys rely on the underlying population measures that are generated by the census. Those weights allow them to take account of a possible non-response bias in the voluntary surveys. Without reliable population measures, the whole thing becomes less adequate. Without the mandatory long-form census, Canada's position as an international leader in quality of data and research on women’s equality will be lost.

Finally, to make one last point, about privacy concerns, and speaking as a user of the data, Statistics Canada is also a world leader in terms of how hard it is to use their data in any non-confidential way. They are extremely demanding when it comes to protecting privacy, and researchers know this.

In conclusion, along with everybody else I feel strongly that it is very important, regardless of political persuasion, that we understand that good social science in every kind of policy decision requires reliable data.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Professor MacDonald.

I'll move now to Sheila Regehr.

[Sheila Regehr, As an Individual]

Thank you very much for inviting me to this session.

I believe I've been invited on the basis of some history I've had over the years in working with gender statistics in collaboration with StatsCan and with women's organizations. In particular, I have done a lot of work on unpaid work.

I'm not a statistician; I am one of those users. My interest in data, like others', is in how it can support policy in the public interest.

I want to focus on the historical perspective. It will be a bit different from but complementary to the approach of others. I think it's important to the present discussion to situate this in a longer-term, bigger picture.

Significant societal change, like greater equality for women, does not happen overnight. There was mention at your Tuesday session of UN agreements, for example. These are developed over many years as new knowledge is gathered and experience is gained in different parts of the world.

Unpaid work was not on the radar screen when the United Nations' Commission on the Status of Women was created in the late 1940s. The work of many people inside and outside governments put it there, and the impetus came primarily from the women's movement.

Why does this matter? I'd like to highlight four main reasons.

First, it matters because what counts as unpaid work for public policy purposes and the reason it is important is still not very well understood publicly, and the tasks that characterize most of women's work are still too often either sentimentalized or derogated in male-dominated society. So asking questions about something like this requires great care. I know that great care went into designing the general social survey on time use and the census questions on unpaid work. I was part of the consultation when those questions were being designed. When issues are as important as this, you have to keep at them for the longer term, and expecting high use of such data in the short term is probably unrealistic.

We talked about the fact that people are using this data. That's true, but I think it's important to look at this issue of users.

The second reason it matters is that, as is too often the case, the users or potential users who have the most need of data and analysis often have the most difficulty using it. In the case of unpaid work in particular, the overworked women who are struggling most to get to their undervalued paid jobs, raise their children, care for an aging parent, and so on, need the policy support. They're not the ones who are going to be able to do the research, and yet without the research and data, it's hard for them to get policy-makers to pay attention to their issues. This is a real challenge.

In my current job I'm using census data on unpaid work for a new report related to poverty, but I discovered, even in my own world, that to get the full detail I wanted was beyond my resources. I'm sure I'm not alone.

My third point is this. I read in the transcripts from Tuesday something in the discussion in French that really struck me, which I don't think comes across the same way in English, and that's the use of the term travail invisible. It's this issue of invisibility that I think relates strongly to the census. One can see the value of having census questions about unpaid work that make many people think about it—far more than you would get in the limited sample size.

So you make people think about it. You make people stop and recognize how much work they do. Maybe they talk to other people, who didn't get the long-form census, and the conversation expands. This has tremendous value in making this work visible—legitimate, if you will—and thus valuable.

The final reason I think the longer-term view matters is that within the past few years, especially following the world financial crisis and ongoing difficulties in restoring some stability and sustainability, new voices are being heard on unpaid work. This is similar to Kathleen's point.

Joseph Stiglitz, for example, is former head of the World Bank. He's one of a growing number of very influential, mostly male, traditional, market-oriented economists who are changing their view. They're now developing a strong appreciation for the importance of non-market work, what we refer to as unpaid work, and as unpaid work becomes a more important topic of wider public debate, it's even more important for Canada to have good information to be in a good position on this issue.

In closing, I was going to say a few more things that I don't need to say about the value of the census in terms of all the different factors that you can relate, the almost infinite possibilities for analysis. I want to talk just a tiny bit, though, about the work that I was involved in.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

You have 30 seconds, Sheila.

[Sheila Regehr]

Okay. I think I can do it.

I was struck in the census data by how much work some senior women were doing, such as almost full-time, or more, child care. I really wanted to know what these grandmothers were doing. Knowing what I know about family structure and differences across immigrant and visible minority communities, I really wanted to dig into this to find out what was going on. The only way I could do that or see whether there were different geographic patterns—whether immigrant neighbourhoods in Toronto were different from other places—was through the census, and that's the work that I couldn't afford to get done.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Ms. Regehr.

Now we go to Beverley Smith.

[Beverley Smith, Editor, Recent Research on Caregiving, As an Individual]

Thank you.

I am unhappy with the elimination of the long-form census. It's an important starting point in making fair laws. We had opened a window on women's rights, the sun shone in, and now we're closing it.

In prehistoric societies, men and women were sharing responsibilities: she was taking care of children and he was hunting. They were interdependent.

However, when men set up commerce with money, they stopped counting the role at home. The person cooking, cleaning, and tending the young became invisible. Tax policy said she didn't even work.

Carol Lees, Saskatoon homemaker, was handed a form by Stats Canada in the 1990s. It advised her that if she had been a housewife all her life, she should indicate that she had never worked. To her this showed the level to which we had sunk.

The state required her to deny her own worth. Her complaints, the conference she organized, united women's groups across the country. She was our Rosa Parks. Her insistence that women's work in the home be counted had resonance. It also showed that Stats Canada and the Government of Canada are works in progress and that they can see the light.

At Beijing in 1997, Canada signed the UN Platform for Action, to value unpaid work. For the first time, it would count in the long-form census.

Now that window is closing.

When I heard of the voluntary survey, I was dismayed that the unpaid labour question would no longer be compulsory. Imagine my surprise to learn that the question wouldn't be asked at all.

I am a teacher. What we are teaching in school is what we believe to be important.

We teach math and reading in school because we think they matter. What is not in the curriculum, we might conclude, does not matter. And that is what is wrong with the census plan.

To take off the unpaid work sends the message that women's unpaid work does not matter. Monday I taught grade 11 students about the Rwandan genocide. The first step: “just the facts ma'am”. I gave them the background, and we watched a movie. They will have lots of opinions and be passionate about the issues, but the school's job is to give them the factual basis on which to build their views. The first step is the facts.

Statistics Canada is all about the facts. We need them as the pillar to build our bridge on, the bridge to equality.

I arrived yesterday in Ottawa by plane.

I did not ask the pilot whether he was competent. The public is already protected by the legislation. If I am the victim of a car accident, I am confident that emergency services will be deployed.

So it's not a question of whether you should ever trust anybody; it's whom you trust, what standards you have.

Our laws protect children from predators. We require security checks for those who handle our kids or our money. We trust the codes of ethics of real doctors and engineers. And it's the same with government.

I don't tell my neighbour how much money I make, but I'll tell Revenue Canada so they can charge me an arm instead of an arm and a leg. I don't tell my prospective employer how many children I have. It's none of his business. But I tell Stats Canada so that my district will have schools and parks. I wouldn't tell the stranger at the corner how I commute to work, but I tell Stats Canada so that roads won't be congested.

Government gets a bad reputation as big brother. We're worried that if they know too much they'll harm us. But if they know too little, they might also do us harm. I am in favour of small government. It should let us live our lives. But enabling people to take care of themselves starts with recognizing how much they do of that. We need the data to empower free choice.

In a democracy, those who make the laws have to know what we want. We have to tell them. If they guess, they may guess wrong.

I believe Stats Canada can be trusted. Since 1881, workers there take an oath of secrecy. The information we give them is coded and machine scanned. They are not motivated to deal with us personally. They are only looking at us as groups, for trends. They have no agenda; they are not trying to sell us anything. They are neutral.

We may worry that information could give government too much power. But for women, information is what will empower us. The facts will show with clarity the difficulties we face.

Are women earning as much as men? If not, why not?

I think it's because of our caregiving role. Do women earn longer than men? Are they delaying retirement because they can't afford it? Are senior women in poverty because they outlive men? We need the facts.

Do women suffer more depression than men do? Do they consult doctors more? Do they have more stress from career-family dilemmas? How much is this costing the economy? Give us the facts.

Are children dropping out of school more? Is unpaid care time related to how well children turn out? How does this factor affect their health, their education? We need the facts.

Women save the state billions tending the sick and elderly outside of hospital. To maintain our homes, we are the greatest spending machines in North America. We keep the economy running. Is what we do counted? We need the facts.

For me this is not about being fair. It is not about being nice to women, giving them a little pat on the head: Oh, how cute. This is about a debt we owe women. The unpaid labour question alerted legislators that what women do unpaid is one third of the GDP. Should we sweep that information back under the rug? No. We need the question to stay. It's a promise we made internationally. It's a debt we owe.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Ms. Smith.

Now we go to Mary Mowbray of the Canadian Women's Foundation.

[Mary Mowbray, Co-Chair of the Board of Directors, Canadian Women's Foundation]

Good morning. Thank you for inviting the Canadian Women's Foundation to address this committee on how the loss of the mandatory long-form census will affect women's economic security in Canada.

I'm the co-chair of the Canadian Women's Foundation. I've been on the board for eight years. In my professional life, I'm a vice-president with Colliers International, a full-service commercial real estate brokerage firm. The issues that affect women and girls are a passion of mine. I have personally experienced and I have seen clearly in my work the impact that a woman's ability to achieve economic independence has on her family and on her community.

The Canadian Women's Foundation's mission is to invest in the power of women and the dreams of girls. We work to move low-income women out of poverty, to end violence against women and to build strong, resilient girls. We are Canada's only national public foundation focused on transforming the lives of women and girls to better the world for everyone. We are one of the 10 largest women's foundations in the world.

All of our funding is donated by private individuals and corporations who believe in our mandate to improve the economic security of women and girls in Canada. Since 1991, we have raised over $47 million and funded over 1,000 community organizations across Canada. The work we do has a positive effect across Canada. Eighty-four percent of the women who were on welfare when they joined our economic development program have reduced their dependency on welfare.

I'm going to make three points this morning. One, the loss of reliable, accurate data from the mandatory long-form census will hamper our efforts to advance women's economic independence in Canada. Two, a move to a voluntary survey will mean that Canada's most economically disadvantaged women and girls will no longer be properly counted. Three, data from the mandatory long-form census supports our fundraising work and informs our community investment strategy.

We believe that women's equality is inextricably linked to their economic security. In addressing the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, Hillary Clinton said:

If women have a chance to work and earn as full and equal partners in society, their families will flourish. And when families flourish, communities and nations [flourish].

When women are economically secure, they pay more taxes, they have more purchasing power, and they help to keep the economy strong. They also rely less on government services. They are healthier and their children are healthier.

We know because of long-form census data that despite women's social advancement, certain groups of women remain economically vulnerable. We know there are significant income gaps for visible minority groups even when members of them are born in Canada, gaps that cannot be readily explained away by differences in age, education, or any other factors. We know that women who immigrate to Canada today are not advancing economically as immigrants have done in the past, despite higher education levels.

We know that aboriginal women, especially those living on reserves, are among Canada's poorest women. These are the women we work with--low-income women--and they tend to be immigrant women, visible minority women, women with disabilities, single mothers, socially marginalized women, women who have lived with abuse, and aboriginal women. These are the very women we fear will not be fully represented in a voluntary survey of any kind.

The Statistics Canada website gives examples of how voluntary surveys under-count economically vulnerable groups. Here's a quote about the general social survey: “Non-coverage of households...is concentrated in population groups with low educational attainment or income.”

Currently, Statistics Canada uses data from the mandatory long-form census to help correct these biases in voluntary surveys and ensure that voluntary survey samples are properly weighted. However, without a mandatory long-form census as a baseline, how can we be sure that data from voluntary services captures the vulnerable groups? Without reliable data, how can we measure economic progress or lack thereof? How can we demonstrate that all women count when all women are no longer counted?

I'm going to give one specific example. We used information from the mandatory long-form census when we did an economic review of our economic development work. We'd done the work for 20 years. We knew the areas. We knew the issues that were involved. We had a volunteer committee of 22 people, each with their own biases. We had a report conducted on women in trades and technology.

The conclusion that came out of that was that it was very clear that women were clustered in the lowest-paid occupations. Out of this work that was based on data, we ended up funding a new trades and technology stream. We're investing over $1 million a year in it, and we picked up a major corporate partner who was engaged because of the research that supported our investment strategy.

To be an effective and responsible foundation, we have to base our investment strategy and decisions on reliable and consistent data. All evidence supports the view that groups that are economically vulnerable are likely to be under-counted in voluntary surveys. These are the women we serve. Without reliable, consistent data, how do we know how they are progressing? Without the ability to compare the past to the present, we won't know if women have achieved economic independence or not, or how their progress is going. We don't know what we can't accurately measure. Helping women achieve economic security is our mission. We know that if women remain economically insecure, Canada cannot reach its full potential. The corporations and the individuals who support our work know this too.

Our work is based on reliable and consistent data—data that capture the reality of all women and data that change over time, data that can only come from a mandatory long-form census.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Ms. Mowbray.

Now we move to the question and answer segment. We begin with seven minutes.

I'd like to let the witnesses know—for those of you who have been here before, you do know—that the seven minutes includes questions and answers. So if everyone could please be as succinct as possible, we can get as many questions and answers as we would need in this session.

I'd like to begin with Ms. Neville for the Liberals.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

And a very sincere thank you to each of you who were here this morning. Your presentations were different, but the power of your presentations and the impact on women is quite astounding, and I very much appreciate your being here.

As you know, we heard from Statistics Canada on Tuesday, and they said to us that “...it appeared that little policy, analytic or academic work has been produced from the unpaid work questions on the census”.

Why would they say that? What's been your experience?

Ms. Lahey, do you want to comment?

[Prof. Kathleen A. Lahey]

I will share a personal, direct experience that might shed some light on that. First of all, as Dr. MacDonald mentioned, it takes time for peer-reviewed, data-based research, which is usually funded from grants, etc., to get up, running, be executed, and published. So there is always a time lag, and sometimes that time lag can run to a total of three or four years. As soon as the 1996 unpaid work data became available, I rushed to my nearest Status of Women Canada office to look for funding. But along the way, I managed to get funding even more quickly from the Law Commission of Canada to carry out a research project in the tax policy area that was very near and dear to my heart, on the destructive impact of joint taxation on women particularly.

That paper was published fairly quickly because it was published by the law commission itself and was available and circulating for a total of five or six years. It's no longer available, however, unless someone makes a personal appointment to come to my office and take a copy out of the boxes in my office, because when the Law Commission of Canada was defunded in 2006, its offices were closed. It was told to dispose of all its assets for the best price, and the dump truck would be along on a specific date. The web page was torn down and is only available through an obscure, mirrored version based at Dalhousie University. And the research is, for all practical purposes, invisible. So I don't have any problem believing that when the Statistics Canada gender experts went looking for evidence of use of these data, they may have had a hard time finding a great deal of it.

Status of Women Canada did fund a huge amount of research on this. That research has all been taken off the web page, hidden in government archives, not available on the Internet, and is not available for sale.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Thank you.

Ms. Mowbray.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Yes, I was going to say Ms. Mowbray and Ms. Smith both had their hands up.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Thank you. I have lots more questions.