Evidence of meeting #37 for Status of Women in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was data.
A recording is available from Parliament.
9:40 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
I'm sorry, we have gone to seven and a half minutes now.
Thank you very much.
Now I will go to Ms. Ashton for the New Democratic Party.
9:40 a.m.
NDP
Niki Ashton NDP Churchill, MB
Thank you very much.
First I'd like to apologize for stepping out for a few moments. My community is going through mass layoffs, and there was a big community meeting at home to try to deal with the situation.
I am particularly interested in the way question 33 connects with advocacy work. In my last two years, since having been elected—and prior to that as well—I have been shocked to see the attack on women's advocacy organizations.
I'm particularly interested in how, perhaps, the facts about women, and certainly, in a way, the numbers that represent the voices of women, may relate to advocacy around issues like child care or elder care or pay equity or employment insurance or whatever it might be.
I'd also like to note that sitting in the House of Commons, where only 21% of us are women, it seems to me more urgent than ever to make sure that women are counted somewhere.
I'd like to perhaps begin by asking Kathleen Lahey, and others who may have thoughts on it, about the connection between question 33 and advocacy.
9:40 a.m.
Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen's University, As an Individual
Well, I think the most obvious answer is that there has been advocacy, I believe, going on within Statistics Canada to try to get rid of question 33. I think that's a very direct link. After having heard the testimony that was given two days ago in this committee, I went back and reread the “2011 Census Content Consultation Report”, in which they report on their consultation process. Footnote 10, which says, “During most in-person consultations, participants were asked about the use and importance of unpaid work data”, took on an entirely new meaning for me.
This was not done in any of the discussions pertaining to any of the other questions that were on the “to be reviewed” list. Unpaid work was never on the list to be reviewed, according to the consultation guide.
The other peculiar thing that happened is that Statistics Canada itself became a major contributor to the comments that were collected and were then relied upon by Statistics Canada in concluding that the unpaid work question should come out, although it did not fully say that in its consultation report. In fact, the combination of the federal government responses and the Statistics Canada responses to the question that was asked by Statistics Canada people interviewing their consultants about unpaid work were enough to clearly constitute the 30% who said to take it out.
So there's advocacy on both sides. Women have been trusting Statistics Canada to not particularly single out the unpaid work question, but I think there's evidence in the consultation report that, unfortunately, Statistics Canada has perhaps not been quite so above board.
9:40 a.m.
NDP
Niki Ashton NDP Churchill, MB
Moving on to Martha MacDonald, do you have any thoughts about question 33 and how it connects to advocacy work by women?
November 18th, 2010 / 9:40 a.m.
Professor and Chair, Economics Department, Saint Mary's University, As an Individual
The unpaid work activities are an important part of what women's advocacy has tried to make clear. It's not just in terms of providing those services; it's in terms of how that work relates to paid work and the inequalities in the labour market.
Definitely, it has an important role to play. But I don't want it to be just a focus on that unpaid work. In terms of advocacy, I think there are a lot of other issues about the value of the long-form census data that are going to equally pose a challenge.
9:45 a.m.
NDP
9:45 a.m.
Co-Chair of the Board of Directors, Canadian Women's Foundation
The information we get with question 33 helps us to explain why women are at an economic disadvantage. They make choices, and whether you want to call it unpaid work or selfless work, or whatever it is, if I wasn't buying groceries for my child, somebody would have to buy the groceries. If I'm not doing it, I have to pay someone to do it.
We can get caught up in semantics for years and have fun little conversations, but at the end of the day, child care is child care, elder care is elder care, and if I don't look after my 84-year-old mother, I have to pay someone to look after her.
I just want to make a point here. I hear the passion and I hear the real commitment and the interest from the members of the committee, but I don't hear a lot of discussion about what I think is the fundamental issue as to why people are outraged--and I think outraged is the word--about the cancellation of the mandatory long-form census. It's really simple. There are lots of data and there is lots of research. It is not all driven by our organization or special interest groups. There are examples from other countries, like our neighbour to the south. These data show that voluntary surveys, by virtue of being voluntary, underrepresent vulnerable groups. Full stop.
It's very simple. Up to now, Stats Canada has used the mandatory long-form census to correct for that skewing. It's a very simple proposition. If you don't have a mandatory long-form census, you don't have the ability to correct for that.
The stats are there. When they did it in the U.S., 43% of white households responded, compared with 20% of black households and 23% of Hispanic households. When you phoned them afterwards, as soon as you said it was voluntary, responses dropped off by 17%.
This is not driven by special interests. This is fact. You can play it any way you want, but that is the fundamental problem. We will not have factual, accurate data about the Canadian population. It will be the people who need the most help that will not be counted.
The longer we go on not having a mandatory long-form census, the more difficult it will become to correct for the bias and the bigger the skewing will get. It's simple.
Can we collect the information some other way? Sure, we can. We can become like Finland. We can have an identity card that combines our health records, school records, income records, employment records, traffic violations, credit checks, and crime records. Everything could be in one place.
Do you want to talk about being intrusive? Do you want to talk about aligning local, provincial, and federal governments? Do you want to talk about costs? Let's start doing that. That is the alternative, unless you want to accept that we're not going to know the makeup of our population.
I'm here on behalf of the Canadian Women's Foundation and the one in seven women in Canada who lives in poverty. But really the issue is far greater than the people in the groups that the five of us are speaking about.
9:45 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you.
I think we have time for a second round. We will begin with Ms. Simson for the Liberals.
9:45 a.m.
Liberal
Michelle Simson Liberal Scarborough Southwest, ON
I'd like to thank everyone for coming out. Your testimony has been very compelling and powerful.
Perhaps I'll start with Ms. Regehr.
You said something that's quite interesting. Having read the clerk's notes, and I hope I have this correct, you mentioned that you were in some way consulted back in the 1990s on question 33. I agree, and was hoping, that it would be a lot more finite and a lot more detailed rather than eliminated.
That said, looking back in history, and to your point, Ms. Lahey, what's the problem with Statistics Canada in this particular question?
The clerk's notes indicate that historians reported that the federal government announced its intention to include the question on unpaid work in the census at the Beijing conference. That decision was the result of a cabinet decision that overruled Statistics Canada's advice. Right from the get go, Statistics Canada was a little adverse to even having it.
Ms. Lahey, you indicated that there are advocates to remove this question, which is quite bizarre. Statistics Canada appeared to have given us what was rather misleading testimony in terms of users of that particular data that was obtained by that question.
You were there at the beginning, Ms. Regehr. Do you have any sense of why there was an objection on the part of Statistics Canada to even include this question?
9:50 a.m.
As an Individual
I wondered if somebody might ask that. When I read the transcripts, I thought, “Oh, is my memory any better than Dr. Fellegi's?”
I can't definitively say that I know the answer. Based on my recollections of what was going on at the time...and it goes to Dr. Fellegi's statement too, though, that there is a role for government in deciding what we ask questions about. It's not about how we ask the questions and those technical things--
9:50 a.m.
Liberal
Michelle Simson Liberal Scarborough Southwest, ON
In fact, he testified that if the government thought a question was far too intrusive, they had the option of eliminating that question.
9:50 a.m.
As an Individual
From my recollection, this was one of those issues.
There was a lot of testing that went on in the design of the questions. To the point that was made earlier about people understanding the question, they focus tested it a lot. They tried to get the questions as good as they could, so that people who were not used to considering these things as work would understand what they were. Take the emotion and motivation out of it, but understand what the work is, so that it could be documented.
For Statistics Canada, I think there were some people who were worried a little bit about the reliability of it. Once we got the results and once they were compared to GSS, those fears proved to be unsubstantiated. I think those were some of the concerns.
However, going into Beijing, and given the importance to gender equality of having this kind of information, that societal need to start somewhere and understand what we're dealing with and get good data on it—I'm speculating—was probably the paramount issue.
I don't know what happens in cabinet, but those were some of the discussions and some of the issues that were being debated at the time.
9:50 a.m.
Liberal
9:50 a.m.
Professor and Chair, Economics Department, Saint Mary's University, As an Individual
I'm not sure if this is a direct answer to your question, but I think one of the strengths of the census data is the mix, the range of information. It might not be the most perfect unpaid work question, it may not be the most perfect job-related question, but the elements are all there. The various range of things we've talked about in terms of immigration, paid and unpaid work, incomes and family incomes, and children and education--it's that mix that's really important.
9:50 a.m.
Liberal
9:50 a.m.
Conservative
Nina Grewal Conservative Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, ladies, for your time and your presentations. Certainly we enjoyed them.
Talking about question 33, I want to suggest that it was inadequate and offered very little value to our researchers and policy makers, but the results may be interesting. A serious analysis of unpaid work requires much more information than the census question provides, and it's not just the number of hours of unpaid work that matters; it's when and how those hours are spent.
Would you agree with me that it's not the number of hours worked that's important?
9:50 a.m.
As an Individual
Thank you.
It's an interesting question, and the response was mentioned earlier. You need more than one source of information to really get a handle on these things. I'm a very visual person, and something springs to mind that Australia did when it was looking at unpaid work and time-use surveys the first time. One of the really neat things about the general social survey is that it really allows you to see very specific patterns in women's and men's time that are different.
This visual chart for Australia showed that men's time is in big blocks. You spend a long weekend doing home repairs, and that's done. Then you spend the next five days at work. Women's patterns are like this coloured mosaic all over the place. You do a few minutes of this and a few minutes of that; you do things in combination. That's fascinating to know, but the amount really matters too. The kind of thing you get in the census is complementary to that, so you get a sense of the volume and who's doing what.
In the study I'm looking at and working on, I found it fascinating that there are some women who should be retired but look like they are doing full-time, long hours of child care. I also know from the census that family structure among immigrants to Canada is very different, especially among immigrants who are living in poverty. It's very different from the Canadian average. So combining those things you get a sense of that population.
Maybe they are elderly women who have come to Canada recently who don't qualify for old age pensions and therefore need to do this child care work. Maybe they're supporting their children, who are very stressed from lack of child care and trying to meet all the demands, so the grandparents are assuming that. There is such a richness there if you combine these different sources.
9:55 a.m.
Conservative
Nina Grewal Conservative Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
Ms. MacDonald, you have done some serious work on unpaid labour. Was your work dependent on the results from question 33, and did you gather more vital information from other sources as well? Could you please elaborate on those sources?
9:55 a.m.
Professor and Chair, Economics Department, Saint Mary's University, As an Individual
My main published work on unpaid work used the general social survey, but in doing so I discovered both the strengths and weaknesses of that. It's very rich in detail. You can decide, concerning what Ms. Brown said, whether you're going to count shopping as work or not in how you do the analysis. You can have lots of debate on that. There are also things you can't do with that, and certainly in that work we cross-referenced with the census.
In other international comparison work I'm involved in, and particularly in my teaching work, the unpaid work is very central, using the unpaid work as a factor in an analysis of paid labour market inequality that you can do with the census--so the gender wage gap, or penalties in terms of having children, or whatever. In the analysis of paid wage work you can also use summary unpaid work as a variable. You are not necessarily focusing on the unpaid work, but you are taking it into account in analyzing other aspects of inequality. It's very useful in that way. I have used that.
9:55 a.m.
Editor, Recent Research on Caregiving, As an Individual
It's more than hours. I would also count income sacrifice. Did you have to take time away from your paid work commitment to do the care work? There are other questions we could ask within this.
9:55 a.m.
Co-Chair of the Board of Directors, Canadian Women's Foundation
Sorry, and full-time to part-time.... Seventy percent of Canada's part-time workforce is female. They make choices that they don't take full-time jobs because of core housework related to food and shelter. So this is meal preparation, cleanup, indoor cleaning, and laundry--not lawn cutting and not reading to my daughter at night. It's still mostly done by women. The hours do matter; they really do. They affect their choices in jobs, and that affects their economic independence.
9:55 a.m.
Liberal