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.