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.
November 18th, 2010 / 9:55 a.m.
Bloc
Monique Guay Bloc Rivière-du-Nord, QC
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I am happy to be here today. Ladies, thank you for being here.
You talked about question number 33. As I only have five minutes, I will try to be as brief as possible.
There are other very important questions about women in the long form census. Am I wrong about this? I understand that these questions could also be eliminated.
10 a.m.
Editor, Recent Research on Caregiving, As an Individual
At the level of definitions, I always had a problem with Statistics Canada because their definition of work is different from mine. In each question where a person is asked whether he or she has worked, there is nothing to take into account the women who work but who are not paid for their work. So the whole questionnaire is biased.
10 a.m.
Bloc
Monique Guay Bloc Rivière-du-Nord, QC
Exactly, and that should not be the case since in Quebec, for example, women represent 52% of the population.
You talked about unpaid work, but there is also the whole issue of women who are single parents and the issue of women who do not get equal pay for work of equal value. A great number of questions deal with this issue. If we withdraw question number 33, I believe that it will do a lot of harm.
I have two questions that, for me, are very important. Did you approach the government, apart from your appearance in front of this committee, to insist that question 33, among others, stays in the long form census?
Did you intervene in other fora, through your respective groups or associations or whatever?
10 a.m.
Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen's University, As an Individual
I took it directly to the national newspapers, the political parties, the major blogs, and so on, and a huge reaction unfolded.
10 a.m.
Professor and Chair, Economics Department, Saint Mary's University, As an Individual
I signed a petition.
10 a.m.
As an Individual
As an individual, not as a representative of my organization.
10 a.m.
Co-Chair of the Board of Directors, Canadian Women's Foundation
Sorry, my French is not....
10 a.m.
Co-Chair of the Board of Directors, Canadian Women's Foundation
With my work through the Canadian Women's Foundation.
10 a.m.
Bloc
10 a.m.
Conservative
10 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
I think that's up to Ms. Mowbray whether she wishes to listen to the translation or not.
Can we move on to Ms. Guay, please?
10 a.m.
Bloc
Monique Guay Bloc Rivière-du-Nord, QC
I would like to know whether the previous form really allowed you to obtain all the information that you are talking about this morning. Did you really obtain, through the previous form, all the information that you needed to compile your statistics? I would like to hear you about this.
10 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Let me just clarify. Are you asking if there is another way we could get it?
10 a.m.
Bloc
Monique Guay Bloc Rivière-du-Nord, QC
Did the previous form, that included question 33, really enable you to do all your research?
10 a.m.
Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen's University, As an Individual
Question 33 was never designed to cover every aspect of unpaid work. Unpaid work probably accounts for about one-half of all human work hours in Canada. But unlike paid work, which is covered in 12 questions over many, many pages in every census, unpaid work has been segregated into one single question. So it has been framed as what is referred to as a symbolic question, which gets at the three most important unpaid activities people engage in.
It's a very wide-ranging framing of the question, and I'd just like to emphasize that it does not ask about unpaid work; it asks about unpaid activities. That's why the census data really are the place to start, because they reach every part of Canada, every community, every income category, and every cultural and linguistic group. No one is left out.
In a quick comparison of just how the two samples, the GSS versus question 33, compare, I discovered that in the last round of census data collection, 40.9% of all the women who responded to the census—and there were 25.5 million responses to the census—indicated they did some unpaid activities relating to children.
The GSS for the year just before that, for 2005, which only sampled 19,500 people in the whole country, or 2,000 per province, was only able to find 20% of all female participants in its sample reporting any child care work. So there are significant data limitations with the GSS.
The census is absolutely crucial with respect to question 33, even though we could make it a lot better than it is.
10:05 a.m.
Liberal
10:05 a.m.
NDP
Niki Ashton NDP Churchill, MB
Great. I have two questions.
I would direct my first question to Ms. Regehr. My mom, who spent many hours of unpaid work raising my brother and I, was part of the national action committee in the fight for consideration of this point in the census.
It seems to me that so many years later, the question I ask is, by removing not just this question but also the mandatory form census, are we in fact moving backwards?
Also, how do we compare with other countries' data collection and the work they're able to do as a result of their data collection?
Perhaps I'll state those questions, and then after you have a chance to comment, Ms. Regehr, I'd like to direct a further question to Ms. Mowbray and ask her to further expand on what I think are some pretty shocking figures of the level of responses by different groups when the census is no longer mandatory.
I'm wondering if we could perhaps consider that model in Canada. I represent an area that has a very large number of first nations and Métis people, and certainly people from diverse groups. If in fact we can project that level of response in our country, what would that mean for the representation of these groups, and certainly of the women in these groups?
10:05 a.m.
As an Individual
It's hard to respond to that question other than to say that things are going backwards if there's a huge range of data we're not going to be able to use anymore. I know that in my own professional life there are pieces of work that we would have done but will not now be able to do if we do not have the long-form census this time. That's fact; it's just straight fact. So I don't know how to respond otherwise.
The focus of my work has been different in recent years, so I haven't kept up with things, and I apologize for not being able to answer the question about international comparisons. But I do know that most of the Nordic countries do a really, really good job at collecting this sort of information, and they use it better than we do in public policy.
