Status of Women Committee on Nov. 30th, 2010

[Alan H. Kessel]

Madam Chair, I can certainly speak to you as long as you would like or allow me to on any of the issues you would like on terminology.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Irene Mathyssen]

Well, we have a few minutes.

[Alan H. Kessel]

I've spent most of my career dealing with international law and humanitarian law. I led the delegation on the development of the International Criminal Court treaty in Rome. One of my star members of the delegation, who I stole from a feminist NGO in fact to work for us, worked on the development of rape as a war crime. I'd be delighted to speak to you for as long as you'd like on these issues, since I've been immersed in them for many years.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Irene Mathyssen]

Thank you. The committee certainly appreciates that, and we value the expertise that you bring. At this point we are out of time. I would again like to extend our gratitude to you.

I'll suspend for a few moments while our witnesses leave and our witnesses for Status of Women Canada take their places.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Cathy McLeod]

Good morning. I'll call this meeting back to order.

We're heading into the second portion of the meeting. Pursuant to Standing Order 81(5), we are reviewing supplementary estimates (B), 2010-11, vote 95b, under Canadian Heritage, as referred to the committee on Tuesday, November 2, 2010.

I believe we have an opening presentation by Suzanne Clément, who's the coordinator, head of agency, with Status of Women Canada.

Welcome, and we look forward to your presentation.

[Suzanne Clément, Coordinator, Head of Agency, Office of the Coordinator, Status of Women Canada]

Thank you very much.

My opening statement will be taking the better part of my ten minutes, but if the committee would permit, I would like to introduce the members with me today.

I have Linda Savoie, who's the director general of the women's program; Sébastien Goupil, whom I believe some of you have met at an earlier appearance on the census; and Johanne Tremblay, who is the CFO for the organization.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I am pleased to be here with you today to talk about the supplementary estimates of Status of Women Canada. As the first anniversary of my appointment as coordinator approaches, I find myself amazed at how quickly the year has gone by—and how much we have achieved!

Let me begin by noting that we are in the midst of the worldwide 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence, which began on November 25 with the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. This period provides an opportunity to raise awareness of this enduring problem and to encourage Canadians to take concrete actions to eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls.

Status of Women Canada works to promote equality for women in Canada. To achieve concrete and tangible results on this front is a shared responsibility. This requires strategic interventions on our part, as well as on the part of other federal organizations such as DFAIT, which you heard from today, and stakeholders at all levels, both within and outside of government.

The issues affecting women cannot be addressed by one organization alone. Over the past year, we have invested significant effort in developing partnerships. Status of Women Canada acts as an enabler, a facilitator, and a knowledge broker, starting with the federal family and federal organizations, and extending well beyond, to provincial and territorial governments, NGOs, academics, and others.

Status of Women Canada, and the women's program in particular, operates in three broad areas to advance equality for women and remove barriers to their participation in society. Those areas are: leadership; economic security and prosperity; and, very importantly, ending violence against women, with emphasis on remote, aboriginal, and immigrant communities.

Through our policy work, we seek to influence and support the efforts of our partners. We endeavour to help others understand their roles in promoting equality for women and seize the opportunities that this presents, regardless of whether their mandate deals with economic development, law enforcement, social housing, or prevention of violence.

When I last appeared in front of this committee, I indicated that I had begun discussions with Statistics Canada on the publication of the sixth edition of “Women in Canada”. In fact, Status of Women Canada will receive a transfer of $129,000 in its operating budget in the 2010-11 supplementary estimates (B) exercise for this purpose.

I'm proud to announce today that the first chapter on paid work will be released this December, with the remaining chapters published over the course of the next year. This is a fine example of the central role Status of Women Canada plays in ensuring that sex-disaggregated data is available to inform policy and program-making.

More than a dozen federal organizations have contributed to this initiative, both financially and in terms of advice and consultations. I would like to take this opportunity to thank them.

Another key lever to advance equality for women is gender-based analysis, which, as you know, has received well-deserved attention over the past year. Implementation of the GBA Action Plan is providing federal organizations with an opportunity to reflect on how to entrench the sustainable practices required to inform decision-making.

Status of Women Canada will continue to focus on making the framework and tools relevant, in particular for areas where legislation, policy and programs are often assumed to be gender-neutral. It is also important to note the growing interest of other House committees in gender-based analysis and related issues.

This year, we made changes to the Women's Community Fund. These changes will allow organizations to work more collaboratively with Status of Women Canada to create the best possible environment for advancing equality for women in our country.

As well, other federal departments are now involved in reviewing applications, which provides a broader representation of expertise and potential funding partners. As I mentioned earlier, Status of Women Canada focuses a good deal of its energies and its resources on the issue of violence against women. Why? Because today, one in two women will experience violence in her lifetime. And because, in 2008, there were 146 female victims of homicide in Canada, 45 of whom were victims of spousal homicide.

Young women experience the highest rates of violence. Girls under the age of 18 experience sexual assault by family members at a rate four times higher than for boys. And as we know, Aboriginal women continue to experience high rates of violence and homicide, a situation that remains unacceptable.

The impacts of this violence are far-reaching—not only are they devastating to the victim, but also to her family, to our society, to our economy and to our health care system. Status of Women Canada works in partnership with organizations across the federal government. For example, we are working with the RCMP to train officers to better identify and help victims of human trafficking.

We are a partner in the cross-governmental Family Violence Initiative chaired by the Public Health Agency of Canada and through which we have recently begun mapping government interventions in this area.

We also recognize that collaboration with our provincial, territorial and community-based partners is essential to success in addressing violence at every level.

Among our current collaborative efforts, Status of Women Canada is providing funding to the Newfoundland Aboriginal Women's Network to implement a community crime prevention and awareness initiative that targets violence against women. This project's key strength is its recognition that lasting change requires the involvement of a full range of stakeholders in the community.

Economic security and prosperity is another area of priority. Indeed, a healthy economy for all Canadians is the government's top priority. Women play a critical part in securing Canada's economic prosperity.

Many advances have been made with respect to women's participation in the workforce. Still, there is work to be done—for example, while we are seeing more women in fields such as human resources and business, they continue to be underrepresented in science, engineering, and trades.

Non-traditional occupations present a tremendous opportunity for women. This committee has done some important work on this issue and on how to encourage women to pursue careers in fields where labour shortages are anticipated and the remuneration is attractive.

In recent weeks, Minister Ambrose has announced some promising and innovative projects that have received funding, such as the Centre for Women in Science, Engineering, Trades and Technology, WinSETT, leadership program, which will promote women's active participation in non-traditional work and leadership and will include a particular focus on aboriginal and immigrant women.

We've made important strides in women's participation in leadership. This year's World Economic Forum gender gap report ranks Canada 20th out of 134 countries, compared to 25th in 2009. As of 2010, women hold 22% of the seats in the House of Commons, 34% of those in the Senate, and 27% in federal cabinet posts.

However, we still have a way to go, particularly in some areas—for example, while women now make up 47% of the labour force, over 40% of private companies have no women on their boards of directors. To address this issue, Status of Women Canada recently provided funding to The Jeffery Group for a project called “The Bottom Line: Gender Diversity at the Board Level”. This promising initiative aims to increase the number of women on Financial Post 500 boards of directors.

In closing, I want to stress the excellent working relationships that Status of Women has with other federal departments and agencies, other levels of government and civil society. Our work is necessarily collaborative and could not be achieved without the invaluable support of our partners.

Thank you for permitting me to make this presentation. I welcome the committee's questions.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Cathy McLeod]

Thank you so much, and we're ready to start our first round of questioning.

Ms. Simson, you have seven minutes.

[Michelle Simson, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Ms. Clément, for appearing before the committee. In fact, the last time you were here, we were going over the supplementary estimates at that time.

I particularly appreciate your opening remarks with respect to where Status of Women is focusing its attention. You highlight particularly the area of violence against women, which you know I'm happy to hear. But as they say, the devil is in the details, because I do recall being quite distressed that the last time we went over the estimates, some $317,000 had been stripped from the budget to fund a ballet, which would have little or no impact whatsoever. I was beginning to wonder how serious the government truly was in addressing the issue of violence against women.

So that said, I'd just like to ask you to elaborate on one of the statements you made in your opening statement, where you say, “This year, we made changes to the Women's Community Fund.” Can you be more specific about what those changes are and elaborate on whether they represent more money or less money, and what was behind the changes? Thank you.

[Suzanne Clément]

Thank you for the question. I would like to address the first point on the transfer to the Atlantic Ballet Theatre of $317,000 last year.

At first sight, transferring money to a ballet organization may not obviously give the impression of addressing questions of violence, but I have to say it has been an extremely powerful investment in the area of addressing—

[Michelle Simson, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

But with due respect, in your opening statement you said that in 2008 there were 146 female victims of homicide and roughly a third of those were spousal homicides. I'm wondering to what degree a ballet would in fact address this issue. Production was just getting under way. How far along is it?

[Suzanne Clément]

The launch will be February 14, Valentine's Day, at the National Arts Centre—that is, the launch of the production. They have already launched a shorter version of a video that is being used in schools and in different forums across the country. It was presented at the Governor General's women's leadership conference recently. What it does is it uses the performing arts as a vehicle for passing the message on as to what the impacts of violence are, and in particular on how men, who are the aggressors, are positioned in the context of that conjugal relationship, violent—

[Michelle Simson, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

In other words, though, I guess my concern was that it is the arts, and I don't know...I wasn't aware that if there was a theme or a message being sent by the arts, a play, for instance.... Let's say we were having a play on the meltdown of the economy in Canada. Would that come out of Finance? I guess that was my point at the time.

[Suzanne Clément]

I wouldn't be able to answer that question, but I can say that—

[Michelle Simson, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

No, no, but you see where I'm going with it—you know, depending on the arts, what the actual subject matter was. So that was my concern.

But getting back to the Women's Community Fund, which was the question, could you please elaborate on that?

[Suzanne Clément]

Yes. Since the minister's announcement in June, women's program staff have implemented the new process for developing and assessing applications to the women's program. The staff provide advice and professional assistance to groups throughout the proposal development stage, including providing feedback on project ideas at an early stage of development.

Program officers can also assist groups and make suggestions about other partners in the community who may be interested in working with the applicant to ensure sustainability and ongoing impact. The main change there has been on the focus on the regional resources in helping the groups develop their proposals. The assessment process is now being managed at the centre in headquarters.

The first big change was that we removed the call for proposal, the one date per year that organizations had to apply by. It is a continuous intake. When I appeared here in May, I believe Madame Demers raised a comment about taking so much time to get back to organizations. The new process allows us to immediately get back to the organization, to work with them, to further develop the application if it's not complete, and it also provides us the opportunity to do the assessment process immediately and render decisions. We're very pleased to say we already have decisions in this current year that have been made on proposals. The front-line resources, the regional resources, are working with the organizations to develop the proposal.

The second big change is that we've invited departmental resources from across the federal family who would have an expertise or an interest in the area that is being pursued in a proposal. For example, if it's a proposal that is addressing issues of violence, we would ensure we have representation from Public Safety and the Department of Justice, so that we get both their expertise and input into the assessment, but also possibly get them interested in working with our organizations and ensure that a cross-pollination and cross-awareness are being built around women's issues in communities.

[Michelle Simson, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Cathy McLeod]

Next, Madame Demers.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Ms. Clément, for being here today. My thanks also go to the people who accompanied you today.

I would first like to talk about the study done by Statistics Canada for you. One hundred and twenty-nine thousand dollars is not a lot of money. How many people were included in this sample?

[Suzanne Clément]

We are talking about Women in Canada, a guide published in 2005 and a few other times beforehand.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Yes, we were looking forward to it.

[Suzanne Clément]

Right. The $129,000 is the transfer received under supplementary estimates (B). Other transfers will be allocated in supplementary estimates (C).

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

I'd like to know how many people are represented in the sample of women in paid work.

[Suzanne Clément]

It isn't a number of people. Statistics Canada uses a number of information sources, including the census, the GSS and the NHS. I don't know all the terminology.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Okay. So it's combined, then…

[Suzanne Clément]

Yes.