Thank you.
Thank you very much for inviting me to speak on these issues today. I am very pleased to see that the focus is on not just questions of leadership, but on questions of economic leadership and women's prosperity. There is a strong connection among all of these concepts, and I would like to introduce my comments by drawing your attention to the one-page handout that each person should have, with a few charts on it that may help contextualize some of my comments.
The first point that I want to make is that women's equality in Canada is definitely not something that has been achieved yet. In fact, the reality is that women's sex equality, which was very well on the road to becoming a reality back in the 1990s, has been deteriorating rapidly in Canada. People say this a lot, but I decided to put into chart form the most recent international rankings that are based on the same indicators used to assess the degree of sex equality in other countries.
This shows that although Canada was number one in the entire world on the basis of both human development factors as well as on sex equality factors, beginning in the year 2000, Canada has been falling rapidly in the international rankings. On some of the rankings, one of which is conducted by the World Economic Forum, Canada in recent years fell as low as number 31 out of all of the countries in the world. This is a very seriously negative set of rankings that reflect the fact that on every known economic and social welfare indicator, women in Canada are persistently falling behind, with the exception of one. This has already been mentioned by other speakers.
Women in Canada continue to be ranked number one on the issue of educational attainment. I would like to emphasize that because this cannot possibly be blamed on women. Women in Canada have by their actions, generation after generation, demonstrated that they are very strongly motivated to achieve as much as possible with their educational backgrounds, with their abilities, with their energies, and so on. What we are facing here is a question of how economic policies and social policies intersect with women's life aspirations to produce a very disturbing picture showing the deterioration of sex equality in Canada.
The dimensions of women's inequality in Canada are very durable. Over the last 20 years we've seen very little change in some fundamental economic indicators. One is the question of how much unpaid work is done by women as compared to men. The percentage of unpaid work done by women has continued to hang in the 62% to 64% area for the last 20 years; that is, women continue to do the bulk of unpaid work that gets done in Canada. This is by hours.
Also measured by hours, women are now at the point where they have almost equal numbers of hours of paid work, as compared to men. If you add those two sets of figures together, with women doing 45% to 47% of all paid work hours, together with 62% to 64% of all unpaid work hours, you actually see that women are working more hours every year in Canada than men are.
What do women get for it? Recent economic statistics indicate that women's market incomes continue to only account for 36% to 38% of all market incomes. So, for all that work, women are still receiving slightly more than one-third of all market incomes that are received in this country.
I give you these figures because this is a very serious problem, and it is a problem that has significance on the economic level.
International organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other leading economic organizations have all found in studies they've carried out over the last 10 years or so that the more sex equality exists in a country, the more durable that country's economy is, the more resistant families are to the ups and downs of economic crises, boom and bust cycles. They've also found that the more work is shared equally between women and men, be it unpaid work or paid work, the greater the health, the wellbeing, and the overall productivity of the entire population. This is not a finding that has any real detractors to it: sex equality is a fundamental economic strategy for achieving prosperity.
So what has been going wrong in Canada? My main area of research and focus within the general area of gender issues relating to law and politics is in the fiscal area. I'd just like to draw some basic findings to your attentions, which I think help illuminate the path forward.
First of all, since 2006, Canada has cut its various sources of revenues by approximately 2.2% of GDP per year. Canada is missing $40 billion worth of revenues every year that it used to have. This has been in conjunction with the effects of economic recession, the combined effect of which has been a growing emphasis on austerity policies, deficit reduction, and cutting public expenditures. Unfortunately, this has made it difficult for Canada to sustain the programs that are absolutely necessary to achieving gender equality in an economically significant way.
One of those ways is that it has brought to a virtual halt any efforts to implement a national child care program, which is essential to making it possible for women to do less than 62% to 64% of all unpaid work in this country. It's just impossible for women to do more in the way of paid work than they have been able to without some relief from the unequal responsibility that they bear for such activities as home care, child care, elder care, community care, and so on.
The second thing that has been happening is that, as Canada has become increasingly reliant on tax expenditures of various kinds to solve political problems, Canada's revenue base has been carved out from the inside so that something like $172 billion of potential tax revenue is left on the table by the government every year through the existence of a large number of tax expenditures. So for virtually every tax dollar that is collected, another dollar has been left on the table in the form of this large number of tax expenditures.
Most of these many tax expenditures have a negative gender impact, but I just want to draw your attention to the most particularly toxic tax expenditures from a gender perspective, and these are the tax expenditures that have been enacted in order to reward women to not work for pay. That is, there are a large number of tax benefits that have been enacted and are a fundamental part of our tax transfer system that give larger after-tax rewards to households in which women have smaller paid work lives than they would perhaps otherwise have.
At the present time, this is currently costing the Government of Canada $6.7 billion per year, which I point out is more than enough to finance even the most lavish national child care program. But along with this is the ongoing promise of new parental income splitting benefits, which would cost the federal government an additional $2.7 billion come 2015. I have put a little decile breakdown at the bottom of this page to demonstrate how this is not only hugely expensive, but it's also hugely unfair and runs directly contrary to any sensible policy aimed at trying to improve the prosperity of Canadian women.
I will close by making one more statement, and that is that when parental income splitting comes into effect, couples who live on one income of $190,000 or so per year will receive a tax benefit of $12,000 from parental income splitting. That's a very large amount of money.