Evidence of meeting #57 for Status of Women in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was stem.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Joyce Bateman Conservative Winnipeg South Centre, MB
I'd like to move to you now, Ms. Connolly, and to your damning statistics, if I may. It was wonderful to see the clarity of your report. Only 4% of women are even in the architecture field. You used that as the first example.
As I asked Ms. Evans, how do we reach these young women? How do we reach their families? What ideas do you have? Clearly this permeates the body of your report.
Professor, Department of Economics, Université du Québec à Montréal, As an Individual
Right.
To echo what Ms. Evans was saying, there is one point that I did go over quickly in my recommendations. The federal government, through research granting agencies like NSERC, funds a lot of scientific research. University professors get their funding through those. Well, they could have specific spending categories geared toward public outreach. They already fund communication and knowledge transfer activities. A lot of university professors use that for going to conferences to talk to their academic peers. That is very valuable, but I think probably more could be done to go and talk to local high schools.
You're not going to reach every parent in Canada, but having highly successful women...and men as well. As long as people can talk passionately to young children and young adults about what they do, and about the scientific careers they have, I think that is valuable. I think you have, through those agencies, a channel that you can use to fund that kind of outreach.
Conservative
Joyce Bateman Conservative Winnipeg South Centre, MB
What a great idea, to make that an inextricable component of the research funding.
Professor, Department of Economics, Université du Québec à Montréal, As an Individual
Yes. The CIHR, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, has a program like that. It's called Synapse. It's an outreach and mentoring program. I have not seen the equivalent for NSERC or SSHRC, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Something like that could be exploited.
Conservative
NDP
The Chair NDP Hélène LeBlanc
Thank you. I would like to thank you very much for your time.
You have a little time left, so you could have a very brief comment to thank everybody. But I would like to give just a little chance for the opposition for one question, one brief question.
Conservative
Joyce Bateman Conservative Winnipeg South Centre, MB
Hold on a second, Madam Chair.
There's justice and there's justice. You cut me off in the middle of my time. I have waited patiently for the whole round and I have listened attentively and, Madam Chair, I find this the utmost of disrespect that you would interject and cut my time off—
Conservative
Joyce Bateman Conservative Winnipeg South Centre, MB
—to empower the opposition who have already had a question and most of whom are so disrespectful to our witnesses that they've already left this meeting.
NDP
Conservative
Conservative
Joyce Bateman Conservative Winnipeg South Centre, MB
On a point of order, I'd like to find out first whether you or la greffière keeps the time, because I think we are having problems on this committee with the timing of individuals.
NDP
The Chair NDP Hélène LeBlanc
Thank you, Ms. Bateman.
Please ask your question and then we'll conclude with your time. Thank you.
Please do ask your question.
Conservative
Joyce Bateman Conservative Winnipeg South Centre, MB
I am so sorry to all of our witnesses. My question was for the wonderful women from Unifor and I'd like to start with the first lady, Lisa Kelly. I actually am so very impressed with the presentation you put together.
I mean, if we don't get the message out, you are not able to assist people, you're not able to grow that 305,000 people in your cadre. Much as Ms. Connolly and Ms. Evans have said with clarity, they are trying to be creative about reaching out and not waiting until we're training people from barista to welder, but to maybe engender.... How could Unifor help reach the younger people, like maybe the grade sixers that Ms. Connolly or Ms. Evans were referring to?
Director, Women's Department, Unifor
I'd like to throw that over to my colleague, Ms. Weymouth, because she actually has been part of many a very valuable outreach, not only at a school-age level but at a working-age level.
Terry, do you want to speak to that?
National Skilled Trades Coordinator, Unifor
Thank you very much.
Yes, we've been doing the women's skilled trades and technology awareness program since 2001. We've actually presented this course to more than several hundred people. We've also taken this course and changed it, depending on who our audience was. We've done a program for the Saugeen First Nation mothers and daughters. We used the same techniques to address 67 women, mothers and daughters, in that first nation.
We just recently did the Ontario Women's Directorate program, a partnership with the Women's Enterprise Skills Training and St. Clair College. There were 67 people who took that last year, and 75 this year will take that training.
NDP
The Chair NDP Hélène LeBlanc
Thank you very much.
I would like to thank all our witnesses. I feel we had very valuable information.
We will have our meeting next Tuesday.
This meeting is adjourned.