Status of Women Committee on Oct. 29th, 2018

[Tara Setaram]

The government has already recognized that brick and mortar housing for foster homes or group homes puts people who live in those homes at risk.

One of the elements of our programming in Halton has been that we want to create a crisis unit and transitional homes so if they're ever found in those spaces, they can move. Because Halton is growing, our housing recommendation is that whenever there is a new build, the city could negotiate a number of rentals within that building to be allocated to transitional space. Right now what we're encountering is that they don't want to lease to third parties. That's one of our main barriers.

If people are building, then having spaces allocated for transitional housing supports is our recommendation.

[Alma Arguello]

Another recommendation would be.... There was capacity money that did come out. The two streams came out, and the collateral for it, but it excludes small agencies from participating. We are the only agency in Halton region that will be getting their crisis unit. That means we only have one bed between Peel and Hamilton. It's just one bed.

We cannot afford the capacity in an agency such as mine. We don't have the capital. Right away, this goes back to being systemic: there's the system and there's the block. We can't move forward, so we have to leverage partnership with bigger agencies. Fine, we do that, but then we have to go into the terms and conditions and policies and procedures of the other agency, which exclude people and are not necessarily operating from an intersectional feminist model. That is hurtful.

We are at a point right now that we are trying to work with the region to see if we can put a proposal forward and have the region help us out with it, but we also have to look at the integrity of the folks we're trying to assist. We believe that a scattered program is better, because it's out in the community and still gets the support.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Ms. Costa, do you have anything specific on the capital priorities, and also operational priorities?

[Grace Costa]

Absolutely.

For us, it is the supportive housing piece. We don't have access to those funds. Our 50-bed housing unit, which is a townhouse model, is supportive housing. We can provide them with some supports, but certainly nowhere near the supports that the young women who come with these lived experiences need.

Again, because youth shelters seem to be almost lost from the map, we are seldom offered any kind of opportunity to put in a bed for those kinds of youth.

The other piece is that if I have a young woman who shows up at Satellite, which is a harm reduction shelter, and she's in crisis and her boyfriend or partner knows she's coming to Satellite, I have nowhere else to send this young woman. Not only do I put her at risk, but I put the other young people in that shelter at risk as well.

It's a losing battle. It's almost like I'm shuffling.... I'm calling places to try to see if they can move one of their kids over to our place so I can move one of our young women there.

Those are the kinds of experiences we've had.

[Megan Walker]

We partner routinely with the corporate sector. We use the corporate sector money to provide immediate access to service for women and children.

The corporate sectors in our communities across the country are very generous, but they oftentimes want to see upfront government money as well. In fact, most of the corporate sector that we work with want to see the government—for capital expenses—come to the table with at least 60% of the funds. That's not always the case.

A specific recommendation that I have for Status of Women Canada is to make funding available, and not only for capital expenditures. You could have the most beautiful building in the world, but if you don't have the funding for staff to provide service, you may as well not build the building. Operating expenses need to be funded as well as capital expenses.

Specific to trafficking, trafficked women suffer a trauma that is unspeakable. Many of those women and girls will come and go from service. They will exit and return. They require different services at different times. However, one of the things we see consistently is that although nobody wants to live in an institution, those women and girls would like a safe place that they can call their home while they are working on healing. That means living with other women and girls with similar experiences while having access to programs.

Finally, really quickly, I think the government has to stop working in silos. These issues we're talking about today aren't just about Status of Women Canada. They're not just health and they're not just community safety, and until we can get those ministries coming to the table to work toward one solution, we're going to be here in another 10 or 20 years doing the same thing.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

How much time do I have?

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

You're done, Marc. You're already 30 seconds over.

I'm now going to move on to Rachel—

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

I just want to say that there has to be hope for men in their forties and fifties, so any recommendation—

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Marc, you're doing fantastic.

[Megan Walker]

I couldn't do this work if I didn't have hope, but I can tell you it's a much easier process to educate children than it is men in their forties and fifties.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Okay, Marc.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

That's great.

We're now going to switch over to our second round.

We're going to start with Rachael Harder for five minutes.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

That's awesome. Thank you so much.

So many questions, so little time. Here we go.

Donna and Marilyn, you can decide which of you wants to answer this question. During your opening remarks you said there needs to be a program for women specifically. I'm just wondering if you can comment with regard to the importance of home ownership for women, which you alluded to in your comments.

It's one of the things we've heard from multiple witnesses at the table today—that yes, shelters play a role, and they're the initial intake and providers of safety, but at the end of the day, we want these women to be able to find their way to complete independence, whether that be in the rental market or the purchasing market.

[Marilyn Ruttan]

We were trying to get at programs that aren't being accessed. These women don't know about them.

There's one right now with CMHC that will give you the down payment for the house. If you sell the house within the first 20 years that you own it, then you have to give them back the down payment. If you keep it longer than 20 years, you get to keep the down payment.

There are so many programs that these women who are coming out of phase two sheltering probably don't even know about. If we had a mentorship and could train these real estate agents and brokers in this course, the ones who choose to take it who want to take sensitivity training could help these women. It might only be 20% of the women, but then that's 20% of the women going from stage one to stage two who could now come to stage two, because you've moved 20% out of stage two.

It's not going to be in every area. Obviously there are some areas where the abuse is a far greater problem than in Simcoe County.

Simcoe County has a lot of programs set up to help a woman navigate if she wants to buy a home. At the same time, CMHC will give you something on this hand and they'll take it away on this hand by saying there are some restrictions to getting your mortgage. We couldn't even touch on them. Donna's come up with restrictions that need to be removed so these women can qualify for the mortgage before they show up at my door and I start showing them properties.

[Donna Mullen]

I'm not trying to show anybody disrespect for a $500,000 home, but we have to look at reality and the reality of rent costs for these women when they leave the second stage of transition.

If we want them to be successful, we have to empower them so they can pay their own bills. That is the biggest empowerment for any woman today. She wants to pay her way, buy her own food, be able to provide for her children. That will give the woman the biggest sense of security that she can have in this world today.

If the rents are similar to what the mortgage payment would be, what better way to empower a woman if she doesn't have to fear moving every other year because a landlord wants to sell? She could do well with the profit, given the way that real estate has appreciated. We're looking to give that security. Policies in place right now are so interconflicted that women are shaking their heads, asking what to do.

As for building more units, yes, we definitely need more first-stage transitional spaces. We could never build enough for the need out there today. We have to start building programs that interconnect and move women out of the transition two status, programs that give them security in their own homes.

We have Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, whose mandate is homes for all Canadians. Women are the most discriminated against.

I will go back to the casual status of employment. I have included real-life examples in our report that we want to table. They are in there for you to read and know.

I know I'll be cut off trying to give you all this information.

I've done the math. This thing about Canada being a debt nation—I'm very upset about what you're doing to women. We have a Bank of Canada governor saying we all can't manage our chequebooks, and our finance minister thinks we can't walk out the door with a chequebook because we don't know what to spend our money on.

Imagine a woman who has an approval limit of $5,000 who's used her only Visa to give her first and last months' rent so she can move away from an abusive relationship, but that put her $100 over her limit on her credit card. All she's hearing is how everybody's stupid in Canada and can't manage their chequebooks. Is she going to feel comfortable going into her financial institution and asking questions? No way.

That comes back to sensitivity. Mortgage brokers will train themselves for this speciality or be part of this. I am willing to take this across Canada so women know there is a place to go and not feel intimidated or less worthy than the average, to ask the questions and have the same information to make that informed financial decision.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Excellent. Thank you so much.

We're now going to our final line of questioning with Bob. Bob, you have five minutes.

[Bob Bratina, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, Lib.]

Thanks very much.

The reference was made to ministries being in silos, and that's true, but also levels of government are in silos.

I spoke at an earlier meeting about city-owned housing. My first experience as a city councillor was canvassing in city-owned housing, looking through doors and seeing how people were living, which immediately raised my priority, even though I was 60 at the time, to single, senior, vulnerable women.

Also in those city-subsidized housing buildings, women were being trafficked and drugs were being sold. All kinds of things were happening. The security of the buildings was ridiculous. One building, a 200-unit building—I could give you the address—you could open by putting your thumb in the lock and turning it. People were coming and going all night. This really upset me.

The other thing we had was a faith-based shelter, which was really terrible. I was stopped by someone asking for change. I said, “Why don't you go there?” He said, “Are you kidding? You'll get killed in there.” We, as a city, finally dealt with that by closing that shelter, in terms of beds, and finding safe, sustainable, secure housing for everybody in there. It was quite a project in the city of Hamilton. Joe-Anne Priel was the head of that project. You might want to talk to her about that.

Could you reflect, Ms. Walker, on those points?

[Megan Walker]

First of all, I was also a city councillor and was first elected in 1994. I ran on a platform of affordable housing and women's equality rights. Here I am, 25 or whatever years later, still advocating for the same positions.

It's easy to say that there needs to be more collaboration among all levels of government. It's much harder to do that, because every level of government has its own policies and rules around governance and around legislation. It's much easier for us to work within the federal system, removing the silos, so that we understand the impact of financial investment on the lives of women who live in poverty.

When I work with women and they go to a shelter, it's the best thing they can do for that first six or eight weeks, because it provides them with enough safety and enough time to seek legal support and family income support and to go and look at apartments or housing strategies to rent, but when we put all of the subsidized housing into one area so that we create stigma for anybody living there, we are failing women. That's been our approach, historically, as a country.

What I'm saying is that we need to have affordable housing. It needs to be legislated that every single developer who builds a building sets aside a certain number of units for affordable housing so that all women can access services across the country and their children can go to all schools and experience life, and other children can learn from their lives.

We're just ghettoizing women right now, and when you ask what we're going to do about it and how we address it, we need to really be setting legislation from a woman-first perspective—something that's not about patriarchy, not about benefiting men, but something that's going to really benefit women, however they identify themselves as women.

[Bob Bratina]

Right.

Ms. Beaudin-Carver, another experience I had was that I sat as the council representative on our LGBTQ subcommittee. That was a real eye-opener for me as well. I think a lot of us need to have a fuller understanding of the issues that you're talking about. I found out that so many of the kids were on the street because their parents threw them out because of their gender issues.

[Jayce Beaudin-Carver]

What I know is that we were offered an opportunity to work with the City of Windsor through a memorandum of understanding to be part of the by-names priority list, which in our community is that one point of access for homelessness.

On the first day we went live, we had 10 youth come to get advice on that. That was the first day we went live. The majority of the services we provide are to trans youth, but we're seeing homelessness as an issue not just for trans youth. People who, say, are past retirement age who start to transition, who have been in marriages for long periods of time, are now being displaced due to transitioning later in life and see their marriage dissolving. They're finding themselves without employment, on a low income and without access to affordable housing.

It's not just a youth issue, but four times more youth today are likely to identify as somewhere within the trans spectrum rather just as lesbian, gay or bisexual. Trans issues are far more prevalent today than people are aware of.

[Bob Bratina]

The fact that you're here today is a significant step forward.

[Jayce Beaudin-Carver]

It actually is.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

It's fantastic.

First of all, I apologize for all of the delays that we've had today. I've tried to be a little more easy here because the conversation has been so incredible with all of the different witnesses today. On behalf of the committee, I'd really like to thank Megan, Jayce, Donna, Marilyn, Grace, Alma, and Tara for all the great work you're doing in our community.

I hate to do this to you, but we're going to have to exit the room very quickly. The members do have to do about eight minutes of business.

Could we have one assistant per member and one member from each party, if necessary? All the others can exit the room. We will be out shortly. I'm sure many of the members would like the opportunity to speak to you.

Thank you once again.

[Proceedings continue in camera]