Status of Women Committee on April 11th, 2019

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Good morning, and welcome to the 138th meeting of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women. Today's meeting is in public.

The first item we have on our agenda today is the election of the first vice-chair. Do I have a motion to proceed?

Go ahead, Emmanuella.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

I would like to nominate Salma Zahid for the position of vice-chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Are there any other motions?

Sonia.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

I'll second it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Fantastic.

I'll pass it over to the clerk for the election.

[The Clerk of the Committee, Ms. Kenza Gamassi]

It has been moved by Ms. Lambropoulos that Ms. Zahid be elected as first vice-chair of the committee.

Is it the pleasure of the committee to adopt the motion?

(Motion agreed to)

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Good.

Now I'm going to suspend to go in camera. Just to let everybody know, it's one individual per party and one staffer. Everybody else will have to exit the room. We're going to suspend to go in camera.

[Proceedings continue in camera]

[Public proceedings resume]

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

We're going to resume.

This is just a reminder: If you want to be happy in the morning, play 1980s music. It gets everybody up here going well.

I would like to welcome everybody back to the 138th meeting of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women. Today we'll continue our study of the challenges faced by senior women with a focus on the factors contributing to their poverty and vulnerability.

For this, I am pleased to welcome, as an individual, Amanda Grenier from McMaster University.

From Women Focus Canada Inc., we have Oluremi Adewale, Chief Executive Officer, president and founder, as well as Boluwaji Adewale-Olaniru, program coordinator.

Now I'm going to turn the floor over to Amanda. You have seven minutes for your opening statement.

[Dr. Amanda Grenier, Professor, McMaster University, As an Individual]

I will set my timer.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

If you see my pen flailing, you're getting close to seven minutes.

[Dr. Amanda Grenier]

Okay.

Good morning, and thank you for the invitation.

My name is Amanda Grenier. I am a professor in health, aging and society, as well as the Gilbrea Chair in aging and mental health, and the director of the Gilbrea Centre at McMaster University.

I am here today to draw your attention to the importance of understanding and addressing vulnerability and poverty from a life course perspective.

My testimony is based on insight from research projects I have led, which were funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. These include research on older women's experiences of frailty, late-life transitions, homelessness among older people and, more recently, precarious aging. It also draws on research collected as part of an Employment and Social Development Canada project on social isolation among low-income seniors in Hamilton, Ontario. Materials for the project can be found on socialisolation.ca.

I am encouraging the committee to consider adopting a life course approach to address senior women's poverty and vulnerability. Such an approach locates older women's needs in the context of their diverse backgrounds, experiences and events that have taken place across their lives, relationships and encounters with families and society, and the need for care in the context of existing services. Poverty and vulnerability do not simply happen to women late in life, but are the result of social structures, risk factors and experiences that unfold across the life course.

There are three ways that the committee might link witness testimonies and insights into an action plan to reduce poverty and vulnerability among older women: first, by viewing transitions as opportunities for response; second, by recognizing how needs and social backgrounds may intersect to produce or worsen vulnerability; and third, by developing strategies to prevent disadvantage from accumulating across the life course and into late life.

Prior to reviewing these three suggestions, I wish to call brief attention to the request made by the committee to focus on both poverty and vulnerability. Positioned as such, the call is for attention to both the more traditional measures of income security and the human dimensions of being vulnerable.

Differing from poverty, vulnerability evokes the question of whether needs will be met or not, and as such implies a moral and/or ethical responsibility to respond. A life course perspective focused on three dimensions of targeting key and often unexpected transitions as a point of response, accounting for intersecting needs and preventing disadvantage offers a pathway to address both poverty and vulnerability.

First, regarding the focus on transitions, a number of transitions can be identified for intervention. These include how divorce, separation or widowhood may alter women's income or housing through, for example, the move from home ownership to rented accommodation; how the onset of illness or impairment may prompt changes to labour, income, mobility or housing through, for example, part-time work or early departure as a result of injury; the short- and long-term impacts of im/migration related to care trajectories, including, for example, how low income and/or reduced pension contributions may affect financial security in late life; and transitions between locations of care, such as home, hospital and long-term care.

Second is the focus on intersecting needs and locations. Intersecting locations such as citizenship, disability, ethnicity, indigeneity, race and sexual orientation can affect older women's poverty and vulnerability. Our current research on precarious aging considers some of these intersections, in particular how lifelong disability that prevents full-time work, or im/migration after age 40, may impact financial security, access to care, and housing stability, and may produce vulnerability and unmet needs in late life. In another project, our research on homelessness revealed cases where people became homeless as a result of being evicted from rental units, sometimes after hospitalization. It also discovered older people who began using food banks or emergency shelters for the first time in late life.

Third is the focus on preventing disadvantage over time. Disadvantage can accumulate across the life course through structures that produce inequality and heighten insecurities and risk. For example, women's labour and care trajectories may result in poverty, which can have knock-on effects in relation to housing stability, access to care, transportation, health and well-being.

Consider, for example, the case illustration of frailty, which signals the transition to needing care, and how this demonstrates the relevance of taking a life course approach to poverty and vulnerability. The needs and experiences of a senior woman with low income who lives alone in rented accommodation will differ greatly from one who lives as part of a couple and has a work-based pension and care support, whether provided by a family member or purchased. Senior women who must rely on limited public services are particularly susceptible to having unmet needs in late life. At the same time, policy structures that rely on informal, low-paid and/or migrant care can also be considered to initiate disadvantage for younger women that may accumulate across the life course and into late life.

A life course perspective to addressing poverty and vulnerability among older women reveals the importance of developing approaches that reach across income, housing, health, transportation and care. Proposed solutions include strengthening public pension to protect those most in need, including consideration for unpaid care as part of the calculation; developing public care systems and accessible public transportation, particularly for low-income women; the provision of social housing that is safe and affordable and can accommodate changing mobility needs; and ensuring justice across programs to ensure that situations such as being discharged from hospital to the street do not occur.

In sum, I urge the committee to consider a life course approach to addressing older women’s poverty and vulnerability, which is based on three responses: target major points of transition; recognize how needs are impacted by intersecting social locations; and prevent disadvantage from accumulating across the life course and into late life.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Excellent, thank you very much.

Oluremi, will you be doing the opening statement?

[Dr. Oluremi Adewale, Chief Executive Officer, President, Founder, Women Focus Canada Inc.]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

I will pass the floor over to Oluremi for seven minutes.

[Dr. Oluremi Adewale]

Thank you.

Good morning. Thank you for the invitation to speak on the challenges faced by senior women with a focus on the factors contributing to their poverty and vulnerability.

This topic aligns with Women Focus Canada's mandates in addressing and supporting women in areas including, but not limited to, the physical, mental and psychological well-being of women.

For this purpose today, I will be addressing the following challenges: isolation, health services, housing and transportation, and I will be providing some recommendations.

Most would agree with me that a first step in reducing health inequalities among senior women is reducing the socio-economic disparities with a focus on gender. Many senior women remain highly self-sufficient. However, the process of aging may come with some challenges, including, but not limited to, the loss of independence, financial difficulties and/or sometimes diminished physical mobility.

As we look at the isolation faced by senior women, we know that more and more women are facing the realities of aging alone, as women generally outlive men. Almost half of the women over 75 live alone because they have no spouse or friends who are still living. In Canada, by the year 2036 the average life expectancy for women will rise to 86.2 from the current 84.2 years. For men, it will rise from the current 80 to 82.9 years.

Isolation is very common among senior women for many reasons, especially for those women who live in rural areas. Poverty is important to talk about when it comes to senior women for many reasons. As the Canadian population continues to age, social isolation is a key challenge that will affect the well-being of many senior women. It increases the exposure to multiple health risks. Sometimes senior women become isolated as a result of physical health conditions such as chronic pain. Sometimes the isolation may be due to mental health conditions, such as depression. Low-income people and senior women are among the most vulnerable to social isolation.

What can we do as government? Here are a few recommendations.

We need practical, socially innovative approaches. We need to involve senior women in all the steps from the planning phase to the implementation and evaluation of those programs to have a greater chance of being successful in addressing social isolation. We know that senior women are the ones who can speak to the needs, the issues they are facing. It's not us or any other organization making decisions for them without their inputs.

We need to ensure that senior women who are living alone get some form of exercise or outdoor activity with programs in the community that are geared to ensuring that women are not isolated, sitting in their rooms alone.

There is a need to mobilize community resources that target groups of individuals who share common characteristics. Many times older women are isolated even among other senior women. We need to develop ways to monitor and evaluate programs in community centres. There are so many programs in our community centres. They are nowhere evaluated.

I'm going to talk a bit now about health services challenges faced by senior women in Canada. Those include, but are not limited to, limited funding for non-insured health programs and the limited benefits coverage of the health care system, which may result in seniors having to pay for some medically related health services and dental services. There is a proven link between poor dental health and heart disease, and government needs to address that, even among senior women.

Here are a few recommendations. We need equal access to health services and medications for all senior women, and we also need to ensure that the medications are taken as prescribed by doctors. We need to come up with strategies to support senior women and address the medication that they are taking.

Funding for a range of therapies, including physiotherapy and occupational therapy, should be considered. Effective and efficient community health care services should also be considered, with comprehensive, mandatory, gender-sensitive courses on senior women's issues, especially in health care areas.

Some housing challenges faced by women—

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Dr. Adewale, the time is up. I've asked the clerk, and if it's okay with you, we're going to take the information that you've provided to our committee and have it translated and distributed, because you do have some excellent points that are continuing on this. We'll make sure your entire opening statement is translated and sent out to the committee so that we can go on to our line of questioning. Is that okay?

[Dr. Oluremi Adewale]

Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you.

We're now going to start our line of questioning. Our first round is seven minutes.

We'll pass the floor over to Sonia.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you all for being here.

Dr. Oluremi Adewale and Dr. Boluwaji Adewale, welcome to Ottawa. I know your organization is doing wonderful work, and I just want to congratulate you on your committee work. Thank you for being here today.

You talked about social isolation. There are so many barriers that our seniors are facing, and you gave some solutions, but what kinds of community programs are you looking for? The federal government has the horizons for seniors program. How can the federal government help you more and make their policies according to that? Can you explain what kind of community program you're looking for?

[Dr. Oluremi Adewale]

Thank you so much.

I think many times you realize that there are so many initiatives in the communities, but they're not well managed and they're sitting in silos.

In my statement, I talked about the need to also include senior women in identifying what their needs would be. I think we need to start with having some conversations with senior women, health care professionals and social workers to do some preliminary environmental scan of the issues and why people are not using the services that are currently available. When you go to the recreation centres there are some library services there. The opportunities are there, but sometimes people in the communities are not aware of them. Is there a need for us to make people in the community aware of the services that they have? Are there language barriers? Some seniors don't speak English. There is information in the facility but there's no way to translate it, or there's nobody there to interpret for them. Is there a need for us to train the staff in those facilities to be sensitive to the needs of the seniors or to be culturally or religiously sensitive to the needs of different cultures and religions?

Maybe that would be the first step: to examine what we have, to evaluate what we have, and to develop ways to enhance it. If there's a need to start new programs, maybe we can do it in consultation with seniors. We can ask them what would benefit them.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Dr. Grenier, you talked about homelessness. We have a poverty reduction strategy. What kind of suggestion do you want to make to the federal government?

[Dr. Amanda Grenier]

Probably the most pressing issue with relation to homelessness and older people is about recognition and making sure that older people, both men and women, can access housing that's safe, affordable and sustainable. We have the program housing first. That often hasn't been thought through in terms of what older people might need and how that type of housing might be different. An example there might be about older people's safety and security. Just having a house is very different from having a home where you actually feel safe and secure. That house or that housing unit can be sustainable over time if your mobility needs change. We did have people talking about not wanting to take some of the places that were offered to them because they didn't want to live in dangerous situations. They talked about living beside drugs and trafficking and that sort of thing.

I would say that the key issue on homelessness and aging is recognizing how the needs of older people might be slightly different from those of the younger population.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Okay.

Dr. Adewale, when it comes to seniors with disabilities and the lack of transportation, how do we get a solution to that barrier?

[Dr. Oluremi Adewale]

It is a fact that many seniors are staying at home because of our transit system. First of all, many of them are immobile. They can't drive, for safety reasons. The transit system that we currently have is not efficient in terms of meeting the needs of seniors. I already touched on seniors living in poverty. Is there a way for government to provide some funding to ensure that seniors are not sitting at home, and that they have the capacity to pay if they have to go and buy food or even just go anywhere? We know that when they sit at home and they're lonely and sad, the mental health and physical health costs will eventually be more for the government than if it had supported them with, for instance, a support walker. They could get out maybe three times a week to have some physical activity, or get out to buy healthy food rather than ordering in unhealthy food, which they do because it's cheap and they don't have money. It costs the government tons of money in hospitalizations if they have to pay for them when they get sick.

We need to evaluate the transportation system, which currently is not meeting the needs of seniors. We need to provide funding for seniors in order to move them from place to place. That would be one of many recommendations that I think might eventually save money and keep our seniors active and healthier for a long time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you very much.

We'll now go to Rachael Harder for seven minutes.