Evidence of meeting #139 for Status of Women in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was children.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Lia Tsotsos  Director, Centre for Elder Research, Sheridan College
Michael Udy  President, Seniors Action Quebec
Vanessa Herrick  Executive Director, Seniors Action Quebec
Colleen Young  As an Individual
Juliette Noskey  As an Individual

8:45 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Karen Vecchio

Good morning. Welcome to the 139th meeting of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women. Today's meeting is in public. We'll continue our study on the challenges faced by senior women with a focus on the factors contributing to their poverty and vulnerability.

I am pleased to welcome Seniors Action Quebec. Michael Udy is the President and Vanessa Herrick is the Executive Director. From Sheridan College we have Lia Tsotsos, Director of the Centre for Elder Research, via video conference from Oakville, Ontario.

I will now turn the floor over to you, Lia. You have seven minutes for your opening comments.

8:45 a.m.

Dr. Lia Tsotsos Director, Centre for Elder Research, Sheridan College

Good morning, Chair Vecchio and all committee members. I thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you on this important topic. I apologize that I couldn't be there with you in person.

I am Dr. Lia Tsotsos, Director of the Centre for Elder Research based out of Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario. We have been in operation as an applied, on-campus research institute for over 15 years. Our mandate is to conduct research that enhances the lives of older adults and their families. We began addressing our current demographic shift years ago, and are pleased to see the growth of interest, support and funding that is being devoted to exploring the challenges and opportunities presented by an aging population.

Our approach to research has always been an inclusive one. Our founding director, Pat Spadafora, coined the phrase “reciprocal benefits research”, whereby those engaging in research are more than just subjects and often have the opportunity to engage as active participants or even as co-researchers, helping to inform the direction of the research and its conclusions. For example, we spent many years offering and studying tutoring programs for older adults, with much of that work being supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, or NSERC. The older adults who engaged in the projects were studied, yes, but in the process they also received free computer training and helped with the development of standardized training materials. This reciprocity, the “with us, not for us” approach, is one that we continue to support wherever possible, including in the context of examining challenges faced by older women.

In this context, for example, we recommend that there be efforts made to directly engage with the older women deemed at risk for poverty or vulnerability in order to understand the pathways that led to their being in this situation. Instead of focusing solely on the current state of affairs, one must also explore the historical and systemic conditions that led to their current challenges in order to develop sustainable solutions. Sometimes the factors that lead to poverty and vulnerability, particularly in women, are lifelong and not related to age alone.

For example, from our work with those technology tutoring programs, we observed that some cohorts of older women were never responsible for the management of home finances and were not always very technologically literate. When they became widowed, suddenly that job fell entirely to them and required a significant learning process. This problem is compounded by changes that make some government services primarily accessible only online. In this example, the historical conditions that resulted in dependency for some women, combined with a shift in government processes, leads to an increased risk for vulnerability. These situations may be further exacerbated by the variety of unpaid caregiving duties—for children or for aging parents, for example—that disproportionately fall to women, further reducing their potential engagement in the workforce and increasing their lifelong financial vulnerability.

In our work exploring risk factors for social isolation and loneliness in older immigrants, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, or SSHRC, we have seen similar examples. Some older immigrant women come to the country with the expectation that they will provide a level of care for young grandchildren. As such, they primarily remain within the home, may not learn how to drive, and may be residing in suburban areas with limited municipal transportation options. Combine this with limited English skills and no independent source of income, and these women, once the grandchildren are grown up, may find themselves lacking purpose, social capital and the resources to address these issues. This again increases the risk of poverty, isolation and vulnerability.

Having said this, we would also advise against stereotyping or generalizing women of a certain age or situation. Occasionally, the discourse in this space automatically assumes that women are at greater risk or are more inherently vulnerable than men. This represents a form of gender-specific ageism. Previous work completed at the centre suggests that ageism is the most tolerated “ism” when compared with racism and sexism.

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research, or CIHR, have an action plan devoted to gender and sex-based analysis in research. We certainly support this approach as part of a diversity framework within the research community. Sex and gender-based analysis can inform considerations of how other determinants, such as ethnicity, health, socio-economic status and age, interact with sex or gender to contribute to such outcomes as risk factors for poverty and vulnerability. When we fund research that explicitly reflects and considers the diversity of the population, we will all be able to work with higher-quality, more robust datasets.

More broadly, the development of population-level, open-access datasets is also critically important.

The Canadian longitudinal study on aging is doing tremendous work to examine aging across the country by following 50,000 individuals for 20 years. As part of this project, there's a process in place for researchers like the ones at the centre to access those data. This is encouraging, as it supports further research and the development of interdisciplinary teams that could study the complex pathways of aging and how they differ across the country.

As I conclude, allow me to reiterate some of the general recommendations we have for work in this space. First, many of the factors that contribute to poverty and/or vulnerability in older women have origins in earlier life, so they should be considered as part of a more holistic look at these issues.

Second, despite such evidence, we should not make assumptions about the status of older women by default, as this may culminate in ageist thinking and behaviour.

Finally, research that fully considers gender and/or sex as part of its data collection and analysis can help us better understand how these factors interact with others to shape the experiences of all older adults in the country.

The last thought I will share is a personal one. My grandmother came to Canada in 1950. She was an active member of her cultural community and her English was good, but she never worked outside the home and never learned to drive. When she was widowed suddenly at 74, she found herself in a situation that was far beyond her capacity to deal with. Had it not been for the fact that our family was close, both geographically and emotionally, it would have been far too easy for her to have completely been consumed by that experience, being physically, emotionally and technologically isolated and vulnerable.

I work in the field of aging professionally and know the scale of the challenges we're facing, but personal experiences like these really drive home the importance of the questions we're asking and the necessity of answering them well.

I thank the committee, once again, for allowing me to contribute to this exercise and look forward to the outcomes and recommendations that emerge from this set of consultations.

Thank you.

8:50 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Karen Vecchio

Thank you very much.

I'm now going to turn the floor over to Seniors Action Quebec.

8:50 a.m.

Michael Udy President, Seniors Action Quebec

Thank you very much, and thank you for the invitation.

Seniors Action Quebec is an advocacy organization advocating on behalf of English-speaking seniors in Quebec. There are just over a million English speakers in Quebec, so about 13% of the Quebec population. Of that million, just under 160,000 are 65-plus, so it's a sizeable number of people who are English-speaking and 65-plus. If you lower the age criteria to 55, then there are about 260,000, or roughly 25% of the English-speaking population in Quebec that is 55 and over. Of the 160,000 English speakers who are 65-plus, 52% are women and 48% are men. In part, this reflects the fact that, on average, women live longer than men.

The information I'm presenting to you now came from a project that Seniors Action Quebec conducted from 2016 to 2018, funded by ESDC, that was focused on reaching socially isolated seniors and English-speaking seniors in Quebec. A researcher helped us look at some of the data about English-speaking seniors, and this has helped us isolate some information that we think helps highlight the situation of women who are English-speaking seniors.

Of the 160,000 who are 65-plus, we learned that about 30% are living alone. We were looking for indicators of social isolation, and living alone is not an automatic indicator, but it's one of them. What was interesting about the roughly 46,000 seniors living alone was that 37% of all 65-plus women lived alone, whereas 20% of the men did. Therefore, more senior English-speaking women are living alone than men. I don't know exactly why that is, but as I mentioned, living alone is one potential indicator of social isolation. More senior women are living alone than men.

Secondly, we were pretty shocked, actually, to see the size of the senior English-speaking population that was living on $20,000 a year or less, and even more surprised to see that almost twice as many women were living on or under $20,000 than men. Probably, part of that was related to their past non-participation in the workforce and less access to pensions. It was a pretty surprising finding.

Lastly, you are probably familiar with the LICO indicator, which is an indicator of “straitened circumstances”—that's what the literature calls it—but a much more restrained annual income. There are 18% of women 65-plus who are living under LICO. In general, senior English-speaking women are not doing as well financially as their male counterparts.

The last slide summarizes the focus that we had on indicators of social isolation. It's not divided by gender, but repeats the information I presented. When you consider those indicators combined with any medical conditions, mobility limitations, lower implication in social and community life, and a weak or absent social safety net, those things will certainly contribute to social isolation. Women are more likely to have some of the indicators that, in combination with these other things, will amplify isolation.

I'm going to ask the executive director of Seniors Action Quebec, Vanessa Herrick, to continue to contribute some information about English-speaking seniors in Quebec.

8:55 a.m.

Vanessa Herrick Executive Director, Seniors Action Quebec

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm going to provide a little bit more of the story around some of those numbers and what the particular challenges are that English-speaking senior women in Quebec face. They are unique. I'm not going to say they are unique specifically to Quebec, but this is a language-based minority in a province that is quite particular so the circumstances are a little bit unique.

These are some of the challenges that these people face. For example, the threat of isolation is true for all seniors across Canada; however, English-speaking women in Quebec face a particular situation. Many of them did not benefit from education under Bill 101, where French education was given them. Those who were not in the workforce didn't have the benefit of learning French amongst their peers. Therefore, the levels of bilingualism among senior women is extremely low. For example, in women 55 to 64, it's 60%, but in women 75-plus, it's only 36.2%.

This language barrier does isolate them. It doesn't allow them to communicate with communities above and beyond their own. We're also dealing with a geographic situation in Quebec that is extremely large. There are English communities beyond Montreal. They are not large but they are out there, and they do have seniors amongst them.

This lessens a woman's ability to access health care and social services if they are not in an area where these services are provided in English. I don't have time to go into the specifics of how and when these services are provided in English in Quebec, but it's very regulated. If you're not in an area where they're provided in English, they aren't provided in English, whether you speak French or not.

The other second challenge that's really important that women face in Quebec is the youth exodus, the fact that many young people do leave Quebec in search of other career opportunities. Lia spoke a little bit about how important family was to her grandmother when she was feeling isolated. Many of these seniors in Quebec do not have that benefit.

Because I know we're running out of time I'm just going to tell a small story that happened to me at work, probably in my second week on the job. I got a phone call from a woman who was in Montreal to see her mother. Her mother was in the hospital. Her mother was over 75. This women had been living in B.C. with her family for a few years. Her mother ended up in the hospital with pneumonia. When she flew in to visit her mom, the question came up: Why with CLSC home care health care workers did you end up in hospital with pneumonia, something that could have been treated quite easily?

What came to light after some discussions was that her mother did speak some French. However, her mother was shy to admit that she wasn't comfortable communicating her health issues in French to her health care worker. She ended up in a very serious situation because she wasn't comfortable. This woman phoned the CLSC to try to put in place a bilingual home health care worker for her mom when she was released from hospital. She was told it was impossible, that they weren't required to provide a bilingual home health care worker, which wasn't true.

She had been in Quebec longer than she needed to be. Her employer was putting pressure on her to go home. Her family was upset. She did not know where to go. She had phoned ombudspeople, so she contacted us to see what her options were. We were able to help her. However, this woman was in a very serious situation and so was her mother. Had she been released from hospital without proper care, she would be at high risk. She was extremely elderly and already in frail health.

These are just some of the examples of the particular issues that senior women face when they are in a language minority and other minority situations.

I want to thank the committee for the opportunity to present.

9 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Karen Vecchio

Fantastic.

Today we'll start off with our seven-minute rounds of questioning. I'm going to pass the floor over to Sonia Sidhu.

You have your seven minutes.

9 a.m.

Liberal

Sonia Sidhu Liberal Brampton South, ON

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you all for being here.

Our seniors deserve a better life. We all know that.

My question is to Sheridan College. Davis Campus is in my riding. Thank you for coming. Thank you for doing this study.

Social isolation, you talked about that. Even though we have a new horizons for seniors program, immigrant women have a language barrier, different culture and immigrant status that affect them. How can we help them more to have a better life?

9 a.m.

Director, Centre for Elder Research, Sheridan College

Dr. Lia Tsotsos

It's an excellent question. The particular region where your riding is located does have such diversity.

One of the things that emerged very clearly from our research was the need for cultural sensitivity training for many staff providing services to older adults, among others. A level of cultural awareness and cultural sensitivity training was needed to recognize situations—even like the one that Vanessa used as an example—where people may have a different level of comfort with those language barriers. There is also the need to provide a lot of those services in other languages or in more accessible formats.

That came up a great deal in our research. One of our biggest challenges was trying to collect data from individuals who either weren't comfortable in the English language or weren't comfortable, culturally, talking about loneliness or isolation. In one of the languages, which may have been Mandarin, there was no direct translation for the word “lonely”. It was referred to in a roundabout way, but there wasn't an actual word. There wasn't a way to talk about this concept, particularly not for the research team who didn't speak the language. Even for our translators and interpreters, there was that barrier. Conceptually, that topic was not one they would commonly want to discuss.

Some of the key recommendations emerge about how to recognize where those barriers might be in place, and how to put in a variety of solutions to help address them. These could include translating materials, different kinds of accessibility, interpreters and those kinds of things.

9:05 a.m.

Liberal

Sonia Sidhu Liberal Brampton South, ON

You talked about accessibility. Most health services come under provincial jurisdiction, and transportation comes under another jurisdiction. How can the federal government help to deliver those services so that seniors can feel better?

9:05 a.m.

Director, Centre for Elder Research, Sheridan College

Dr. Lia Tsotsos

That's another very good question. One of the things is to make sure that everyone is around the table at the same time. It often becomes very siloed and segregated as people are making these kinds of decisions.

Transportation conversations will happen away from the provincial-level decision-makers, or even the federal ones. For opportunities like these, or other ones where all levels are involved in supporting or providing services to those residents, if everyone is part of the same conversation—which doesn't always happen—you'll end up getting not only a diversity of perspectives but the fact-based information about where these services are located and how we ensure that transportation systems actually serve those locations.

In a lot of municipal and regional action groups and committees, we're attempting to make sure that we have the right representatives, those who could bring change back to their respective levels of decision-making or government.

9:05 a.m.

Liberal

Sonia Sidhu Liberal Brampton South, ON

Ms. Herrick, do you have something to say about that?

9:05 a.m.

Executive Director, Seniors Action Quebec

Vanessa Herrick

No, I think that's a really good suggestion. It is a huge challenge that you present. Many levels of government are facing the same questions. Some of the lack of adaptable services is not due to lack of will. It's the administrative complications of trying to get everyone on the same page in order to do something effective and efficient that serves the community and is not onerous to the levels of government.

It's tricky. Lia is right. The best way to go about it is to make sure you have all the players at the table, and to hear from all the levels of community as to what works for them, because every community is so unique.

9:05 a.m.

Liberal

Sonia Sidhu Liberal Brampton South, ON

Madam Chair, do I have time?

9:05 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Karen Vecchio

You have two and a half minutes left.

April 30th, 2019 / 9:05 a.m.

Liberal

Sonia Sidhu Liberal Brampton South, ON

If Emmanuella can—

9:05 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Karen Vecchio

Please, go right ahead.

9:05 a.m.

Liberal

Emmanuella Lambropoulos Liberal Saint-Laurent, QC

While I wasn't scheduled to ask questions, I saw that you guys were here and I'm an English speaker from Quebec. I deal a lot with the anglophone community within my riding, and in Montreal in general. I'm in close contact with QCGN. I also sit on the official languages committee.

In the context of Status of Women Canada, what would you recommend this particular department do to help provide services to senior anglophone women living in Quebec? Obviously, when we talk about there being a will, there isn't always a will on all parts or government levels. Where we are concerned, what can we do to help give these people more access to services?

9:05 a.m.

President, Seniors Action Quebec

Michael Udy

That's a challenging question.

First of all, I'm pleased to meet you. Our office was in your riding at one point, on Décarie Boulevard.

9:05 a.m.

Liberal

Terry Duguid Liberal Winnipeg South, MB

You should move it back.

9:05 a.m.

Voices

Oh, oh!

9:05 a.m.

President, Seniors Action Quebec

Michael Udy

As I mentioned at the beginning, one raison d'être of Seniors Action Quebec is to advocate on behalf of the English-speaking seniors. What that translates into is discovering what some of the differences are about English-speaking seniors as compared with the majority-language seniors in Quebec. There are differences. Some of them are related to language, but they are not all related to language.

In terms of some of the demographic factors, English-speaking seniors compared with French-speaking seniors have typically fewer natural caregivers around them. There's actually a ratio to measure this. I can't tell you how it's calculated but I've seen the ratio. For every francophone senior, there are roughly three point something natural caregivers in their environment, and for English-speaking seniors, it's two point something. That's just as an illustration of a difference that's not really language related.

Well, maybe at the end of it, it is, because people move away in part because of language, but they move away for other reasons too.

To come back to your question, one of the things we have realized we need to do is to make the provincial government aware of what is different about English-speaking seniors. Yes, there can be issues about will, but I don't think it's all about will. It's also about information and understanding differences in the population.

The way to work on that is, as Dr. Tsotsos said, you have to be around the table. Therefore, that has become part of our modus operandi: to make direct contact with the relevant ministries in Quebec such as transportation, such as revenue, ministries that the English-speaking population has not particularly known to be engaged with. However, if we want the government to understand what's different about English-speaking seniors, we're going to have find ways to tell it.

Now, I'm not—

9:10 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Karen Vecchio

Actually, if you don't mind, we're just about one minute over time. Perhaps we'll be able to finish that question.

Rachael, I'm going to pass it over to you for seven minutes.

9:10 a.m.

Conservative

Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB

Thank you.

If you want to quickly finish your answer, you're more than welcome to do so.

9:10 a.m.

President, Seniors Action Quebec

Michael Udy

I was just going to say that where the federal government is able to transfer focused funds to the provincial government for specific purposes—and I'm not an expert in that field—to indicate that the federal government is willing to focus on English-speaking senior women, the provincial government then knows that there's a source of funding to take some of those differences into consideration.

9:10 a.m.

Conservative

Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB

Ms. Tsotsos, during your presentation you talked about a “with us” approach versus a “for us” approach and the fact that your organization chooses a “with us” approach. Can you expand on that a little further in terms of what you mean by that and why that's important to seniors today?