Good morning. Thank you for inviting YWCA Canada to contribute to this study.
Since our founding in the late 1800s, YWCA Canada's member associations have provided essential programs and services to women and girls, including being the leading provider of employment programs for women in Canada. Throughout Canada's history, we have advocated for policies that will improve the lives of the women and girls we serve.
As a federated national association, YWCA Canada's strategic priorities are set by our 32 member associations, which work in nine provinces and two territories. Our priorities reflect the needs of the women and girls using their services on a daily basis.
Our current national priorities include reconciliation work with aboriginal women; inclusion for newcomer, refugee, and immigrant women; addressing violence against women; national child care; women's housing and homelessness; and women's economic equality. Our perspective on women's economic security is grounded in these priorities.
At 51%, women are a slight majority of Canada's population, and have been for almost 40 years. Overall, Canada has an aging population. Fifty-five per cent of all seniors in Canada, those 65 and over, are women, and this increases with age. Women make up 63% of those 85 to 89 and 72% of those aged 90 and over.
Employment for senior women has nearly doubled over the last decade, but their median annual income is one-third lower than men's, and they are twice as likely to live in poverty.
Poverty rates have risen dramatically for senior women who aren't part of an economic union, tripling from 9% in 1995 to 28% in 2015. Much of that period saw government budgets in Canada's social safety net drastically reduced.
Economic security varies widely across populations of women in Canada. Aboriginal people are the fastest-growing population, and their population age structure differs significantly from the non-aboriginal or settler population. Only 6% of aboriginal women are seniors, compared to 15% of settler women; 27% are aboriginal girls under 15, compared to 16% of the non-aboriginal women population. The median age, the age at which half the population is older and half younger, of all women in Canada is 41. It's 29, 12 years lower, for first nation, Métis, and Inuit women.
Statistics about aboriginal women describe the youngest and fastest-growing populations of women in the country. For example, the number of aboriginal women in our federal prisons increased 97% between 2002 and 2012. Correctional Service of Canada has described an average aboriginal woman in prison as 27, with limited education, unemployed at the time of arrest, and a sole-support mother of two to three children.
In addition to the points that follow, strategies to ensure economic security for indigenous women in Canada will need to include everything from ensuring the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls is successful, and honouring the women and their families, and then putting the country on a course to reduce violence against aboriginal women, to implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples—including free, prior and informed consent—to full implementation of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal order to the federal government to end discrimination against first nations children, to funding of child welfare and full use of Jordan's principle. It calls for the kind of fundamental change in relationship described by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Steady increases in women's participation in the labour force since the 1950s have given Canada a labour force that is virtually gender balanced. For the last decade, women have consistently made up more than 47% of people employed in Canada. By 2015, there were more educated working-age women in the population than men. Sixty-nine per cent of women aged 25 to 64 had a university, college, or trade degree, diploma, or certificate, compared to 64% of men, yet women working full time and year-round earn about 72% of what men earn in comparable work.
In Canada, women as a population are now better educated than men, but paradoxically still have lower incomes and consequently are poorer and less economically secure.
As education is known to correlate positively with income, we are left with the question of why is this not happening for women in Canada, what barriers prevent women's economic security, and what measures can successfully address them.
There are many, and I will talk about a couple today in the time I have.
As stated by other speakers, Canada has a significant gender pay gap. YWCA Canada recommends legislated pay equity to close the pay gap. On October 5, 2016, the House of Commons promised to implement proactive legislation on pay equity by the end of 2018. The complaint-based model of pay equity needs to be replaced with legislation framing it as a human right, and the recommendations of the 2004 task force report are a good place to start.
To obtain economic security, women need unimpeded access to safe workplaces with workplace protections. Women are the majority of minimum-wage workers, as others have said, and make up seven out of 10 part-time workers. Regardless of age group, women are more likely to be working part time, at approximately four times the rate of men. A good proportion of women cited personal or family responsibilities as the reason they are doing this. Only 2% of men cite the same reason.
Child care is, as Justice Abella has said, the ramp to women's equality. It's also key to economic security for women with children. Child care increases mothers' access to the workforce and, as the data from Quebec bears out, is a proven anti-poverty tool. Quebec's low-cost, broad-based child care confirms child care as an effective social policy to address poverty for women, in particular for women raising families on their own, by dramatically increasing their access to employment. In Quebec, between the introduction of child care as a social policy in 1996 and 2008, employment rates for mothers with children under the age of six increased by 22%. The number of single mothers on social assistance was reduced by more than half, from 99,000 to 45,000, and their after-tax median income rose by 81%.
YWCA Canada recommends that the federal government proceed without delay to establish broad national access to low-cost child care through moving forward on the promised child care framework. Given women's education and employment status, lack of national child care is a yawning social policy gap.
Early child development for aboriginal children needs to be defined by their communities and to take into account the profound distrust of having young children in any kind of national care system.
Thank you.