Hi. My name is Valerie Carruthers. I'm with the Women's Economic Council. I'm here with my colleague Rosalind Lockyer.
I'd like to thank you for your time today.
My focus is going to be on EI reform. I've worked with women to sustain them to transition to employment for the last 12 years. I feel that I have something to add.
The first thing I want to talk about is EI eligibility, particularly around the non-standard work that women participate in, the part-time employment in which they form the majority. In terms of who benefits from the EI system, only 34% of women will be able to benefit. What's really difficult when you're on the ground delivering programming is that if they're not EI eligible, there's a whole host of other programs that women cannot access. It's not just about not getting the EI benefits, but it's more importantly the funded post-secondary education and training.
There are an awful lot of people who want to work. They don't have the opportunity to fund their own education or training. Some of these women are from difficult situations. In fact, at the provincial level, at the community agency level, we have to design programs that specifically include a paid employment component of our intervention just to get them EI eligible, so they can access some of these benefits for training. We have to use community resources, provincial resources, just to get them into an EI eligible status to access funded training or education, which is a shame.
I was looking up research, because quite often when we're on the ground, we don't look at the big picture. It looked at money invested in 2015-16. It mentions here that $3.6 billion was spent towards these labour market policies. In 2016-17, this was increased by an additional $125 million. This is to help EI-eligible claimants in Canada gain training and work skills, which includes funded college programs. If you only have 34% of women who can benefit because they qualify for EI, then you're leaving out the majority of women from those opportunities. That's a real shame, and I see that.
The other thing I want you to know, and it's probably been mentioned here before, is that these same women also can't qualify for special benefits when they have children. They're left out, and I have to look for alternate ways for doing that.
I guess the final thing I want to talk about is the apprehension and the fear of people who are attached to an EI system. It can also be a provincial income support system. There's a lot of fear that in choosing work, even when work is available, even when they can do the work, there will be negative impacts to not only their current benefits but also to their future potential access.
I see people go from provincial to federal systems, back to the provincial system, and a choice of work actually puts them further behind. There needs to be more coordination at the federal-provincial level, so that when you make a choice of work, even if it's outside the standard paid employment model, you are not penalized and you can actually be better off by making that choice of work.
I'm going to turn it over now to my colleague Ros.