Thank you.
I'm going to talk about only three things today. There is a lot to talk about, but I'm going to focus on gender inequality as related to workplace segregation. I'm going to look at the skilled building trades, teenage work, and a problem with a government program that you may not know too much about.
It's important to look at the skilled building trades, because Canada is now committed to spending many billions of dollars in the near future on improving Canada's infrastructure program. It appears that most of this will be done through the private sector, through P3 arrangements. It also appears that while some social services may be covered, it will primarily focus on physical infrastructure: roads, bridges, transportation, water systems, and maybe even social housing.
These are areas where men overwhelmingly dominate the workforce, accounting for about 97% of all workers. There are a great many reasons for this imbalance, but there are ways in which this can be changed by government, and I'm going to give you an example of one that worked very well. This was in Vancouver, in the 1990s, through the building of the Vancouver Island highway. It happened to pass through first nations land, so they had to have equity initiatives there, and at the same time we had a government that was committed to equity. That worked very well with having a training program for first nations and females to lead into a highway program. This was initially resisted by the private sector and by the unions. Nobody wanted it, but because we had a government that was committed, and because they actually controlled the labour force, which is too complex to explain now, it actually worked.
What I am saying is that there is a way in which this could happen in Canada through project agreements, if the government insisted on it through the P3s—and this should happen, because there is an enormous amount of federal money going into this. What it required was a considerable degree of compulsion on the part of the government initially, because neither contractors nor unions wanted this. A specific clause in the agreement saying that employment equity hiring “shall operate in priority” over other kinds of hiring is also extremely important, as is supportive leadership at the highest level. The premier of the province at the time was supportive of equity.
This was a huge success. Women went from being 2% of the labour force at the beginning to being 20% at a particular point in time. Of course, a new government came in and overturned all of that. It did not continue, but this was something that was extremely successful.
On teenage work.... I've done studies on all of these things, and that's why I'm bringing them up now, but we know very little about what's going on. What is particularly distressing is that in two provinces in Canada the work age is as low as 12, and Statistics Canada takes information only from ages 15 and on, so we don't know what's happening there.
What we do see is that female workers at a very early age are at certain disadvantages. They are more likely to have jobs than their male counterparts. On average, they make less than teenage males. They are more likely to have multiple jobs and to work throughout the year, and they are concentrated in fewer occupations and job categories.
Basically, what I am saying here is that there is too much we don't know about this. Part of the overrepresentation of women in that area of work may be because of the very high costs that have happened since austerity measures in education, and you have more women having to work longer because they make less, and so on. This is something to look at.
The final thing I want to talk about is the Canada research chairs. In 2008, I, with six other full professors in Canada, had a human rights complaint against Industry Canada because of the discriminatory nature of the Canada research chairs program, which is completely covered by the government. We had a win. We had a settlement in 2006, and the government did not meet its obligations.
What we are seeing is that universities are routinely not meeting the targets they are supposed to meet. I should say that the targets are extremely low. They were calculated in the worst possible way, so the targets are bad, and they're not even meeting them. There are no penalties for universities that don't do this.
By the way, I have given you copies of this, so you can see this more in depth. What I am saying is that we are now in a position to ensure that the Canada research chairs program meets the requirements of the human rights settlement of 2006.
By the way, we are either taking this to court or having another mediation. This is coming up and will be in the news soon. It would be a good thing to act on.
We need to revise the methodology, to define the target populations. We have to ensure that the CRC administrators comply with what we agreed to in a speedy and forward-looking manner. They are not doing it either speedily or forward-looking.
A lot of the people who get CRCs don't even apply. It's just a network. We have to be sure there are application processes because it is very poor. There are also limitations. For example, women who are...you can't apply for the lower tier if you are more than 10 years away from your Ph.D. This is problematic because many young women at that particular stage are having their children and thus need to apply later.
I'm going to close by saying that I want to reiterate that the federal government has a responsibility to ensure that its own programs promote equity for groups protected by Canada's human rights legislation, but it should also go further and ensure that when it injects money, whether it's for crisis control or climate change or infrastructure programs, it makes sure that there are equity conditions associated with that.