Status of Women Committee on Feb. 21st, 2017

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Bonjour, tout le monde. Good morning.

We're very excited to be back at our study on the economic status of women. We have several witnesses with us today.

From the Centre for Families, Work & Well-Being at the University of Guelph, we have Donna Lero. From Queen's University, we have Kathleen Lahey, professor in the faculty of law. From the EI sub committee of the Good Jobs for All Coalition, we have Laurell Ritchie.

Ladies, welcome. We're glad to have you here today. We will begin with your opening comments, starting with Donna.

You have seven minutes.

[Dr. Donna Lero, Professor Emerita, Centre for Families, Work & Well-Being, University of Guelph, As an Individual]

Thank you.

Good morning, and thank you for the invitation to appear today.

Improving women's economic security and ensuring their equal participation is not a trivial matter, as you know. These goals are central to reducing poverty for women and children; for enabling women to fully utilize their talents, education, and experience; and for maintaining and growing the Canadian economy. Moreover, these goals are central to Canada's commitment to gender equality and fairness as social and economic rights, including the commitment it made made as a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All Form of Discrimination against Women.

Many of the issues that I'm going to speak to you about today are well known to you. They have been evident in a variety of reports, including those by the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action, the International Monetary Fund, and the Women's Economic Council.

I'd like to talk to you about the inequalities that stem from women's caring labour and the issues that stem from their roles in their families as the main caregivers of children, the disabled, and the elderly, and how those affect women's employment and career advancement, their health, and their financial resources.

I believe that the challenges that women face can be addressed by improved policies, more workplace flexibility, and more adequate access to child care and home care services.

What I'm presenting to you is based on research, including my own, and observations of these matters over a 40-year career that has included participation in task forces, expert panels, and planning committees.

For decades, there has been an inadequate supply of affordable, high-quality child care in Canada, especially for infants and toddlers, but also for school-age children. Despite the fact that Canada has relatively high rates of labour force participation among women, including mothers of young children, access, affordability, and quality remain serious problems, both for middle-class families and especially for those with lower incomes.

A recent OECD report found child care costs in Canada to be among the highest among 35 OECD countries. They say that Canadian families spend almost one-quarter of their income on child care, a ratio much higher than in other parts of the world. Across the OECD, while the average two-income family spends 15% of its net income on child care, in Canada the ratio is as high as 22.2%. Single parents, on average, fare much worse.

Child care costs vary widely across Canada. In 2016, average monthly fees for infant care ranged from as low as $152 in Montreal—partly or mostly because of Quebec's policies—to over $1,600 a month in Toronto. Even parents who have a subsidy can wind up with substantial out-of-pocket costs because of the way subsidies and additional fees are structured. Low-income families with a child care subsidy in Saskatoon and Calgary have out-of-pocket fees of almost $500 a month.

In addition to high costs, the lack of access to regulated child care remains a serious problem. Wait-lists are a common feature for centre-based care, with almost all the large cities having 70% of their centres reporting that they maintain a wait-list.

High child care costs and the need to provide greater access to affordable early care have been identified as critical issues since 1970. Various attempts to develop a national program have come and gone and still Canada lacks a national early childhood education and care policy.

Lack of affordable quality care may dissuade some women from employment at all, including those struggling to be self-sufficient. It may limit their access to education and training, and result in high rates of part-time and precarious employment. Moreover, it increases dependency, deprives businesses and communities of women's talents and skills, and results in less tax revenue for governments. It also results in less stimulating early childhood programs being available to promote children's development. While some women may be precluded from employment, others do work and carry on despite concerns about work-family conflict and stress.

It's not true that not having a high-quality child care program will necessarily lead to very low labour force participation rates. We're an example of the paradox. What we do have, though, is women and families who do not benefit from having a high-quality child care system.

This partly also reflects the lack of thought and action given to ensuring that there is a trained, well-remunerated child care workforce. Various studies, including one by the Child Care Human Resources Sector Council, indicate that the median wage for child care centre staff in 2012 was $16.50 an hour, and $22 an hour for program directors. Working conditions for early childhood staff have also been of some concern, including lack of access to a pension plan.

Studies have indicated that high turnover in child care programs is one of the factors we must contend with, and recruitment and retention are issues that particularly require attention if we are to grow the early childhood system. We also need to ensure that pay equity legislation addresses the issues evident in the early childhood workforce and other female-dominated workforces that have historically been underpaid.

Further concerns include maternity, parental, and compassionate care leave. I know this is an area that the government has committed itself to studying and to ensuring that there are improvements in flexibility. We have a complex system of leave and benefits, one that requires careful attention. I will say, however, that research clearly indicates that a longer period of leave with comparatively low replacement has harmful effects on women's employment, and results in lower rates of labour force participation, an increase in the likelihood of changing employers, and an increase in the maternal wage gap.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

That's excellent. Thank you.

We'll go now to Kathleen Lahey.

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey, Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen's University, As an Individual]

Thank you. I'm very happy to be here and that this issue is the focus of this study, because women's economic inequality is one of the biggest problems Canada faces today.

To remind people who don't remember, between 1995 and 1999, Canada was ranked number one in the whole world for gender equality. It was also ranked number one for human development overall, and that was through CIDA, through Status of Women Canada, and through this committee's taking an historic leadership role globally in spelling out exactly how to achieve gender equality in countries around the world.

In recent years, because there has been so little funding and support available federally for gender equality, I have been filling my spare time consulting with UN Women, with the OECD, and other international organizations. I have had an opportunity to participate in training on gender equality for economic issues in countries as far-flung as Vietnam and Timor-Leste, both in the Asia-Pacific region, and to a great extent funded by Canada through CIDA. Canada has been doing what it can on these issues, but it is good that it is now taking care of people here at home.

I would like to emphasize that Canada is now ranked 25th in the world on gender equality. I'm going to point the finger squarely at two big macroeconomic developments that are at the heart of the problem in Canada. If they can't be addressed, then all the work in the world cannot the solve the problem to do with lack of child care resources, etc.

I did a small micro-simulation looking at where all the money went. Over the last 20 years, Canada has had the biggest cuts to its tax revenues of any of the leading, highly developed countries in the world. This lies at the heart of the problem with gender equality.

If Canada had not then embarked upon the various tax cuts that it has engaged in over the last 20 years—and both the 10-year Liberal government and the 10-year Conservative government are almost exactly equally to blame for this—Canada would have had in the last year, 2016, $47 billion more revenue just from personal income tax alone.

Where did that money go? It went, first of all, to enrich higher income Canadians, who are predominantly men. Secondly, it went to enrich men at the expense of women in a ratio of approximately 70% to 30%. This is part of the problem.

Part of the problem is also that as of 2010, there hasn't been sufficient statistical tracking of exactly where women are economically. On the bottom of page 5 of my handout, you will see that as of 2010—the most recent data we have, because the latest census did not include the unpaid work that women work so hard at—women continued to perform 64% of all unpaid work in Canada, including, of course, all the care work for which women are disproportionately responsible. They are at near parity in terms of hours devoted to paid work, but they are only receiving approximately one-third of all gross receipts in terms of income in the country each year. This is a massive economic dislocate because women are doing more than half the work in Canada every year, and they are getting just a little bit more than one-third of all of the income. This is unfair.

At the top of page 6, you see a profile of what women's incomes look like relative to men's. Women's incomes flatten out shortly after they achieve childbearing ages. Their incomes are flat, not curved and arced like men's are during their prime earning years. For full-time, full-year work, women are now not earning as much as they did in 1990, 1995, or 2000, based on their level of educational attainment. Women who are characterized by both sex and race, or ethnic or indigenous identifications, are doing even worse.

What are some of the specific structural problems that you encounter once you leave the macroeconomic level?

Well, Canada has for a long time looked at infrastructure spending as its number one solution to economic growth problems, but if you look at the square at the bottom of page 7, you will see that the more Canada focuses its economic development programs on infrastructure, the more deeply it drives the wedge between women's incomes and men's, because women continue to be incredibly under-represented in everything from construction and labour trades to engineering, despite the training of the chair of this committee. Women are under-represented in primary industries. They are better represented in manufacturing, which is a declining industry.

In recent years women have received 0% of all of these special science, technology, engineering, and math appointments to chairs, which have been funded for a vast sum of something like $35 million per year, for universities to support the development, innovation, and technology industries in Canada, and so on.

I point out that infrastructure dollars are almost never spent on social infrastructure for child care, physical infrastructure for care, or other women's needs. The resource industry has a similar impact.

I will go really quickly to my two biggest solutions.

Canada needs pay equity. It also needs massive spending on child care, and the individualization of all of the care resources that are available. Right now, Canada spends $24 billion per year on supporting the unpaid work of women, and only $1.6 billion per year on paid child care resources.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Very good.

Now we'll go to Laurell Richie.

You have seven minutes.

[Laurell Ritchie, Co-Chair, EI Sub Committee of the Good Jobs for All Coalition, Inter-Provincial EI Working Group]

Thank you, and thank you for the invitation. I'm going to focus on employment insurance, which along with CPP is one of our two most critical social insurance programs in the country.

It is important for women to move into non-traditional jobs in the labour market and to take on new leadership roles in the public and the private sector. Right now, it would help to spur some of that if all, not just some of the massive public spending going into the country's physical and social infrastructure were tied to contract compliance with employment equity at the front end of the spending.

Having said that, it is at least as important to pay attention to the lives of millions of women who do not get the starring roles and who will continue to work in retail stores, restaurant kitchens, hotels, assembly plants, support services for health and education, and similar jobs. The government's own occupational projections for 2020, for example, still show that the three most numerous occupations are retail salespersons, cashiers, food counter attendants, and kitchen helpers.

These women need and deserve better supports, from affordable quality child care in their communities, to stronger employment insurance for their temporary absences from the labour market. These are the things that matter to the employment security and well-being of most working women.

According to the latest 2015 EI monitoring and assessment report, the employment insurance system put almost $8 billion—not million, but billion—$7.729 billion, into the pockets of working women that year, providing them with greater security and independence, and, in the communities where they spend those dollars, greater economic stability.

I want to quickly address two aspects of our EI regime. First, in recent decades we have made a collective project, or so I like to think of it, of shaping a strong system of parental and special benefits that would be the envy of any woman to the south of us in the U.S. It can, of course, be made better, and that is the point made in the letter we've circulated and that you may have on your desks now to Minister Duclos and to Prime Minister Trudeau.

Community and labour organizations have called on the government to keep the big picture in mind, such as the need for improvements in EI access and benefits, especially for those in precarious jobs, and the need for public, universal, and affordable child care programs. I don't know how many times we have to say this.

We have also supported and proposed an extra eight use-it-or-lose-it benefit weeks for the second parent, as in Nordic countries and as Quebec already has with its five weeks; a reduction in the hours required to access special benefits—all the flexibility in the world isn't going to help you if you can't get in the front door; a higher EI benefit rate; compassionate care benefits in case of critical illness, not just imminent risk of death; and restoration of the pre-2012 access to special benefits for all temporary foreign workers who contribute premiums to EI.

Second, discussions about how best to improve EI special benefits also carry the risk of typecasting women's interest in the EI system. In fact, we have to address women's access to regular EI benefits if we are to get to the nub of the economic security matter. The neglect in this area over the last two decades has left us with shameful levels of EI recipients amongst the women who are unemployed in this country.

According the latest StatsCan data—I did the numbers as they came out in the last few days—only 34.4%, or not even 35%, of unemployed females were receiving EI benefits in December. Remember, these are for the officially unemployed. For men, it was 48%, which is itself a poor showing compared with earlier decades.

Some of those who are not receiving EI are legitimately self-employed, so they neither contribute premiums nor qualify to collect benefits. However, some are involuntarily self-employed or dependent contractors, a matter that some of our other laws should address.

Beyond that, there are many women who aren't getting EI and have a right to it. Our coalition has put considerable focus on the urgent need to improve access to EI benefits. There are things that we can fix if we have the political will to start reshaping EI regular benefits to better reflect women's modern labour market realities. It will help men as well, but it is women, as well as new immigrants, young adults, racialized workers, aboriginal workers, and those with disabilities, who generally end up in the temporary, part-time, short-term contract, and temp agency work that now characterizes so much of the labour market.

We've seen one step in the right direction. The government listened to the complaints of many and eliminated the 910-hour entrance requirement for new entrants and re-entrants to the workforce, a rule that had previously discriminated against women as well as new immigrants and young adults. Departmental staff have estimated that this might help improve access by 3%. It's a start, a down payment on other things on the EI to-do list.

There are two measures—I'm not going to have time to get into the details right now—that I think would help enormously in women's access. First would be a lower entrance requirement of 360 hours, uniform across the country, for a very basic EI claim. That's been repeatedly proposed. Second, the EI hour system needs to be revamped to reflect the realities of real workers with real work schedules. Thirty-five hours, which is what the EI hour system is predicated on, has not been the standard work week for a very long time, particularly for those in precarious work circumstances.

Furthermore, I'll just provide titles for four other improvements to EI that would help women enormously. One is to raise the miserably poor EI benefit rates, because low-income earners get to the breaking point sooner. An average EI benefit for women, according to the monitoring report, was $398 a week. Another is to have an EI training benefit to help women upgrade and develop their skills. A further one is to extend EI sick benefits initially up to 26 weeks, as women make the most use of EI sick benefits. Finally, the government should allow an extended EI benefit period for those who have had maternity parental leave following a layoff for which regular EI benefits were received, and vice versa if they are laid off after returning to work after such leave. That one really should be a no-brainer. Women are losing out with the current rules.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you very much.

Now we'll go to our first round of questioning, beginning with my colleague, Monsieur Serré.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you so much for your well-prepared and concise presentations.

My first question, in the short amount of time that I have, is for Ms. Lero. You mentioned parental leave, maternity leave. We've had other witnesses who talked about adding more parental leave for men, as long as it doesn't take away from women's. In your presentation you said that it was a detriment to some of the women in the workplace to have longer maternity leave.

Would you be in favour of...? What's your recommendation on how you would balance that out between men and women?

[Dr. Donna Lero]

Thank you for the question.

My comment about long leave periods—anywhere from nine months and longer—at a lower rate of replacement, as we currently have, was that it has been shown to have negative impacts on women's employment. Use-it-or-lose-it leave, or designated paternity or second-partner leave, has at its core the idea of gender equality and the idea that it encourages men, in most cases, to have a greater role in child care as it enables women to get back into the labour force. The two have two different effects.

And yes, I would certainly be in favour of paternity leave.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you.

I would agree. I was eligible for only 10 weeks in 1993 and 1997. I took the 10 weeks, but it would have been nice to take more.

[Dr. Donna Lero]

I would just say that the statistics we have, which I think all of us would agree could be improved tremendously, do a disservice to men in that many men take what I call invisible paternity leave. They take time off from work as vacation time, or even sick days, because those are paid days and there's no question about their commitment to the workforce, rather than taking designated paternity leave.

It's a cultural shift that we need to make.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you.

Ms. Lahey, you talked about unpaid work. According to the Canadian Medical Association, most home caregiving for seniors is by unpaid family, friends, and neighbours. Can you elaborate on what economic impact it has on women in Canada and any recommendations you have on the unpaid work that's being done?

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

First of all, speaking of people who do provide unpaid work in the form of care for older persons, they are often themselves older persons, just not quite as old. Extensive research has demonstrated that in Canada specifically, women, even from their mid-40s, are more vulnerable to losing their paid work and so become more vulnerable to being forced into either early retirement, where it's available, or taking on unpaid work to help their relatives. This has such detrimental effects on their own health and their own stamina that it becomes a problem for them to maintain paid work during that period.

There is a really serious problem right now in the way in which unpaid work is encouraged, and exacerbated, I would say, through the pension income-splitting system. The latter allows older couples to receive massive tax cuts, with a top benefit of an extra $11,000 per year per couple, I think, through pension income splitting. It's an incentive to caregiving for older women, and a disincentive for older women who most need income to not go into paid work. That's just one example of one demographic group that is at risk from this.

All the way through the system, the way that unpaid work is forced on women is hidden and inserted into virtually every provision. For example, you've already heard about the working income tax benefit that is available to low-income couples. It has three defects. The first is that there is a cap imposed on the family income as a whole, meaning that the smart thing for a low-income family to do is to send the person who can earn the most money into paid work. Statistically, that will be the male partner, if there is one. Second, it means that if a woman wants to use that benefit, she will be disqualified by virtue of her husband's income. If she has a low income and he has a high income, she will not be able to take it. And third, even if she were the one who is able to take advantage of this, there is no child care built into it.

As a lateral and related point to that, the participation tax rate alone on second workers and lone parents is extremely high in Canada. By the time child care costs are added in, a lone parent who has to pay for child care and also for taxes on earnings will spend 94% of what can be earned, on taxes and child care, according to the latest OECD stats on Canada. What lone parent can earn such a high income that they can afford to go into paid work? For a second earner in a couple, that rate, which is called the participation rate plus child care rate, is 78% for second earners.

Women who have care responsibilities are absolutely blocked by access to affordable care, and it is affordable care itself that is underfinanced in Canada. We have the lowest level of spending on that among the entire OECD, and that has been the situation for decades.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you.

In 30 seconds, my last question is related to universities.

You talked about the chairs. We heard about the lack of women in universities and research chairs. The target is 30% and it's not even being met. Do you have any recommendations along those lines? If you don't have time, you could provide them later on.

I agree totally with your stats on the infrastructure and, hopefully, putting some monies into affordable housing and working on that aspect.

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

The federal compliance mechanisms for universities have no teeth. I cannot even get access to the pay equity figures for my own faculty. I have to get them from my dean. If my dean doesn't want to give them to me, then I can't see them.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

That's your time.

We'll go now to my colleague Ms. Vecchio.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Lahey, I want to confirm one thing. You said that it was $11,000. There is a tax cap of $2,000 when you're doing income splitting when it comes to pensions. Is that not correct?

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

That is not correct. Pension income splitting is something that is absolutely all the way up to 50% of total pension income. The only sort of—

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

That's if you're looking back, though, but you have to look at all the levels, because there's only a maximum that it does do.

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

No. No, you may be thinking of the parental income splitting mechanism that was in effect for only a short time.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

No, I'm looking at the CRA stuff right now that says it's a $2,000 cap. That's what I want to confirm.

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

The $2,000 cap would be for the other form of pension income splitting, which is available with respect to a pension credit—

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Okay. Got it.

[Prof. Kathleen Lahey]

—but I'm talking about pension income splitting, which goes all the way up to 50% of total income—

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Got it. So—