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.