Evidence of meeting #46 for Status of Women in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was system.
A recording is available from Parliament.
9:25 a.m.
Co-Chair, EI Sub Committee of the Good Jobs for All Coalition, Inter-Provincial EI Working Group
It has not taken it into account.
9:25 a.m.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Thank you for your very specific recommendations. We'll be pushing some of them forward, for sure.
Ms. Lahey, can I talk with you about another particular program? You've talked quite clearly about what happens when women are left out of the equation. On the New Democrat side, we were concerned about the government's reform of the Canada pension plan. Although it was a good move in a general direction, we were disappointed that it didn't include drop-out provisions for women who take time out to care for children. Also, the new government bill, a different bill, that was tabled in the end alters pension plan funds and could destroy the defined benefit pensions that women rely on disproportionately for financial security.
In your work, does the creation of taxation policy that doesn't consider women, threaten their economic security, and particularly that of vulnerable groups like elderly women?
9:25 a.m.
Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen's University, As an Individual
It's a complex system because women's work lives define what their eligibility is going to be for all forms of pension support, with the exception of old age security, GIS, and the other low-income supports. On the one hand, what you see is deterioration in the quality and level of retirement income that's available, as defined benefit and defined contribution systems or hybrid systems are all dissipating and being replaced. This, I think, really should be a matter of government regulation, just like the minimum number of hours of paid work permitted under employment standards.
I do think that governments need to take a more active role in defining minimum levels of engagement and bring a stop to the trend toward precarious work. With respect to the CPP drop-out figure, it is a small figure. I see no reason for any sort of penny-pinching on that end of things. I think that the drop-out provision should be provided pervasively whenever any changes are made to CPP. CPP itself is getting more complex as changes are made to it, but I think it is important to protect the integrity of that system to the extent possible.
To bring in something that people don't understand concerns me greatly. In this connection, when pension-income splitting takes place, it deprives women of their fair share of what would have been their OAS and their GIS, because it deems them to have more income than they would ordinarily be seen as having with respect to eligibility for OAS. At the same time that pension-income splitting takes place, male pension income splitters get a larger share of OAS and GIS than they would have if they were being taxed on their actual pension income, and the women they are married to are seeing a fall in their OAS and GIS. Many married people do pool their income, and everybody has access to the same amount of income—but not everybody does. In any event, this is a form of high-income theft from low-income women that needs to be corrected, and it's part of the pension picture as well.
9:30 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
That's your time.
Now we're going to go to my colleague, Ms. Damoff.
9:30 a.m.
Liberal
Pam Damoff Liberal Oakville North—Burlington, ON
Thank you very much.
I wish I had half an hour to ask all of you questions.
Ms. Lero, you've done a lot of research on people with disabilities and the employment challenges they've faced. It's the last segment of society that we feel people can work for free and consider it acceptable and within the law. In particular, when it comes to women with disabilities, do you see any role that the government can play? We know that grants don't work, because as soon as the grants run out, the job disappears. So I'm referring to ways that we can support women with disabilities to find permanent paying employment.
9:30 a.m.
Professor Emerita, Centre for Families, Work & Well-Being, University of Guelph, As an Individual
It's a complex question. I'm engaged in a research project right now that's looking at episodic disabilities, which are conditions like MS, for example, that have fluctuating periods of ability and wellness.
We have a system that has as the ideal a full-time, full-year male worker. For many people with a disability, and perhaps for some who are caregivers, the idea of part-time work with prorated benefits and some income top-up would enable them to continue to work as part of the labour force without compromising their health.
Right now, we have disability income systems, such as ODSP in Ontario and others, that assume this dichotomy of a person either being able or unable. There are many people who can work and use their skills if they're able to get to work and have the accommodations they need, including some reduced workload demands, so they can continue to make contributions. We need to rethink some of the income support systems, and we certainly need to educate employers, so that we have this.
My understanding is that some of the impasses are actually issues with insurance systems—not EI per se, but others like insurance for benefits where restructuring some of these programs in ways that would better meet the needs of people is balked at.
9:30 a.m.
Liberal
Pam Damoff Liberal Oakville North—Burlington, ON
Ms. Ritchie, during the summer, I had a conversation with the head of a union in my riding who represents early childhood educators who work in schools. Because of their jobs, they're required to file for EI every summer. They're laid off every summer and then have to reapply. One of the issues they brought to my attention is that because women's maternity leave is longer than the men's, it affects them disproportionately because they don't qualify when they come back in the summer.
Have you run into that at all? Do you have any comments on how EI, because of the way our system is set up, is impacting women in a negative way, but not men because they are only taking paternity leave in that case, which is 34 weeks?
9:30 a.m.
Co-Chair, EI Sub Committee of the Good Jobs for All Coalition, Inter-Provincial EI Working Group
If I understand you correctly, you might be speaking about the final point I was making in my comments at the outset. This has been a continuing problem. If someone is on parental leave and then later on needs to go on regular benefits, in this case because of a summer lay-off, they may find some work over the summer, but if they don't, then they will be on EI. If they have been on parental leave during the year and exhausted their entitlements, and did not get enough hours to requalify, then they don't get the regular lay-off benefits that another colleague might, and the reverse happens too.
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
Pam Damoff Liberal Oakville North—Burlington, ON
I'm sharing my time with Mr. Fraser, so I'll pass it over to him now.
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS
Thanks very much.
First, Ms. Ritchie, you spoke a little bit about EI, and how the benefits don't necessarily go to everyone who should be getting them, and cited independent contractors as one example. I completely agree, although conceptually I have a little difficulty deciding how the program should flow when the latter are not contributing to the program. I view it as the money of the workers who do contribute to it.
How can we ensure that these people are eligible for appropriate benefits without tapping into funds they didn't pay into?
9:35 a.m.
Co-Chair, EI Sub Committee of the Good Jobs for All Coalition, Inter-Provincial EI Working Group
We would agree with you that EI should be going to people who have contributed. The system is predicated on that. The problem here is that we need to take a broad brush approach to a whole set of laws, including labour standards, the Canada Labour Code, etc., and start to drill down into this problem of involuntary self-employment in which some of the larger employers offload their responsibilities for contributing to EI and CPP, as well as the problem of some employees not contributing to CPP.
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS
Is the answer then, in your view, to require that those individuals be rolled into the EI program, or that we have a separate program for people in that kind of a work situation?
9:35 a.m.
Co-Chair, EI Sub Committee of the Good Jobs for All Coalition, Inter-Provincial EI Working Group
In the situation I'm talking about, it would be to have them rolled into the program, to be deemed dependent contractors and rolled into the program with employers and employees contributing.
February 21st, 2017 / 9:35 a.m.
Liberal
Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS
Excellent. Thank you.
Ms. Lahey, I think I have about a minute left. I think it was you who mentioned that in terms of macroeconomics, governing for growth can be a bit of a problem. I don't mind governing for growth, but I take your point that we need to make sure that growth works for everyone. There are a few examples I can think of, including investing in things like in-home care or child care, where a federal investment could help growth achieve some level of equality. Are there other industries we could be targeting, which could potentially lead to systemic savings or growth that helps promote women?
9:35 a.m.
Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen's University, As an Individual
I think the most important thing to do is to get women into a position of complete parity when it comes to paid work. Just with respect to Alberta, I did a small pay equity exercise to look at the overall revenue impact of doing that. One of the slides that I copied into the handout demonstrates this. Between the reduction in transfer payments that need to be directed to low-income individuals and the increased revenues, it's actually a money-maker just to promote gender equality.
To your first point, I don't agree that going for growth in the single-minded way that Canada has done for so long, and which other countries have done as well, is a little of the problem. It is the core of the problem, because it has completely turned upside down the priorities of most governments, who seem to feel that their main goal is to feed and nurture the corporations within their jurisdictions to a greater extent than they feed and nourish the human beings who are the source of all wealth.
Most of the OECD countries and other big think-tank organizations, including the IMF, have come to the realization that in fact single-mindedly going for growth is absolutely the wrong thing to do, and that what needs to be done is to go back to the sustainable development goals, the Paris agreement, the Beijing requirement—
9:35 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
That's your time. I'm sorry.
We will go now for five minutes to my colleague Bev Shipley.
I want to welcome you to our committee today.
9:35 a.m.
Conservative
Bev Shipley Conservative Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm going to split my time with Karen.
I just had a couple of thoughts. I'll make a comment first.
In terms of the infrastructure funding that goes out at any time, you talked about affordable housing and those types of issues. That money normally transfers to the provinces, and the municipalities work with the provinces to determine where the infrastructure dollars will go.
I'm a farmer. I'm in agriculture. We had this discussion the other day about some of the issues women face in agriculture. My comment would be that I'm more interested in seeing how we can encourage women to get involved in some industries so that they do get equal.... Can I get your thoughts on that?
For example, in agriculture, we need agrologists; we need engineers; we need veterinarians; we need chemists; we need skilled trades; we need program designers; we need all of those things. One of our challenges is not only to get people in general, but also women in particular to go into these skilled trades such as agriculture, where there is a demand. You go into it; you come out; there's a job. Drive by construction sites and you will see women involved, driving excavators or packers, doing things that men just always did. Those are skilled trades. They pay well.
I'd like to get your thoughts on how we can encourage that part of it. Everybody else is talking about some of the benefits. We need to address those, but I'm trying to get from you how we get women to realize that this is a great opportunity for them to get involved in something that would be successful for their career.
I'd ask you all to take a run at it, if you like.
9:40 a.m.
Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen's University, As an Individual
It is a pervasive cultural challenge, and it begins with regulation of advertising, which increasingly stereotypes women as being more concerned about keeping their nails intact than thinking about driving heavy equipment. There is that. It is well established in educational research through detailed gender-based analysis that this kind of streaming of women and men begins as soon as they set foot into any kind of culturally organized institutions.
By the time women reach university career ages, the institutional factors are already very discouraging. Walk into an engineering department at Queen's in the fall and you'll see people painted in purple from top to bottom, kicking jackets for miles at a time down the road as part of their initiation process. It just doesn't appeal to female culture. Even with a female dean of engineering in Queen's, it's been really difficult to get past that cultural barrier that is constructed and maintained.
9:40 a.m.
Conservative
Bev Shipley Conservative Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON
Are we not making progress? It's sometimes hard—
9:40 a.m.
Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen's University, As an Individual
No. The numbers are going backwards.
9:40 a.m.
Conservative
Bev Shipley Conservative Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON
I know of ones who are moving that. I don't think governments play a role in changing the culture of a program. You were talking about the initiation process. I think the university has to take those initiatives. Does it not?
9:40 a.m.
Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen's University, As an Individual
The university does everything that it can, but the Canadian Human Rights Commission does not. It does not enforce the rules. It produces results that are insulting and that put the blame on women if they do mind the harassment that they generally experience when they are the first to enter into these areas of work. It is a systemic legal, cultural, economic problem that has to be attacked at every single level. That is why the role of Status of Women Canada has to be, in part, to re-establish the process of gender mainstreaming of every single policy, practice, law, and program in the country, to turn that back to where it was pointed before—in the direction of emphasizing gender equality as a fundamental principle around which all human activity should be organized.
9:40 a.m.
Conservative
Bev Shipley Conservative Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON
Could somebody help me? What percentage of women, compared to men, graduate from secondary school, colleges and universities?
9:40 a.m.
Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen's University, As an Individual
It's very low. It's been going backwards seriously. The women who do graduate are increasingly focusing on the earth and biological sciences, and not on the hard-core built environmental and chemical engineering environments. They are also falling out of computer programming, which was the area people thought women were going to make strides in. The data is available and is in fact on file with this committee, from a couple of years ago, I think.