Status of Women Committee on March 7th, 2017

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Pam Damoff]

We'll now go to Ms. Malcolmson for seven minutes.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thank you, Chair. Thank you to all of the witnesses. We're going to cut and paste all kinds of your testimony for our report because your work is really appreciated and important.

My first question is for Kate McInturff from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. From your testimony and your other work, I see how hard poverty hits women. We see that 37% of single mothers in Canada live in poverty. Women with disabilities are among the poorest population in all of Canada, with an unemployment rate of up to 75%. It's appalling. You've talked about how universal child care would help lift a lot of low-income women out of poverty. I'm hoping you can elaborate more on that. How would universal child care impact poverty rates among Canadian women and, in particular, what lessons can the federal government take from the Quebec universal child care model?

[Dr. Kate McInturff]

In Quebec we've seen rates of poverty fall quite significantly amongst single mothers, for example. I can follow up later with the exact number. I don't have it off the top of my head, but I believe it was something on the order of 140,000 single mothers who moved out of poverty. The period I looked at was from 1997 to 2015. Of course, some of those women moved out of poverty for other reasons, but it's a significant number and, I think, strongly correlated with the introduction of child care.

The issue of part-time work also speaks to this. We have women in part-time work—and I'm looking at the numbers on my spreadsheet now. There are 25.78% of women who cite preference or voluntary reasons for being in part-time work. Then there are various percentages of women who cite illness, child care, family responsibilities, going to school, and business conditions. For the women for whom child care as the reason, it means they are trapped not only in part-time work and, as my colleagues have pointed out, in low-wage work, but also that they may not have access to employment insurance. If we've seen an economic downturn and the high entry-level requirement that my colleague spoke about, what happens then is that you have a cycle of women living in poverty, not making enough through work to get out of poverty, potentially losing a job during a period of economic downturn, and not having access to EI at all, or having much lower EI benefits. Therefore, they take the first job they can get, which may be precarious, part time, or low wage. Because they don't have access to those EI benefits, they can't wait another week or two weeks to get into that more permanent job, that job with the living wage, so you have a cycle there.

Child care isn't the only way you break that cycle, but I think the evidence is there that it is one of them.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thank you very much.

To Vicky Smallman from the Canadian Labour Congress, you had a very punchy way of expressing your concern in a Twitter post about what happens when we hold up and celebrate successful entrepreneurial women. You mentioned how it doesn't actually get at the basic economic security questions that our government should be tackling. Can you give us a paragraph of more than 140 characters on that thought?

[Vicky Smallman]

I knew my tweets would come back to me someday. I think you're referring to my remarks on the difference between women's economic empowerment and women's economic justice. This is why we very cautiously use the term “economic justice”. “Economic security” is pretty good, too, but “justice” has a bit more push to it. The problem with the notion of economic empowerment is that it focuses on solutions that benefit individual women. You give them the tools they need to succeed in their careers. This is not in and of itself a bad thing. Of course, we want women to be empowered, economically and otherwise, but when we focus on solutions that benefit individual women, we lose sight of the systemic barriers that are keeping all women down, especially those who are most marginalized.

Economic empowerment and programs and rhetoric aimed at the empowerment of women—especially if they have an entrepreneurial focus, but not necessarily—don't allow us to look at what the systemic barriers and solutions are. It means that we're not actually addressing those inequalities and breaking down those barriers that make things worse for the most marginalized women—indigenous women, racialized women, immigrant women, lone mothers, and women with disabilities. You can have a few people get up the ladder and maybe crack the glass ceiling a little bit, but there's a whole other ceiling made of brick for a bunch of other women down here. That's why we prefer to focus on systemic barriers and talk about women's economic justice.

[Sheila Malcolmson, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thank you so much.

My final question is for my friends at Canada Without Poverty. My own province, British Colombia, has no provincial poverty reduction strategy. I note that in your work you've highlighted some of the successes in other provinces that our federal government could learn from. For example, Newfoundland and Labrador used to have the highest rates of poverty, but they've introduced some holistic approaches, including child care, pharma care, and increased social assistance, and the province now has the lowest poverty rate in the country. Can you talk about how such programs can affect women and their poverty rates?

[Michèle Biss]

Yes, and thank you for that question.

As part of our work at Canada Without Poverty, we produce our poverty progress profiles, which are a review of provinces and territories, and how poverty reduction strategies are playing out and how they measure up to our international human rights obligations. What we've noticed overall is that the provinces and territories that are doing the best are adhering not only to specific pockets of policy—it's not just piecemeal policies here and there—but to this overall approach. It's what we would call a rights-based approach, or elements of a rights-based approach.

Two of the provinces that are doing quite a bit better would be Quebec, which we've talk quite a bit about, especially from the lens of their child care program, as well as Newfoundland and Labrador, as you remarked. Another territory that has some good elements is the Northwest Territories. What we're seeing in an overarching sense—and I'll speak very quickly because I can see that my time is running out—

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Pam Damoff]

Yes.

[Michèle Biss]

—is that it's with this overall approach that they're going to do something about poverty, and all of these piecemeal policies are going to fit in a framework—

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Pam Damoff]

I'm going to have to cut you off, I'm sorry.

We're going to turn to Ms. Ludwig.

You've got seven minutes.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you very much. Thank you for your excellent presentations.

My questions, overall, focus on the unconscious and structural barriers.

Ms. Smallman, you had mentioned systemic barriers.

Kate, looking at the issue of women in trades, here's my scenario. If we look at trades training in Canada, largely through the college system, a student would go in and study so many hours and then they go into the field. To get the next block, they have to come back to school. In my home province of New Brunswick—I'll speak to that as an example—the individual comes back, but when they come back to school to finish the second block, they have to be, first, maybe eligible for EI, and if they're not, they pay for it themselves, and it goes on and on. Over the course of the four blocks to a journeyperson's specialty, so many of them drop out.

In your experience, are the drop-out rate higher for women? We know the difficulty of getting to the first block. I've seen, at the college level, a significant increase in the number of women, but I do not see the same trend at graduation because of the blocks. If someone has a child or two children, could you speak to their ability to go back to school and collect only EI, not a regular salary.

[Dr. Kate McInturff]

I'll do my best to speak to it. It's a little outside my expertise.

The non-traditional field that I have spent some time looking at is the oil and gas sector, just because we've seen investments in moving women into that field. There was a very good study of women in the mining sector, and those women cited as their top two barriers a hostile work environment and the lack of child care and flexible hours. When the mining companies employing them were looking for employees during that period of time—this was in 2014 and we weren't seeing the loss of jobs, but an increase in jobs—and were asked if they had any kind of policy or template, or anything around addressing employing women, none of them did and none of them thought there were any problems.

Sometimes it's a matter of making sure we're communicating, but also I think we want women to be able to enter the fields they want to enter and we need to listen to them. If what they're saying is there's a lack of child care or they don't have child care that works with the hours in some of those non-traditional trades, or with the seasonal nature of returning for training and then back, and so on, and that women's lives can't accommodate that because of the unpaid care work, we need to think about how we provide child care for those women. Then we also need to work on the issues of unconscious bias. This isn't about creating an antagonistic relationship. This is about saying, “Here are some really qualified people who want to complete their qualifications. They want to be your coworkers. They're good coworkers. They don't look that different from your wives and sisters and aunties. You know, you just need to think a little about how maybe they don't need to enter the building through the men's locker room.”

It's really dialogue and responding to those women and making sure that you're listening to what they say they need.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you.

We have just recently completed a report, “Violence Against Women and Young Girls in Canada”, and a common theme, unfortunately, that we heard from the witnesses was the difficulty when reporting, and then taking that all the way through the justice system. So I have two questions.

The first question is for Kate: how was the loss or the cost of $12 billion to Canada's economy calculated?

My second question is for Ms. Smallman. I just want to get my mind around what you referred to as “paid safe time”. How would that work? Would someone have to go to their employer? It's tough enough for someone to go to the justice system, let alone to someone whom they work with side by side, and with the systemic barriers and biases, to say that they are being abused or that they've had a problem. Does someone have to get convicted? How would that work in a work setting? Five days definitely doesn't sound like a lot.

I'd like you both to speak to that.

[Dr. Kate McInturff]

The $12.2 billion number comes from two reports that were issued by Justice Canada over the last couple of years. They look at the self-reported rates of intimate partner violence—and sexual assault in another study—and they calculate the number based largely on academic research, including the average number of women who end up in hospital and the average length of stay; the reports of lost work hours, the costs to the victim and to the employer; the cost of the use of victim services; the justice costs, the policing costs; and they calculate a cost for the suffering, which is a bit of a strange exercise but not atypical of economists. It is a way of assigning a value to the fact that these are victims who have suffered a violent crime.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you.

Ms. Smallman.

[Vicky Smallman]

A couple of things need to happen in addition to having access to the time.

One is to view domestic violence as a workplace hazard, a health and safety issue. Our colleagues in Australia, whose work we are basing this model on, have many years of implementing these types of clauses at workplaces in that country. In addition to having access to the time, there are also internal policies around how to deal with domestic violence if it's having an impact on somebody at work. Usually the person can just go to their supervisor and say, “I'm having some trouble, I'm experiencing some violence, and I need tomorrow to go and deal with this thing,” and the supervisor will give them that time. Right?

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

If I could just jump in there, though, Ms. Smallman. What happens in the case of unconscious biases among colleagues?

[Vicky Smallman]

A really important component to all of this is training for managers. In the labour movement we are engaged in a very extensive training program for our shop stewards right now, to build awareness of this issue. There are programs available for employers in most provinces now. Building that awareness and breaking the silence around domestic violence and how it works is are what's helpful.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Pam Damoff]

Thank you very much. Sorry to cut you off.

We'll go to Ms. Vecchio for five minutes this time.

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

Yes, I'm going to make it really quick and short. I want to start by asking all of you on the panel, what are the key barriers? Just call out the names. I don't need explanations, but what are those key systemic barriers?

[Dr. Kate McInturff]

The disproportionate burden of unpaid work.

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

Unpaid work, okay.

[Angella MacEwen]

Discrimination.

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

Discrimination for being a woman?