Evidence of meeting #52 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 quebec.
A recording is available from Parliament.
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
Pam Damoff Liberal Oakville North—Burlington, ON
I asked if we could go in camera for the last 15 minutes of this meeting just to discuss that bill, the timing of witnesses, and the study of it.
Could we still do that?
9:35 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
Yes, we can.
I'll suspend until we go in camera.
[Proceedings continue in camera]
9:45 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
We're back for our second panel.
We're very happy to have with us by video conference today Andrea Doucet. Andrea Doucet is a professor and Canada research chair in gender, work, and care at Brock University. Also, we have with us Morna Ballantyne, who is with Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada. She is the executive director.
We will start with Andrea. You have 10 minutes for your remarks, then we'll go from there.
9:45 a.m.
Professor Andrea Doucet Professor, Canada Research Chair in Gender, Work and Care, Brock University, As an Individual
Thank you for this invitation. We did send a brief on behalf of my research team and I want to acknowledge that I'll be speaking today from my research and from my research with Dr. Lindsey McKay and Dr. Sophie Mathieu.
I want to make three key points that relate to women's economic security and their participation in the Canadian economy. I will read research evidence with some stories that are both personal and political.
My first point is about men's involvement in unpaid care work. My second point is also about men and their take-up of paternity and parental leave and why this is important for women's economic participation.
Third, I will speak about how low-income women in Canada are systemically excluded from maternity and parental leave benefits. Let me begin with a brief story.
I take you back to 1989, when I was just beginning my Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge. I was pregnant with my first child and I was planning to write my doctoral dissertation on women's paid and unpaid work. After giving birth, I changed my dissertation topic to women and men and paid and unpaid work.
One key moment that led me to make that shift was the day that my husband went to his first play group, a moms-and-tots group that met in the basement of a local church. While he was assured that he would be welcomed, each time he entered the church basement with our daughter, he felt like he was entering a very closed and cold club reserved for mothers only. People wondered why he was there. Why wasn't he working full-time? He was treated like an alien, a pervert, and sometimes, as a rock star. Of course, everyone wondered, where was the child's mother?
What has stayed with me from that time 27 years ago and from the research that I have done across those years is the deeply ingrained assumption that men should be primary breadwinners and women should be primary caregivers. These assumptions have shifted a great deal over the last quarter century, but what has changed little is the expectation that it is women and not men who will care for infants and toddlers
This was well expressed to me by an Ottawa father, a stay-at-home dad I interviewed four times between 2000 and 2010 for the first and second editions of my book Do Men Mother?. He said to me, “Even in a society where people believe that men and women are equal and can do just about everything, they don't really believe that men can do this with a baby, especially a really tiny baby.”
My first point, then, is this. I believe that men's increased involvement in caring can and does lead to a shift in political and cultural values and socio-economic conditions around paid and unpaid work. Here I borrow from the words of feminist theorist Dorothy Dinnerstein, who wrote 40 years ago, in 1977, about the losses—personal, psychological, and economic—for both women and men in a society in which, as she put it, one gender does the “rocking of the cradle” while the other “rules the world”.
I want to close this first point by being very clear that I state this position about men and care not as a universal or a categorical one. This is a panel on women's economic security. There are contexts, sites, and instances in which it might not be appropriate to bring men into this issue. I am thinking here of issues of domestic violence, which I believe this committee has already addressed, or difficult custody cases, in which these arguments on gender equality play out in a very different way. I thus want to clarify that I make this point informed by what social scientists call a “contextualist approach”, which attends to the context and complexity of women's lives. One must always ask, “Which women are we talking about?”
My second point is about men and paternity leave. In 2001, as all of you well know, the federal government, under the EI program, expanded parental leave benefits, for mothers or fathers, from 10 weeks to 35 weeks. The number of fathers taking leave jumped significantly, from 3% to 10% in just five years. Then in 2006 Quebec introduced the Québec parental insurance plan, QPIP, a separate and more generous parental leave policy, with three to five weeks of non-transferable paternity leave. By 2008 it was clear that far more Québécois fathers were taking government-sponsored paid leave benefits than were fathers outside Quebec. In Quebec, nine out of 10 fathers take leave. In the rest of Canada, it is about one in 10. Those numbers are stark, and they have remained fairly constant across the last eight years.
The difference between fathers in Quebec and fathers in the rest of Canada led Lindsey McKay and me to examine these two policy regimes. Our research included interviews with 26 families in Ontario and Quebec, which we conducted between 2006 and 2008. We recently followed up—a decade later, in 2016—with nine of the 26 couples. Following here are four key findings and arguments from our work across this past decade.
Ten years ago we found that parental leave decisions were shaped by gendered norms in the workplace. A number of men expressed concern about losing their jobs. One father in our study was fired after he took nine weeks of parental leave. When we returned to interview fathers and mothers in 2016, we learned from them that the workplace is slowly beginning to change, but that fathers can still feel pressure from work colleagues and bosses when they take time off to care for infants. There's still an expectation that this is women's work. Several fathers told us that they were sometimes treated differently and negatively at work after taking more than one period of parental leave.
We support a growing international argument that designated paternity leave, implemented in a “use it or lose it” scheme so that if the family don't use it they lose it, with high replacement rates and low eligibility criteria, as in Quebec, Norway, and Sweden, is a key motivator for families to take up leave.
Our final point is that top-ups—benefits with replacement rates that are higher than the EI rate of 55%—make a huge difference to fathers' take-up of leave and that they thus indirectly support women's employment. As women still earn less than men, it is women who take most of the leave time, and this can translate into long-term loss of income, benefits, and professional opportunities.
I am now at my third and final point, concerning low-income mothers' access to maternity leave and parental leave benefits.
In a 2016 research article published in The Journal of Industrial Relations on work conducted by McKay, Mathieu, and me, we argued, based on our analysis of EI and the QPIP program, that there's a rich-poor gap in receipt of maternity and parental leave benefits among Canadian mothers. The gap is geographic, reflecting the two benefit programs—Quebec's and the rest of Canada's—and it is income-related.
Our findings, in brief, are the following.
Women work throughout their lives and contribute to EI. An average of 25% of mothers pay into EI during their pregnancy, but they don't have enough hours to quality for their parental leave. Other mothers pay into EI for their whole working lives, but they don't make the cut when it matters; that is, they need to accumulate 600 hours in the 52 weeks prior to giving birth. This stands as the major barrier to benefits access.
Under EI rules, 36% of mothers do not qualify, compared to only 11% in Quebec. Mothers in lower-income families are most excluded, with 56% left out under EI, compared with 15% in Quebec. One of the reasons for this difference is radically different eligibility criteria. EI requires 600 hours; QPIP only requires having earned $2,000, which is about 186 hours at minimum wage.
The revision currently on the table for Canada's parental leave policy will exacerbate the rich-poor gap in parental leave, as well as the gendered wage gap. In our view, it's a poorly crafted policy in terms of women's economic security, especially for mothers without standard, well-paid, full-time employment.
I want to conclude my presentation with three brief remarks.
My first point is a conceptual one. Maternity leave and parental leave are currently lodged in the EI system, but these are care policies and not unemployment policies. In the long-term, my colleagues and I believe there should be a wider discussion of how to structure the support of the caring needs and demands of all diverse Canadian families.
Second, maternity leave, paternity leave, parental leave, and child care should be brought together in a more coherent plan that recognizes the interconnections between family caregiving and child care. One thing that struck us in our parental leave research is how awful it is for many Canadian parents who end their parental leave time, and then face the dire situation of limited and poor child care options.
Finally, I return to the story that I told you about 10 minutes ago about my partner and our infant daughter. She and her twin sisters are now young adults. They all graduated from high school with honours, two completed post-secondary programs, and one is in process. All three are in precarious work: an actor, a video editor, a project manager in the non-profit sector.
They do not have benefits; they go from contract to contract. They do not accumulate 600 hours with the same employer in any given year. Two of them have partners who are in precarious employment. If and when they choose to have children, they will likely not qualify for parental leave benefits, so I'm speaking today not only as a scholar who's written about gender equality issues for about a quarter-century, I speak as a mother of three adult children who are all in precarious work. A lot of Canadian families, especially lower-income families but also middle-class families like mine, worry a great deal about women's economic security for the next generation.
Thank you.
9:55 a.m.
Conservative
9:55 a.m.
Morna Ballantyne Executive Director, Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada
Thank you very much, Madam Chair and members of the committee.
You heard two excellent presentations earlier this morning detailing the positive impact of affordable child care on women's economic security. They made the case that women's economic security is enhanced by participation in the paid labour force and that levels of female participation increase when mothers have access to child care. I will focus on three things the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada thinks should happen now to make that access a reality. Our viewpoint has been developed through extensive consultation with parents, early childhood educators, policy experts, researchers, and others involved in child care. We hope that you will include it in your report.
First, please push to get the federal-provincial-territorial child care policy framework right. Building a child care system in Canada will take at least a decade. It's critical that the federal government commit for the long haul and put in place foundational building blocks that will stand the test of time. We want to see the federal government keep working with the provincial and territorial governments to develop a sound, extensive policy approach to early childhood education and child care as a fully funded, high quality inclusive public service that all Canadians can access regardless of their economic circumstances, their place of residence, or the individual needs of their children.
Currently, parents in Canada are forced to purchase services from a child care market. Some of that market is regulated and some is not. Some of it is not for profit; some of it is for profit. It's a market that offers a confusing array of scarce offerings, too many of which are of poor quality, and almost all of which are unaffordable for families. This child care market is particularly bad at meeting the needs of children with disabilities, children whose parents work non-standard hours or irregular hours, and children who live in rural and remote communities.
Leaving the provision of care to the market doesn't work for child care any better than it would for health care, for primary education, for secondary education, for sanitation, or for countless other areas in which governments have intervened for the benefit of all Canadians in order to enhance equality of opportunity and provide a higher standard of living for all and just because doing it that way makes economic sense.
We need both levels of government to work together. While the provinces and territories have constitutional jurisdiction over the delivery of child care services, the federal government has the spending power to drive the change. The federal government also has a legal obligation to make changes to child care, because the current system makes it impossible for Canada to live up to its international commitments with respect to women's equality and the rights of the child. Unfortunately, we will not likely get the federal-provincial-territorial policy framework that we need when the federal government's multilateral framework agreement is announced, which we expect to be within weeks of the federal budget.
We don't know a lot about the negotiations that have been under way now off and on for more than a year, because, honestly, they've been carried out in secret with no meaningful input from stakeholders. But everything points to the promised agreement being little more than a broad commitment to make child care more affordable and accessible and of better quality and also, more flexible. Instead of principles, we need a framework that says how those objectives will be achieved. For example, we need to have an agreement for direct public funding of child care services rather than indirect funding through fee subsidies to parents. I read a report the other day—I think it was produced by Wellington County in Ontario—that said the child care system in Canada is funded 88% by user fees and only 12% through direct government support of services. That's no way to finance a system so critical to women's economic security. Giving a very small number of parents help with their user fees through subsidies is just not good enough.
We need a policy framework that sets out direction for solving the problems that plague the child care workforce. Quality of child care is directly linked to the qualifications and the stability of the workforce. Expanding the system is just not possible without more trained early childhood educators, but attracting and retaining staff to the ECE profession is not possible when the predominantly female child care workforce works for substandard wages and in impossibly difficult conditions.
The policy framework has to include commitments to putting in place the infrastructure required for system-building, including the regular collection and the analysis of data.
We have put a proposal for the kind of policy framework we are looking for in a three-page document, and I've brought it with me. I gave it to the clerk to pass to you, along with our vision of the kind of system we need to build.
The second thing we urge you to do is support our view that early childhood education and child care needs of indigenous communities have to be addressed through a separate and distinct policy framework, one developed by both levels of government and representatives of Canada's indigenous peoples. Truth and reconciliation demands no less, and the law requires that indigenous children services receive funding equal to that provided for non-indigenous children.
Third, we call for sustained and proper levels of federal funding. When the budget is introduced tomorrow, we'll know how much if anything the federal government proposes to budget for child care beyond the one-time-only $500 million that was in the 2016 budget. We expect, however, to see a flat rate allocation of $500 million for each of the next 10 years, taken from the social infrastructure fund.
If this does occur, Canadians won't see more or improved child care services unless the federal government bumps up its financial support for future years. We need a separate stream of funding for child care also, so that we're not in competition for dollars with other priorities, such as housing.
The first year of funding already announced for 2017-18 is not as high as we would like, but it could help with some immediate problems in child care, such as the long wait-lists in many jurisdictions for parent fee subsidies, or the lack of spaces in remote and rural communities.
After 2018, however, we need to dramatically increase the funding commitment each year, until we reach the target of 1% of GDP being allocated for early childhood education. This may seem like a lot, but as Professor Fortin and others have already testified, the spending will generate significant returns in economic growth, including boosting women's participation in the workforce. The cost of the program will pay for itself through increased tax revenues and productivity. It's spending that will make women more equal, and most importantly, it will ensure the best care for our country's children.
Like the others, I want to move to a personal note. It's absolutely impossible for women to make a presentation to the status of women committee without speaking about our own experience, because of course the personal is political.
I want to tell you that I came to child care advocacy not as a policy expert; I really came as a parent, as a single mother of two children. I became interested in advocacy and in the issue of child care when I became pregnant with my first child and was told that I'd better get my name on the waiting list or I would never have access to child care. Then I did, luckily enough, get a space for my son in a good, high-quality child care, and I had to pay for the fees in the form of a debt for the following 10 years, because it was that much money, and then of course I had a second child and had to pay the fees for two children.
My son is now 32; my daughter is 26. I became a grandmother exactly three weeks ago today. It just breaks my heart that my son and his partner are going to have even a harder time than I had more than 30 years ago. I can't believe that in Canada, as wealthy as we are, with all the expert advice that we have, we know what to do and still haven't done it. It really is a question of political will, and your committee can play a huge role in making sure that this point is made and that we get the politics right and the finances right.
Thank you.
10:05 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
Excellent.
With that, we'll start our round of questioning, with Ms. Ludwig for seven minutes.
10:05 a.m.
Liberal
Karen Ludwig Liberal New Brunswick Southwest, NB
Thank you both for your very moving and informative presentations.
I'm a mother of two. I can give my personal experience. When I first started working full-time, teaching at the community college, I knew it was going to take extra hours, and I will not say publicly how much I paid in child care, but it was extensive, and that allowed me to do the things that I wanted to do with flexibility. Looking at standardized day care versus bringing someone into my home, it had limited hours, and when you're trying to build your career—we men and women around this table can all speak about that—it does typically take longer hours than nine to five. There's the flexibility and the guilt that goes along with that, so thank you.
My question is around the area of training. When we're looking at employees working at these regulated child care facilities, one of the things that I have found over the years is that, because it just didn't pay very well, we didn't see a lot of uptake from men who wanted to work in that field, and I do think, and I wonder if you feel the same, that there's a value to having a diverse labour force in the area of child care. That's one question.
The second is, how do we standardize the training across the country if we implement a federal framework on this, which I think is an important area, if it's still regulated provincially? The consistency of delivery and potentially the learning outcomes may differ from province to province. I'm wondering, based on your experience, what recommendations you could offer there.
I'll start with Ms. Ballantyne.
10:10 a.m.
Executive Director, Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada
First of all, we would absolutely support the need to diversify the workforce. It is more than 95% female, and obviously, it's good for kids to have a diversity of adults in their lives. One of the reasons, of course, that it's predominantly female is that it's a low-paid sector, and so one of the ways to bring more men into the field would actually be to take a really focused approach to improving the working conditions and the wages and benefits for the workforce.
Now it's true that this is an area that falls within provincial and territorial jurisdiction. However, there have been lots of periods in Canadian history very recently when the federal government has played an active role in workforce development, and in fact, the Government of Canada right now has indicated that workforce development is a serious concern. So we think, as the next step, that a good chunk of the discussions going on between the federal, provincial, and territorial governments should focus on workforce development. We and they can look, with the involvement and inclusion of the child care sector, at what could be done and what strategies and best policy approaches could be developed to address the workforce problems. That has been done in the past; we can do it again in the future.
10:10 a.m.
Liberal
10:10 a.m.
Prof. Andrea Doucet
I agree with Morna Ballantyne about the need for higher pay for men to be involved in this sector.
The other issue for me is that it's kind of a catch-22 in the sense that it's assumed that women do caring, and then nobody wants men in early child care, and then those assumptions just get perpetuated again and again and again.
I do think it has to be a comprehensive approach with higher pay, cultural training around men and early infant care, and just working slowly to bring more men into early care. I can say that I have visited Swedish day cares, and there are lots of men in these day cares, but they have had a much longer time of building high-quality, affordable, accessible, universal child care. They also worked on a sort of public campaign about men's roles with children. It has to come in a number of ways. Right now there is still an assumption that it is women who will care for infants and young children, so we need to break those stereotypes and cultural assumptions, and that has to be done through a number of programs and targeted campaigns, maybe. That's what Sweden did. Sweden had a lot of campaigns where they showed images of men with children.
10:10 a.m.
Liberal
Karen Ludwig Liberal New Brunswick Southwest, NB
My next question is related to entrepreneurship. We look across the world for economic security. We focus a lot on helping women develop and create their own businesses and sustain them. If someone has a home-based business, or someone is an entrepreneur, they're not paying into employment insurance. What do we do for that young woman, the woman who would like to have a child or becomes pregnant, when there is no employment insurance? What are your recommendations to help people like that?
10:10 a.m.
Executive Director, Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada
I think that one's for you.
10:10 a.m.
Prof. Andrea Doucet
There is a provision for self-employed people to choose to pay into EI so they can access parental leave benefits. That's a new provision that was put in place a couple of years ago.
The larger question for me is around extending the eligibility of people who have access to parental leave benefits and looking to our neighbours in Quebec for lower eligibility criteria. We know that women have patchwork careers because they tend to care for their children so they're moving in and out of work. That means they're often not eligible. If someone is self-employed, she may not be able to afford to pay into EI for a while. If we lowered the eligibility criteria we would widen the access for people to have parental leave benefits.
10:10 a.m.
Liberal
Karen Ludwig Liberal New Brunswick Southwest, NB
Ms. Ballantyne, if we had more men staying home taking parental leave, how might that affect women's economic security?
10:15 a.m.
Executive Director, Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada
I think the issue around women's economic security is to make sure they have access to the paid labour force and also have access to full pay when they're away from the paid labour force when their children are young. That's really the only way to do it.
The issue of engaging more fathers in the care, especially of young children, is important especially in later years of life. Studies have shown that when fathers are engaged in the early care of young children through parental leave provisions then they would more likely take shared responsibility for the duration of their children's childhood. That will contribute to women's economic security. The fact is that women continue to be the ones who must take time away from work for a number of reasons, not just when their children are very young but until their children graduate.
10:15 a.m.
Conservative
March 21st, 2017 / 10:15 a.m.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
Morna, I'm going to direct most of my questions to you.
The first one here is with regard to the child care system, specifically the one in Quebec right now.
My understanding is that 52% of the families who access the Quebec child care system are in the middle- to upper-income bracket. Meanwhile, we have a waiting list that is two years' long and a lot are lower-income families who aren't able to access the system. When I look at this, if this is an example of what we're supposed to be going for as an entire country I'm quite discouraged by that. In my estimation we should be looking at the child care needs of those in lower-income brackets, especially those women in single-income households who are more prone to live in poverty or have lower incomes. I'd be very interested in having them have access but I just don't see the Quebec system, that model, providing for this.
Can you help me understand what we can do differently to make sure that these low-income women have the access they need?
10:15 a.m.
Executive Director, Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada
Sure.
I think in part this issue was addressed in the testimony earlier this morning.
It was clearly stated by Professor Fortin that the Quebec child care system is not the ideal system. One of the reasons it isn't is that there continue to be two Quebec systems of child care. One is a regulated, subsidized child care system, and the other is a for-profit system that operates outside. Parents who access the regulated system have very low fees, and the money is paid directly to the service. In the other part of the sector parents have to pay and then apply for a tax refund. It's not a completely universal system. What we should do in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada is develop a genuinely universal system. The only way to do that effectively is to provide public funding directly to the services rather than direct funding through either tax credits or through subsidies to assist parents paying the user fee. As long as there's a high user fee, lower-income earners are going to be discouraged from accessing the system.
I've got a paper that I co-authored on why universality is important, and I would be happy to share that with you afterwards.
10:15 a.m.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
Thank you.
I hear what you are saying. Now, if I'm understanding you correctly, what you are really steering us toward is almost a fully publicly funded system. Gone are the days of having home care and privatization within the child care system.
This is my concern with that approach: when I look at the research, it shows me that the children who exist in these public spaces are far more prone to levels of anxiety and depression than the children in private centres. The research also shows me that those individuals who are within these public centres, these larger centres, are more likely to commit crimes later in life than those who are in the private centres. The truth is I could go on and on with statistics like this, showing that often those home-based centres are, in fact, better for the well-being of our children and produce positive results.
How, then, would we go about taking care of these social issues that face our society?
10:20 a.m.
Executive Director, Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada
I could probably go on and on trying to dispute the evidence you just made reference to, but instead what I'd like to do is just maybe clarify what we mean by a fully publicly funded system. For us, a publicly funded system does not mean one type of day care only. A publicly funded system can and should include home-based child care, centre-based child care, and a number of other child care arrangements—flexible child care arrangements, for example, so that women who work part-time or irregular hours can access the system.
We're not saying a publicly funded child care system means centre-based, institutional child care. This is a myth. This is not what we've ever said, and we continue to reiterate that point.
The reason why we need a publicly funded system is so that we can then pay attention to developing the kind of quality services that will in fact lead to the really good, positive development of children and families. That's our answer.
10:20 a.m.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
Sure.
Morna, I've noticed there's this buzzword that's being used by all four witnesses, and that is “quality”. We like to use the term “quality”, but no one's taken the time to define what it means to provide “quality child care”. What would you define that as? How do we know we're providing quality care to our children in Canada?
10:20 a.m.
Executive Director, Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada
There are two ways to answer that.
One is to talk about a quality system, and the other is to talk about quality care. There's all kinds of evidence and research that's been done on what good quality care is in terms of the provision of care to children. We know what that evidence is, and it relates to the relationship between the early childhood educator and the child, to the physical environment, and to the curriculum. We have a good sense about what constitutes quality care.
A quality system is one that has public financial, and other support, so that quality care can actually take place.
10:20 a.m.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
You made reference to the current government and decisions “being made in secret”. My question for you, then, is what would a proper consultation process look like, going forward?
10:20 a.m.
Executive Director, Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada
First of all, we haven't given up hope. We think this project is ongoing. It would be completely unrealistic to expect any government of Canada to be able to put in place and develop a universal child care system within a few months. It's an ongoing process. We want to give the government—whatever government is in power over the next 10 years—10 years to get it right.
Good consultation would be openness with respect to the positions the government is taking to the table with the provinces and territories, getting the best evidence and information from experts to inform that position, and then providing regular reports on how negotiations are proceeding, including timetables of progress.