Thank you very much for inviting me. It's a big honour to be here.
You've probably heard lots of stats and heard about lots of research, so I'm not going to deal with those. It's not my background. I've been working in the trenches for about the last 38 years, mainly with women who have different issues. I've been working with parents and child care providers. I've worked with marginalized women who have been in a shelter or who have gone to a women's centre, and I've worked with teen moms. Most recently I've been working with women entrepreneurs. I have to say, that's the most positive piece of what I've been doing.
What I'd like to do is walk through some of the things I've observed over the years. Unfortunately, things haven't changed much.
I have to start with affordable child care. I'm sure you've been hearing this all the time, but really, if women cannot afford to have child care, they can't work, and there goes their social and economic security.
I was talking to someone from Toronto. I think it is harder in bigger cities. It's really a bit like the housing market, in that she put her name down as soon as she was pregnant to get a child care spot. When she got one, it wasn't anywhere near where she was working or where she was living. She had to put down her first and last month's deposit, which is just like the case with accommodation. When she got there she found that her little guy couldn't tolerate being with a lot of people and was getting sick all the time, so she had to pull him out.
Then she thought she'd go the nanny route. Nannies charge $50 an hour. Here she was with a middle management position, and she said, “I couldn't afford it; I did the math and I could not afford to work.” We are losing out on so many women being part of the labour market because they can't afford “affordable child care”.
This is someone with one child. If you have more than one child, it's even worse. When you start doing the math, paying for each child is just impossible. If you work shift work or you work different times or work part time, it is extremely difficult.
I really think this is one of the major issues that the federal government has to look at: having affordable child care. I'm not saying free—actually, free doesn't work; it's just taken advantage of. I certainly think that if there are more subsidized spots available, and some creativity.... There's a lot happening in Scandinavia.
For example, there is someone who runs Kids and Company, which is a privately owned business. It might be good to start looking at a private partnership with somebody like that, because she offers emergency child care so if your child is sick you can take your child there. She's in the workplace. I really encourage you to talk to Victoria Sopik, who owns that business, to see whether there's some way you could learn from it and also build something that would make it easier for women to work.
The other challenge is that, as we all know, most of the time there needs to be two people working in a family to make ends meet. Unfortunately, what parents sometimes do is go the informal child care route; they go with the unlicensed child care providers.
There's been a lot in the news this week about the horrific case in Vaughan in which a child died. There were 35 children in that home and 12 dogs. That really cannot be tolerated. I think that as a country we have to look at what standards we're setting for informal child care. If they're licensed, they're part of a federal or a provincial government ruling, but perhaps we need to up the standards and also set in place some regulations to make sure that something like that never happens again.
I'm going to move on to marginalized women. I used to be the president of Halton Women's Place. When I was there we found that half the women never made it to the shelter. We were concerned, because we knew there was abuse happening. We thus started up a women's centre located in a mall on the second floor. It was really easy, because the women could say they were going shopping and then come upstairs to visit with us.
Much of what we did was support them in what they were going through and help build their self-esteem, but it became very clear to me that while that's fine, they needed to find a job. They needed to be able to find work so that they could put their best foot forward and move forward with their lives and for their children.
We actually started doing job search skills and we started to work on how they could find a job. For some of them they didn't even know what they wanted to do. It was, you know, what do you want to be when you grow up? They hadn't really thought about what their skill sets were. I would really like to see more programs like that, more programs where we're helping women at the grassroots level move forward with their lives.
The other group of people who I have worked with were teen moms. I had 65 students who we were helping to get through high school—and they did. But one thing we did was make the curriculum practical. For example, they did their income tax as part of their math program. I know there are moves to make more practical life skills part of the high school curriculum, and I really think that is a great idea.