Status of Women Committee on April 6th, 2017

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Absolutely.

You also do a lot of work around women who lack the confidence in their business to move it forward. We've heard that, and I've heard it myself, that a lot of times it's women who are afraid to take those risks to grow their businesses. They reach a certain point and they don't go further.

You've done work around that. Is there anything we can do to encourage women to gain more confidence in what they're doing in their business so they can grow it, so they can go in for a bank loan and present in a way that gets the bank manager to actually offer that loan?

[Anne Day]

That is the sort of work that women's enterprise centres do in the other provinces. They support women as they go through. They run programs that are funded by the federal government. They will also help them access loans and they'll start a peer lending circle.

PARO Centre for Women's Enterprise, in Thunder Bay, does that right now. I think supporting those sorts of ventures is the way to go.

I sat on the task force for small business looking at why women's businesses didn't grow. We did it across Canada and we came up with three reasons. One reason was lack of financial literacy. The second reason was not using IT the best they could to move their businesses forward. The third reason was lack of confidence. That was huge. Lack of confidence is really big. I've spent the last three years working on a book called Good Enough, which looks at why women don't feel good enough, and the confidence level is really there. They question everything. They're full of self-doubt. Building programs and services that work on the inner person before they can move forward with their business is helpful, as well as financial skills.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you.

I'm going to share my time with Ms. Ludwig.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Go ahead.

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

Thank you.

Thank you both for your presentations this morning.

My questions are regarding women or diversity on boards. Does either one of you have experience getting more women involved at the board level, and also in the election process?

[Anne Day]

I haven't. I've sat on several non-profit boards, but I haven't been involved in that process. What I know is that you need to have at least three women on a board to make a difference. If it's tokenism, it's not really going to work as well.

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

Okay.

[Linda Davis]

From my standpoint, it would just be from the studies and things that we know. We don't have enough women in the pipeline. To get women involved takes programs and mentoring. There has to be an effort. It can't just happen. We can't just dream it and make it happen.

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

Thank you.

We heard from Jennifer Reynolds before this committee, from Women in Capital Markets. She spoke specifically about women on boards, and about its not being about tokenism, for sure—I agree 100% with that, Anne—but about the best talent to help our companies out.

The return on investment is significant when we have women on boards, and have diversity on boards. I wonder whether you could offer us, as a committee and also as a federal government, some suggestions about how to get the message out more to corporate industry and the not-for-profit industries about the election process and about the value of the outcomes of having women and diversity on boards.

[Anne Day]

There's a group called BoardMatch, certainly in Ontario, that will match you up with a board position. It's back to the lack of confidence again. Women really need to understand and believe they have something to contribute.

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

That message, then, should go to men as well, who are also in charge of the election process, because we need men and women involved in this discussion.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Hear, hear!

[Linda Davis]

I would say that I think the government needs to set the tone and show the way. I think that having a balanced cabinet is a great example, but governments appoint many boards and to many positions. I think they need to balance those appointments as well at all levels of government—municipalities, provincial governments, as well as the federal government. That in and of itself can be a great leadership initiative.

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

For sure, leading by example is, I think, an important message. There's a mantra that I often use: you can't be what you cannot see. If people don't see diversity on boards or don't see women on boards in leadership positions, they don't identify. We often don't identify ourselves there, so the fact that we have a gender-balanced cabinet based on the best qualifications is, I think, a very important message.

[Anne Day]

Another thing is, let's look at the bottom line. As you were saying, when women are on their boards, businesses do better. That may be the way to approach corporations, to say, “This is going to improve your profits at the end of the day, if you are seen to be a company that believes in women and diversity and you actually have representatives there.” This is especially so among millennials; they judge you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

We're out of time. I'm sorry.

We'll go to Ms. Vecchio for seven minutes.

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

I'd almost be willing to give her a couple of my seconds, but I have lots of questions.

Linda, I want to start with you.

We talk about curriculum a lot. In my own constituency, the STEAM Centre—which is STEM plus the arts—of the Thames Valley District School Board in our area is focusing on a program and doing a pilot for the program starting in September 2017.

You talked about grassroots. I believe much of our problem is that we're not getting it as the children grow. Even when I was in public school in the early eighties, you would go in, you would go to the workshop and you would cook, and all the girls and boys did this together. Those kinds of programs were taken away. Personally, I would probably never have gone into a workshop if it hadn't been for the school, and now we don't see those sorts of things.

I find that the curriculum sometimes.... Trust me, I love our counsellors and guidance counsellors in the high schools, but often they are not affiliated with the actual workforce. They're affiliated with school boards and therefore may not know the opportunities.

How can we work better with our secondary schools and our elementary schools so that we're starting this early? We talk about the competence. I think if you were to put me in a workshop.... I was in a workshop in grade 7. I was terrible, but I still at least tried. There are other people, though, who are going to be successful. We see lots of changes in the automotive sector.

What can we do, starting with those children in grades 7 and 8, so that as they're growing they're not feeling excluded from certain fields? How can we work on that?

[Linda Davis]

I'm glad you asked that, Karen. Thank you.

I think a really key piece here is to make sure that the learning is experimental. There's a great way, I think, that school boards can do this through partnering with business. I think partnering is wonderful. It shares a bit of the cost and it shares the responsibility, but it makes an awareness piece for the employers too.

On the steering committee we talked about having field trips going out to different types of employers, making sure that students see women in what we're going to call non-traditional—

I've had my fingers slapped about calling it non-traditional.... I think we should change the language there. Let me say, making sure that young men and boys see themselves or see their counterparts in something that might be more female-dominated.

Another economical way we can do this is to partner with those employers, but instead of making field trips, which are costly and time-consuming, create videos and make sure that the videos are a bit contrived, in the sense that we're giving the message we want to give, so that we show the best light for the industry and the best welcoming environment for either gender to be engaged in it. We also need to make sure we're engaging students at a young age, so that they see the possibility of what that industry is about first-hand, in a real-life experience kind of situation.

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

That's awesome. Thank you so much, Linda.

Anne, I want to move on to you. Thank you very much for your presentations today.

When you talk about entrepreneurs, if we're looking at the entrepreneurs you deal with, how many actually have employees? Are they single-person businesses, or...?

[Anne Day]

Quite a few are single-person, but we go from people who have just started right up to people who are in the top 100. Some of the women are in the top 100, and yes, they have lots of employees.

Taking on an employee is tough.

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

Absolutely. I don't want to become political here, but I also want to look at small business, because I ran a small business so I know the cost. Whether it's for the Canada pension plan, employment insurance, or WSIB, we have all sorts of factors that employers have to take into consideration. My mom and dad ran a business as well.

I always say that for every dollar, it's $1.30 minimum that somebody is actually putting out when they're paying to have an employee. With any of the changes we've seen, such as the small business tax credits or the small business tax not being reduced, is there anything of that type that we should be focusing on to help women entrepreneurs and all entrepreneurs?

[Anne Day]

I was listening to the previous discussion and was thinking, when they were talking about putting the minimum wage up to $15, that as a small business owner it would be rather prohibitive. I think that's one of the concerns that small business owners would bring forward.

If you're going to do it, then I think you need to look at what you are going to give the small business owner to help offset it, because the bottom line is the bottom line, and they cannot afford to do it. I think assistance in that way would be good.

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

I really appreciate that, because this week I was meeting with the convenience store owners, and one of the discussions was what their margins actually were. We were talking about contraband cigarettes, and why people go elsewhere. People go elsewhere because it costs less elsewhere. If they're having to increase, we may see much more of an “under market” happening. We may also see an increase on Amazon, which is positive for some entrepreneurs, but not when the small businesses in our communities are closing because I can get something from China in four days. We have to be very aware of that. I really appreciate this.

You talk about confidence. I spoke to Linda about curriculum. What are some of the antidotes you would have, and what are some of the things we can do there? I was just speaking to Sheila before and talked about my daughter working in manufacturing. She has just started a new job. I felt it was really important that she know what hard work really is. She is doing things on cycles, going quickly.

What are some of the things we can give to our younger generation?

[Anne Day]

I used to work with women who were going into the skilled trades. One of the most effective things we did was bring in a young welder, who brought her first paycheque.

As soon as the women saw how much she earned, they were thinking “oh”. Women have the same sorts of skills. They have fine motor skills. They can follow a sewing pattern. They can follow a blueprint. Many of the women thus went into the skilled trades. I think it's a question of the exposure and also of working with the parents, because there's still a stigma about working in the skilled trades. I think it's important to reach the parents so that they encourage their children.

I recently was in Linamar, which is a company in the automotive industry in Guelph. They're starting a women's network. They were asking me how to start one. They have 19 apprentices, and every year they try to take five more women apprentices. It's thus also a question of working with business to encourage them to support women.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Very good.

Now we'll go to Ms. Malcolmson for seven minutes.