Status of Women Committee on April 6th, 2017

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

Those are the ones who are already employed, and I applaud you for that, but I'm thinking more of employing more people in those positions. Is there anything we can do to help with that?

[Debora De Angelis]

I can't think of anything off the top of my head.

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

Do any of the other witnesses have anything to add on that?

[Meg Gingrich]

For employing people with disabilities, we had a whole separate submission on increasing accessibility for people with disabilities. But I think there are those programs you can set up working with employers in hiring and things like that and identifying people working with community groups to see if there's.... It's the same thing we recommend with all sorts of other inequities in redressing them: the employer working with whoever to take a proactive approach to go out and actually seek people who they normally might just overlook and assume they couldn't do a particular job when that's not actually the case.

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

Okay. We've talked a lot about day care and paternity leave, not just with you but with other witnesses. I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about compassionate care, because quite often it falls on the woman to take time off work to care for parents or a spouse or a child with autism. In a range of issues at home, compassionate care tends to be taken by women. What can the federal government do in terms of compassionate care specifically to make it easier, not just for the woman to take the leave, but also to reintegrate back into work afterwards?

[Meg Gingrich]

I think there are a couple of things on that. There's having protected leave with some wage supplements so women don't economically suffer when they are the ones taking on the brunt of this.

But I think we also need to look beyond just the individual responsibility and make sure we have publicly funded, accessible programs of care and that we're not just shifting all this care into the community or into the home sphere because, again, that often means women end up taking on more. Even if you hire home care or workers or something like that to assist, it's often the lowest wage employees in those sectors. It's this two-prong thing where you want to have the protected leave with some sort of wage replacements but also to make sure that it's not at the expense of a high-quality, publicly accessible health care system and other types of care that are publicly funded and accessible.

[Debora De Angelis]

For all these leaves there has to be a guarantee that the workers' jobs are protected when they go back, because just to have a leave.... We've received calls from workers who left and then they came back and were told, “This is your job now” and they were saying, “That's not the job I had before”. We're talking about non-unionized workers, so it's too bad, right?

There has to be a protection especially for non-unionized workers that, when they leave, they come back and their job has been protected with any wage increases that they would have missed. Women largely leave to do these jobs. Sometimes they have to take leaves of absence. I know my mother had to take care of my grandmother, and when she went back to her job she just picked up where she left off and there was nothing for her in the wage increase that everybody else got. She was told, “Okay, go do what you have to do; maybe a job will be here when you get back”. There has to be a guarantee for these leaves.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Very good.

That's the end of our time today.

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

That was only five minutes; I thought I had seven.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

No, it's only only five.

Thanks to all of our witnesses for your excellent testimony. If you've thought of something that you would like to send to the committee, I invite you to send it to our clerk and she will distribute it.

Now, we're going to suspend and quickly clear the room so we can start our second panel.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

We're back for our second panel on our study of the economic status of women in Canada. Could I have the committee members resume their seats?

We are pleased today to have, from the Company of Women, Anne Day who is the founder and president, and by video conference we also have Linda Davis, who is the first vice-president for the Canadian Federation of Business and Professional women.

Welcome, ladies. We're going to begin with comments from Anne for seven minutes. Then we'll go on to Linda.

[Anne Day, Founder and President, Company of Women]

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.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

[Inaudible—Editor]

[Anne Day]

Oh, I haven't even got to women entrepreneurs. That was quick. In that case I'm moving right along.

I'm glad that the government has chosen to fund Futurpreneur. I have a suggestion: broaden it to women over 40, or people over 40. We are seeing more and more women and men, I guess, starting businesses, and there are no programs for them. They are only for those who are under 39.

My other suggestion, cutting to the quick, is that every province has a women's enterprise centre funded by the federal government, except Ontario. We are one of the biggest business hubs and it seems somewhat odd that there isn't a women's enterprise centre that is funded here in Ontario.

There are different groups of us working independently and it would be really good if you brought us all together.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Wonderful.

We'll now go to Linda for seven minutes.

[Linda Davis, First Vice-President, Canadian Federation of Business and Professional Women]

Thank you. Good morning.

In the interests of time and with all protocol observed, I'd like to thank the committee for the opportunity to address the topic of women's economic empowerment.

I have been a member of the business and professional women's organization for more than 20 years. I served as the provincial president for Ontario from 2012 to 2014, and as mentioned, I am currently the first vice-president for BPW Canada. From April 2015 to May 2016, I was appointed by an order in council to the Ontario minister of labour's steering committee tasked with studying the causes of and recommending ways to close Ontario's gender wage gap. I recently attended the CSW 61 meeting at the UN and was a delegate for BPW International. It's these experiences that I draw on today for my comments.

I will start by saying that the imbalance of power between men and women is not a women's issue. This is a societal issue based in human rights. Although those of us who have been working in this for some time understand that, the general public does not, and that was borne out in the consultation process.

Most young women don't know that there's inequality in the workplace and usually don't come to that realization until mid-career. We desperately need a national awareness campaign before any real change can happen. We must ensure that, during the awareness process, we do not create a women versus men attitude, and that again was borne out in the consultation process.

This issue is a societal issue, as already noted, and it will take men and women working together to eliminate the bias and the inequality.

Men have had privilege in our society since the beginning of recorded time. We cannot risk dividing our society and creating a Donald Trump phenomenon here in Canada. The intent must be clear that men are asked to share the responsibilities of family, to create welcoming work environments, and to open themselves to change.

Women also must bear the burden of sharing their domain, and work with men to create this change. Employers must change their attitudes to accept men as parents and allow the flexibility for them to meet their family responsibilities. In the past, that meant bringing home a good paycheque. Today, that means sharing the care, sharing the work, sharing the decision-making, and sharing the rewards.

Once the public is aware of the issue, the causes, and the solutions, legislative changes will be more easily adopted and implemented.

Key areas for change are, of course, child care, which has been already mentioned, employment insurance leaves, education, and pay equity legislation, and that's just to name a few.

We need a high-quality affordable, accessible, publicly funded, and geared-to-income child care system with sufficient spaces to meet the needs of Canadians. We also need a better system for elder care. However, assistance to the family care alone will not solve the problem. This must be accompanied with changes to the employment insurance system.

We need a “use it or lose it” father care leave to encourage men to share the care. Both parents must have access to some kind of top-up. Studies show that men are more likely to take those leaves when they have sufficient benefits. The top-up could be an optional opt-in program to deduct higher premiums, or a separate government-supported savings plan like the educational savings plan.

Flexible EI leave plans must also allow both parents to move in and out of the workplace for predetermined periods of time to accommodate their career activities and their advancements while offering continuous care to the child. This flexible leave should continue beyond the parental leave to accommodate short time-off leaves for sick children so parents can be compensated if they're even only off for a day, and that's if they don't have paid sick days from work.

Our educational system—and I know this is not necessarily specifically to the federal government—must strive for a bias-free curriculum and delivery, and we heard information at the consultations that delivery is not bias-free.

I believe that gender balance in the classroom plays a big role and must be involved in all aspects of organized classroom activities, whether it's during playtime or whether it's shared experience. As boys and girls learn from each other and share their knowledge and their experience, we will see less segregation into stereotypical roles as they progress through school.

Pay equity legislation should include gender-based analysis of workplaces and reporting of that analysis. Workplace education, transparency of wages, reporting of workplace data, policies, and strategies to government related to gender equality are a must. Some of the reporting could be incorporated into employment tax data already gathered by Revenue Canada.

Data is another topic that requires that we ensure we are collecting data so we can show progress. We have found that many employment programs and different programs that were happening were actually gathering data, but the data was not being gathered by gender. When we asked why they didn't have that data by gender, they said they'd never been asked for it. Simply rearranging the programs that are happening, asking for data to be gathered by gender, by race, and by religion, could very much help the lack of data we have in this situation.

Thank you for the opportunity. I have many more ideas, but of course, in seven minutes it's hard to get it all in.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Very good. Thank you very much.

Now we'll go into our round of questioning, beginning with my friend Ms. Damoff for seven minutes.

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

Thank you very much.

Before I start with questions, Anne, I want to congratulate you on everything you've done. I represent Oakville North—Burlington and I've been in Oakville since 1992. I was recently at the Women's Centre. I think it's still in the same location as it has been since day one.

[Anne Day]

Yes. It's still in the mall.

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

My first question has to do with the Women's Centre, because it still operates without any funding from any level of government. Certainly you mentioned some of the programs that are being offered, in particular those that have to do with job skills training and that type of thing. We don't provide operational funding, but do you see a role for the federal government in being able to help organizations such as the Women's Centre to be able to provide those types of programs?

[Anne Day]

I wonder if there's a grant that can be attached to someone who is on EI who is going through processes to improve her skills, such as a subsidy that would go to the Women's Centre to help them with the work they do. They used to be funded by the Ontario women's directorate. I know that because I used to work there. I think they have curtailed a lot of the funding they're giving to women's centres across the province, too.

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

There does seem to be a gap—

[Anne Day]

It is a gap.

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

—in programs that are offered.

[Anne Day]

The regional government also provides some of those programs, but there is some strength in bringing together women who are in the same situation. It builds a community and they realize they're not alone in their situation.