Status of Women Committee on March 10th, 2016

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

I don't have the list. Someone took my list away. I don't have it in front of me.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Ms. Nassif, you have the floor.

[Eva Nassif, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Maybe the minister will be able to answer my question. It's about the budgetary expenses.

Year over year we have seen an increase in the annual budgetary expenses, which is great for our mandate as long as we can deliver efficiently. However, I was wondering if you are able to comment on provincial contributions to similar initiatives. In the plan, it was outlined that integrated provincial and territorial efforts, or at least combined efforts, are important.

Have intergovernmental initiatives complemented each other well? Are you optimistic about the increase in specific efforts?

[Meena Ballantyne]

Sorry, I hope I understand your question. You're talking about the intergovernmental...?

[Eva Nassif, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Yes.

[Meena Ballantyne]

As the minister was saying about the FPT meeting....

[Patty Hajdu, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

I have been very encouraged, in the short time I have been minister, to be able to connect with the majority, if not all, of my colleagues across the country, either by telephone or in person. As a matter of fact, this morning I met with Caroline Cochrane from the Northwest Territories. She is a brand new MP and minister of the status of women. Because their Parliament is so small, she also holds many other portfolios, but she was very keen to meet with us to talk about the relationship between NWT and the federal government. We talked about many of the things that gender equality intersects with, things like housing, homelessness, access to education, the economic security of women, and the sparsity of opportunity for many women in the Northwest Territories.

We will be moving forward in that vein, and we have our first FPT meeting in June face to face. We have had a teleconference to plan the agenda. I am really excited to work with all of my colleagues. We think that even some of the provinces that have been less focused on this issue are sending delegates. We have, if not the minister, a delegate of the minister. I am very excited about the June meeting. It is going to be very important as we move forward with this federal strategy in particular, but also in terms of sharing best practices and evidence. As they are planning or implementing programs, as they are gaining all the research and evidence from their expenditures on gender equality, we can gain the knowledge from their efforts, and vice versa. We can share with them things that we have done that have worked or have shown promise, or things that have not shown promise. That is the benefit of collaborating so closely.

In terms of the murdered and missing indigenous women, as you know, we had a provincial round table, and we were so encouraged to get a commitment to full participation by all the provinces and territories. This was extremely critical because many of the issues that families were raising as significant issues that they believe either led to the disappearance or murder of their daughter, or stopped fulsome investigation, were really in the control of provinces—things like child protection and in some case policing. It is a very important component.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

We are going to move now to the Conservatives with Ms. Vecchio for seven minutes, plus one.

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

Thank you very much, once again, for being here, and congratulations on having such a successful International Women's Day. The first question I am going to ask is very specific to the budgets and upcoming future budgets. I noted that in 2017-18 there is a decrease of $687,869. Estimating from 2016-17 and then going down to the future years shows that in the future there is a decrease in the budget. Maybe you can explain more to me. I recognize that, as some of these programs wrap up, these are some of the budgetary measures for that, but we are forecasting that there will be new projects. I am wondering why we have a decrease of almost $700,000 in that budget.

[Patty Hajdu, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

I am going to let the head of my agency take that.

[Meena Ballantyne]

You might have seen that every year we have some money coming from other departments for a couple of years. It is a combination of those, plus we deferred some funding. We reprofiled some funding because 2015-16 was an election year and we knew that with the minister coming we wouldn't be able to spend the money, so instead of having it lapse and go back into the consolidated revenue fund, we deferred it until the minister had time to look at the priorities and decide where the funding should go. We reprofiled some of the grants and contributions funding over two years.

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

Okay.

[Meena Ballantyne]

By 2018-19 that falls off, so it is not a real reduction.

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

It is not a decrease. That's fantastic. Thank you very much for explaining that.

We have had a lot of uptake in our community. People are very encouraged by the new programs that have come out for empowering women, both the first and second programs. I am just wondering, for my own background, what our ceilings are. There isn't a lot of information about how much a group or not-for-profit organization can receive for this. Is it matching funding? Can you give me a little more detail on that? Are we looking at a $50,000 cap, or a $500,000 cap? Those are the sorts of issues that I would like to discuss. Are matching funds going to be expected from the applicant?

[Patty Hajdu, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

Well, that is a good guess. The cap is $500,000, and there will not be an expectation of matching funds. From my perspective, as someone who has run an NGO, I think that is a really good thing because if you are running a small or even a medium-sized not-for-profit, often times you are already begging, borrowing, and stealing to meet your operating budget, and you are automatically excluded from things that require a matching fund. I am very thrilled that this is the way it is structured.

In terms of International Women's Day, I have heard a couple of compliments. I want to compliment all of you as well because I know that you were all out there. In particular, my critics were out there, participating with me, celebrating women, and highlighting the need to do more. Before I get any more compliments, this was really a group effort, so thank you very much.

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

Fantastic. As we carry on with this, I am looking at some of the priorities. I know that we have done some studies on violence against women, and we must continue to do those studies, but looking at some of our previous studies.... Have there been programs that have wrapped up that we have reports on from last year? As we move forward, I do have some studies from 2015. Have the reports been put in, and has something been activated because of those reports? Is there any action taken on those reports received from 2015?

[Patty Hajdu, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

We collect data for two reasons. First, we want to know whether a particular approach is effective or not and whether we want to continue down that path. Sometimes it's not clear immediately; sometimes it takes a couple of different versions of it, or tweaks to it.

Second, we provide our data throughout government. We also do studies so that we can provide information to our colleagues in different departments and to our provincial and territorial partners. As minister, if I saw a trend that a specific approach was not successful year after year, then I would say we should try something else.

Sometimes it's very difficult to apply what we've learned in one community to another community. For example, what might be successful in the Northwest Territories might be a terrible plan for Toronto. We have to be really careful that we're not applying the lessons that we learned from one area to a completely different area. I have a lot of faith in my department and Linda's ability to do that.

Did you want to add a couple of words, Linda?

[Linda Savoie]

Sure. The information we get is not simply derived from projects. It is also influenced by some of the work that's been done in this committee and identified as best practices. We are not the only holders of levers to implement these. The work done to identify the best practices is implemented most of the time in other departments. They would also have things they learned to share with the greater collective.

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

There are two very different groups that we're looking at, the women off and on reserves. I think the work we're doing there is really important. We recognize all the work that you have done in your community. Is there anything that you would like us to detail when we're looking at the violence against women? Based on your expertise and your recent work, is there anything we should focus on when we study this in committee?

[Patty Hajdu, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

I think we talked about a few different roads that you might go down. It is important to look at the experiences that young women are having such as cyber-bullying and some of the problems arising from the use of social media. That's something that I'm curious about, and I know we don't have a lot of research on it. I hope your experts will be able to shed some light on this for us. I think that's very important.

Although you're right that there are distinct groups of women we prioritize, there is going to be overlap. Indigenous young girls are experiencing the same types of social media bullying and cyber-bullying as non-indigenous girls. So there is some overlap in the work we're doing. Our young girls are not talking about it all that much, yet we know that it's happening and sometimes at astronomical rates. Young women are growing up thinking this is a normal experience. It troubles me that often they're not sharing these experiences with their parents and they're not talking about the bullying they receive online. This can be an extremely isolating experience for young women. I would really like to focus on this issue.

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

Yes, absolutely.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Now we're going to turn to Ms. Malcolmson.

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

Thank you, Chair, and my thanks to the minister for her generosity in including me and the opposition leader in your celebration on Tuesday night. It was great to be on the stage with you.

I'm going to talk mostly about political priorities. I think that's fair, because I'm not sure we have you for the whole panel, is that right?

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

She's here for the first hour.

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

Okay, good.

I want to talk about the commitment within your mandate to the federal gender-violence strategy and action plan. Can you describe in more detail what funds are going to be used by the agency to support you in carrying out that mandate and where that fits?