Status of Women Committee on Nov. 9th, 2017

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Good morning, colleagues. We're going to start our session today as we continue with the study on economic security of women in Canada.

Today, for our first panel, we have two guests with us, both by video conference.

We have, from the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, Ruth Halperin-Kaddari.

From the Calgary Immigrant Women's Association, we have Beba Svigir.

Ruth, you have the floor for 10 minutes.

[Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, Vice-Chair, Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women]

Thank you very much. I am very happy and grateful for having the opportunity to address you on behalf of CEDAW. I am Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari. I'm vice-president of CEDAW, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. I participated in the most recent review of Canada by the committee.

The committee is the body of independent experts who monitor the implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. CEDAW consists of 23 experts on women’s rights who are elected for a term of four years by states parties among their nationals and who serve in their personal capacity, consideration being given to equitable geographical distribution and to the representation of the different forms of civilization, as well as the principal legal systems.

Countries that have become party to the treaty are obliged to submit periodic reports to the committee on measures taken to ensure that the rights of the convention are implemented. During each of our sessions, the committee considers each of the state party's reports and addresses its concerns and recommendations to the state party in the form of concluding observations.

In accordance with the optional protocol to the convention, the committee is also mandated to receive communications from individuals, or groups of individuals, submitting claims of violations of rights protected under the convention and also to initiate inquiries into situations of grave or systematic violations of women’s rights. These procedures are optional and are only available when the state concerned has accepted them by ratifying the said optional protocol. As you know, Canada had indeed ratified the optional protocol and CEDAW has conducted an inquiry into the missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada. We issued our report in 2015.

During its 65th session, which took place in November of last year, the committee considered the eighth and ninth periodic reports of Canada and raised a number of concerns during the dialogue with the Canadian delegation, which are directly related to the work of your standing committee and its study on women’s economic security. I want to emphasize that the dialogue, the concerns we raised, and the concluding observations, are all based on information the committee received, both from the formal delegation, the formal state's report, and the replies to the list of issues and questions, as well as on information received from civil society and international NGOs.

With respect to the economic empowerment of women, the committee noted the development of a national poverty reduction strategy and a national housing strategy. Nevertheless, we expressed our concern about the fact that women continue to experience significant levels of poverty, homelessness, and hunger in Canada, especially when it relates to indigenous women, Afro-Canadian women, women of immigrant origin, women with disabilities, older women, and single mothers. We also expressed concern about the current severe housing shortage, in particular within indigenous communities, and the high cost of rent and the impact thereof on women, especially low-income women with families.

Regarding the issue of employment, we expressed our concern about persistent gender wage gaps in both the public and private sectors which adversely affect women’s career development and pension benefits, as well as the lack of effective legislation on the principle of equal pay for work of equal value at the federal level, even in the public sector, given that the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act of 2009 has delivered practically no results, and the lack of such legislation in the private sector in most provinces and territories, as repeatedly noted by the International Labour Organization.

We were also concerned about the continuing horizontal and vertical occupational segregation and the concentration of women in part-time and low-paying jobs, which is often due to their parallel traditional child raising and caretaking responsibilities, as well as the low number of child care facilities and the low usage of parental leave by fathers.

Also, we were concerned by the limited access of indigenous, Afro-Canadian, migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking women as well as women with disabilities to the labour market, and the practice of issuing employer-specific closed work permits, which makes it challenging for migrant workers, including caregivers, to leave abusive employment situations.

We also addressed the root causes of violence and discrimination against indigenous women. We expressed concern about the fact that indigenous women continue to suffer from multiple forms of discrimination, in particular with regard to their access to employment, housing, education, and health care, and continue to live in poverty in Canada as reflected by very high poverty rates, poor health, inadequate housing, lack of access to safe water, and low school completion rates. We further noted with concern the low participation of indigenous women in the labour market, in particular in senior or decision-making positions, as well as their disproportionately high unemployment rates, and their lower pay compared with that of men and non-indigenous women. There is a lack of coherent plans or strategies to improve the socio-economic conditions of indigenous communities, in particular indigenous women, in order to combat the root causes of their vulnerability to violence. The connection and the interaction between economic vulnerability and exposures to violence are, of course, self-evident.

In terms of access to justice, which is key to ensuring the protection of women's economic and social rights, the committee expressed its concern that financial support for civil legal aid programs had considerably diminished in the past 20 years and has become increasingly restricted, affecting women in particular as they are the primary users of civil legal aid.

We were also concerned that income tests for eligibility limit civil legal aid to women living well below the poverty line, consequently denying low-income women access to legal representation and services. The information is lacking on whether the newly reinstated court challenges program, which provided funding for equality test cases, will be expanded to cover claims under section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms so as to include economic and social equality issues relating to poverty, and whether it will fund equality rights challenges to provincial, territorial, and federal laws and preserve its community-based structure.

With regard to marriage and family relations, the committee noted with concern that the recently adopted Family Homes on Reserves and Matrimonial Interest or Rights Act does not apply to the first nations reserves that have enacted their own first nations matrimonial real property laws under the act or under the First Nations Land Management Act of 1999.

Accordingly, the committee formulated a number of recommendations directed at Canada that could, in fact, be read as a road map to further empower women and enhance their economic security. In line with our follow-up procedures, we requested that Canada provide within two years written information on the steps taken to implement the recommendations in paragraphs 21 and 27 of the concluding observations, which are related to the strengthening of the national machinery for the advancement of women and the development of a coordinated plan for the overseeing of the implementation of the 37 recommendations we issued in the inquiry report, which I mentioned before, on the murdered and missing indigenous women.

When we continue the conversation, I can present some comparative statistics in relation to women's economic situation in Canada but, Madam Chair, I think I will stop here.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you very much.

We're going to turn to Calgary Immigrant Women’s Association, and Beba Svigir.

You have 10 minutes.

[Beba Svigir, Chief Executive Officer, Calgary Immigrant Women’s Association]

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today and support the study of economic security of women in Canada. I'm appearing on behalf of the Calgary Immigrant Women's Association, and my feedback will be aligned with the agency's mandate to support newcomer immigrant women in Canada, particularly in Calgary, and the specific challenges they face relative to the study.

We are the largest settlement agency in Canada with a gender-specific mandate. Our mission is to engage all immigrant women who come to Calgary, and support successful integration of their families. CIWA provides services for around 15,000 clients each year, who come to us from 100 different countries and cultures. We do that through holistic and customized programming and services offered at CIWA offices in 99 community locations in Calgary.

We offer over 50 programs and services in the areas of settlement integration, literacy and language training, family and individual counselling, civic engagement, legal and tax clinics, health, housing, and community development.

While many of the issues of equity and equality for women in Canada are prominent in our ongoing social discourse, the disparity for immigrant and refugee women is compounded. According to Statistics Canada, immigrant women have lower employment rates, work in more part-time positions, or are underemployed and have lower pay equity than Canadian-born women, despite having comparable levels of education and experience. They take longer to reach Canadian-born levels of labour force participation compared to immigrant men.

There is a lot of research and speculation around the causes of inequity and inequality faced by immigrant and refugee women, in particular the role of policy and corporate acknowledgement of foreign credentials and language proficiency in English and/or French.

While credentialing and language proficiency are and will continue to be powerful gatekeepers for successful integration and economic prosperity, they do not illustrate the complexity of the barriers faced by many immigrant and refugee women.

Our approach to addressing the economic security of the immigrant women we serve is based on two distinct client groups: professionally trained immigrant women and immigrant women with limited or interrupted education from their home countries. For both groups, we have customized our approaches, piloted innovative best practices, and achieved successful economic outcomes over the years with proven social return on investment, as well as successful integration and social participation. We offer equitable, fair supports in ensuring that all immigrant women who come to us have access to employment supports to achieve their goals and dreams in Canada.

There are both commonalities and differences in the barriers faced by professional immigrant women and those with limited education. From a micro, personal view, many immigrant families suffer tremendous shifts in family dynamics and increased familial responsibilities upon arrival to Canada.

Regardless of backgrounds, immigrant and refugee families have left their social networks in their home countries, and there are increased pressures on them to both create a stable environment and support the integration of their children, a condition for this being parental ability to successfully integrate into the workplace.

Another phenomenon we have seen repeatedly is what we call role reversal. This is the increasing pressure for women to economically support the family due to integration challenges experienced by their spouses, in addition to raising and caring for children, even though they may not have worked back at home.

Finally, this restructuring of the family unit upon arrival to Canada and the economic and social pressures of immigration correlate with increased instances of domestic abuse in families of newcomer and refugee women.

An issue that affects both groups of women is access to affordable child care so that they can work. While there are subsidies in place to help families in need of affordable day care, oftentimes finding day care can be a struggle. The availability of child care for evenings and weekends is particularly challenging, because some of the women we surveyed cited willingness to do any job, such as cleaning or food services, anywhere, but many of those jobs have shifts in the evenings and at irregular hours.

As we all know, many companies reduce costs significantly by offering part-time employment. On the one hand, this works for some women provided the hours offered align with their child care needs, but on the other hand, it compounds economic stresses for those who do not have access to full benefits.

For professional immigrant women in Canada, the necessity of picking up their children prior to the day care closing or caring for a sick child can influence the optics of their commitment to the company they work for.

We have 13 employment bridging programs. We work with our funders to cover child care costs and where appropriate, such as for longer-term programs, living allowances so that our clients can focus on learning and building skills for successful employment. This increases the cost of program delivery substantially, which can be a deterrent for governments and other funding bodies we approach. However, the speed of their transition to employment and job retention rates justify that investment. They serve as an example of best practice. We bring professionals to this country willing to work and expecting to work, so we should support the transition to work for both men and women. Over $2 billion annually is lost due to underutilization of immigrant skills in Canada.

Bridging employment can be cost-effective and successful not only for professionally trained immigrant women but also for those with limited education. I will share one example with you. One of the most innovative programs that we have at CIWA is child care training for low-literacy immigrant women. It's a full-time program for 11 months. It transitions immigrant women with limited education, who often are classified as not expected or not able to work in Canada due to lack of education, skills, and training.

Over the past nine years, women in this program were able to flourish and secure certification of employment as child care assistants. Some have started their own in-home day care. The employment and retention rate is 93% over the years. Their employers swear by them. Significant costs of programs like this one, for child care and living allowance for the duration of the program, are easily justified. The long-term savings as a result are even more significant. Around 180 clients over the years have secured employment and have been paying taxes. Without this program, the majority of these clients would be depending on social services.

We have been fortunate to work with funders in specific departments in government that recognize similar needs. Overall, there needs to be an acceptance and appreciation for the long-term outcomes that short-term investments in vulnerable people willing to work can produce.

Last, I'd like to reference the role of post-secondary institutions in the transition of immigrant and refugee women into employment. The typical path to employment for newcomers, and particularly professional ones, is to take the language training required for their profession, then transition to some academic upgrading that hopefully gets them to their fields of expertise.

For many professional immigrant women, there is a misconception that Canadian education will advance their careers and so they invest time and resources in retraining. Oftentimes it's at a master's level. However, the true barrier is opportunities for employment within their field; that is what they are lacking. Upon completing academic courses, many professional immigrant women take entry-level jobs, survival jobs in an entirely different field than their professional experience. They are never able to transfer into their original professions because their Canadian experience on their resumé typecasts them into survival industry instead.

It is hard to get that opportunity to get through the door for immigrant professionals, even after they achieve Canadian academic upgrading. Our bridging programs are offered in partnership with employers. We secure job placements for our clients for a period of 14 to 20 weeks. Many of our clients are hired by the employers we work with and employers continue working with us because it is a good and cheap hiring option for them.

Immigrant women with limited education have even more challenging and confusing options and experiences with educational institutions and industry hiring practices. As a society, we tend to value academic knowledge and traditional learning models and overlook the importance of competency development, which depends on learning skills and the ability to complete the task required on a particular job.

I'll go back to the previously mentioned child care training program.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Beba, we are at our 10 minutes. We can make sure that some of those questions get asked. I'm sure there will be many questions about child care.

We have finished our two presentations and we're going to move on to our questions.

I would like to welcome Sylvie Boucher and Earl Dreeshen. They're both participating in today's discussion.

To start off, Emmanuella Lambropoulos will start her seven minutes.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

My first question is for the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.

You mentioned that marginalized women, including women who are indigenous and women of the Afro-Canadian community and others, have more difficulty accessing the labour market, and we know that this is true.

Could you speak about why you think that's the case? I'm specifically asking about people who were raised in Canada, who went to school in Canada, but who still face these barriers. What do you think are the main reasons these barriers still exist?

[Prof. Ruth Halperin-Kaddari]

I can offer only my thoughts based on the information we were provided during the dialogue.

My understanding is that what we are witnessing here is the phenomenon that is often the case in many immigrant-absorbing countries in which communities of immigrants are placed or tend to stay together in closed communities and remain in closed clusters within the absorbing country. Many of the social patterns and social practices that have characterized those communities in the countries they come from are still entrenched within their communities even after immigration.

From the work we are doing on the committee, we can sometimes see models that may be somewhat successful in managing to change cultural and social practices through education and through agents of change within the communities themselves; programs that in a sense can recruit leaders from the communities and train them to become these agents of change for their own communities.

Canada is certainly not the only country that is facing such challenges, but our impression was that the programs Canada is employing so far are really short of what Canada can do, as a welfare country and a country with resources.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

As a follow-up question to that, let's say that these people from various communities that are considered more marginalized have the same education as someone who isn't from one of those communities. Do you find that there is still less access to the labour market if they are on equal footing educationally?

[Prof. Ruth Halperin-Kaddari]

Certainly there is. Education is obviously a key factor without which no social mobilization can take place, but it is a prerequisite, not the only requirement. There is a whole circle of factors, social and familial, to be overcome so as to lift the impediments preventing the second generation from being absorbed into the target society.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

Thank you.

My next question is for Calgary Immigrant Women’s Association.

You mention that although post-secondary education plays a big role in allowing some of these women to have the same qualifications they would have had in their....

Actually, let's say that women come from these countries and have the qualifications that are necessary, but Canada doesn't necessarily see those qualifications as equal to the ones here. Once they have achieved academic upgrading, as you've mentioned, why are there still barriers after that point for these immigrant women?

[Beba Svigir]

What happens is that they take a few courses at a time, so that they can put them on their resumé, and they go and compete for jobs. In Canada, an accent can be a blessing or a curse. It's always in the eye of the beholder to take the responsibility to gauge the skills and language proficiency of people whom they are interviewing for jobs, and to assess the skills of foreign-trained people for those jobs. Very frequently, people who do interviews focus on one or the other more than is favourable for the immigrant women—and men, for that matter—to successfully compete for jobs.

Transitioning, providing culturally sensitive supports in preparing them to upgrade their skills and present them in what we call a Canadian acceptable way, is really sometimes an art. Very frequently, it takes a tiny sliver of measure by the interviewer to discard an excellent candidate with foreign training in favour of a Canadian-born candidate.

Biases experienced in interviews are documented. Obviously, nobody does it deliberately, but biases do exist. Settlement support, even for highly educated immigrants, is essential for the speed of their ability to integrate and for their expeditious involvement in the workplace.

We have clients who come to us after completing university courses to do our programs.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Excellent, thank you very much.

We are now going to Sylvie Boucher for her seven minutes.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d’Orléans—Charlevoix, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Hello everyone.

I am very pleased to be here, sitting in for Ms. Harder today on the Standing Committee on the Status of Women. Having served as parliamentary secretary for the status of women for four and a half years, I am very familiar with the files. Moreover, I can say that not much has changed since then.

I would like to ask Ms. Svigir a question.

There has been a mass arrival of immigrants in recent months, and I do not think the current government has established a program to fully recognize the abilities of women immigrants. I remember that the former minister of immigration, Mr. Jason Kenney, had created that kind of program, but I don't think it exists any more.

With the mass arrival of immigrants, do immigrant women have more trouble finding work than immigrant men?

Does the fact that we do not recognize the skills of these women pose a long-term danger for them?

[Beba Svigir]

It has been a long-term risk for immigrant women and men over the decades. We are trying to address that issue by working collaboratively with the governments and the ministries. Particularly to the point in your question about whether recently it has been more difficult for immigrant women to find jobs, in Calgary, we have an economic downturn, so it has been more difficult for anyone to find jobs. We have more than 100,000 people who have been laid off in the last year or so. However, for the clients who come to us for supports for employment—and I mentioned that we have 13 clinical bridging programs—it is not.

As I mentioned, we have achieved a level of labour market involvement of our clients, overall, for all programs, of over 90%. That is because of the well-thought-out and well-executed partnerships with employers that we have for the programs we offer and the clients we serve. It is amazing that we have not had any decrease in the level of job acquisition for clients in the last two years, regardless of the economic downturn. That speaks to the need, along with government endeavours, to put policies in place and invest in employment, and to understand the importance of customizing supports for immigrant women so that we can expedite those beautiful skills that they have brought to Canada in line with the settlement supports.

Have I answered your question?

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d’Orléans—Charlevoix, QC]

Yes. Thank you.

Do I have any speaking time left, Madam Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

You have four more minutes.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d’Orléans—Charlevoix, QC]

In terms of language, we all know that the situation is relatively difficult and that it varies from province to province, whether in your province, in Calgary, or in my province of Quebec.

Do you consider it a problem that the immigrant women arriving in Canada do not speak our language or have difficulty with it?

Is it increasingly more difficult for these individuals to find work?

Are we helping them by offering classes—English classes in your province—to help them get into the labour market more quickly?

[Beba Svigir]

Have I understood you properly? Do you mean immigrant women who speak French?

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d’Orléans—Charlevoix, QC]

It could be either French or English. Can you tell us whether you are able to offer support so they can take classes to help them find work more easily?

[Beba Svigir]

Absolutely. We provide literacy training and language instruction for newcomers to Canada for over 350 women at one time in our organization. Obviously, throughout the first year the government provides support for all permanent residents. It provides financial support for those women to take language classes, as well as access to child care in parallel to those classes. However, child care spots are not equivalent to the language training spots for mothers. Therefore, many women stay behind even though they have the opportunity to take language classes, because their children don't get a spot at the child care centres which would allow the women to take full-time language training.

Actually, in the last couple of year, in Calgary we have managed to decrease considerably the wait-list for immigrants who require language training. I believe that within one month now, all of them have the opportunity to enrol in language classes. However, the access to child care prevents them from doing that.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d’Orléans—Charlevoix, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Earl, you can take the next minute and 15 seconds.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer—Mountain View, AB]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair, for this opportunity.

I'd just like to bring something up with Ms. Halperin-Kaddari. I was on the aboriginal affairs and northern development committee for quite some time, and we dealt with families and matrimonial property and so on. In the list, I believe you had indicated you felt there was a disconnect because at one time this would be taken over by the bands themselves, but of course that was the rationale and that was what was being asked.

That was the thing that was being asked by the bands at that time, so I'm curious as to why you feel that is a negative, or did I misinterpret what you said when you spoke about the act and the difficulties that would obtain once the bands had taken over?

[Prof. Ruth Halperin-Kaddari]

I'm sorry, but I'm not sure that I'm following the question. Was that a reference to our recommendation with respect to—

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer—Mountain View, AB]

Families in homes on reserves who apply.