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.