Status of Women Committee on Nov. 9th, 2017

[Jonathan Will]

Yes.

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

Can you also speak to the advantages of transferring the money through the province, in order for them to create programming within their provinces that meets the different needs across the country?

[Jonathan Will]

The federal government has a multilateral early learning and child care framework, which applies to all the provinces and territories and the federal government is negotiating individual bilateral agreements with all the provinces and territories. To date, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Nunavut have reached agreement, and negotiations continue into the future on the others.

Again, that's separate from the indigenous early learning and child care, which is on a different process.

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

However, my question was whether there is an advantage to doing it that way, as opposed to the federal government providing the child care spaces directly.

[Jonathan Will]

Clearly, the advantage is the ability of the jurisdiction to target the money to meet their unique circumstances. Some places lack child care workers. Others have low pay for child care workers. Others have physical space issues. Each of the agreements with the individual provinces and territories is intended solely to ensure that there is progress on the bigger issue, but also to ensure that it meet the needs of that province or jurisdiction.

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

The needs in Nunavut would be very different from the needs in my riding of Oakville North—Burlington then.

[Jonathan Will]

Yes.

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

Thank you very much.

Over to Industry, we had previous testimony from Dr. Coe, from Ryerson University, about the need to support female entrepreneurs. Specifically, it was mentioned that companies often feel good about supporting girls in STEM-type programs, but then they're not there to fund the women when they're looking to start their own companies.

I want to applaud the testimony that you've given us about what BDC is doing and I recognize that it's early going. However, again, we've heard repeated testimony about the difficulty for women to receive funding or being asked what their husband's employment situation is, while a man would not be asked what their wife does when they go in for a loan. I want to really applaud you on that.

My colleague, Mr. Fraser, asked Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters if it would be helpful for the federal government to hold consultations with private sector stakeholders in the STEM and business fields to develop corporate best practices and resources to advance the promotion of women.

Do you think that's something that would be within the realm of your department? Would it be worth looking at moving forward to do a round table with an organization like that?

[Frances McRae]

Thank you for the question.

The issue of advancing women in business is really a cross-government objective. It is a whole-of-government objective. There tend to be a lot of discussions. Our minister has had round tables, including with Minister Duclos on women entrepreneurship.

We would think about taking on such a round table idea, so it is not out of the realm of possibility.

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

I think their desire was to try to have a sharing of best practices among businesses, so that they're not reinventing the wheel each time.

Mr. Fraser touched on some of the changes that were announced today with EI. Some of those go a long way to addressing some of the other concerns we've heard here. I wonder if you could perhaps provide us with a list of some of the changes that have been made, such as extending the parental leave. We had a bit on the caregiver leave, but could you give us a bit of information about the other changes that were made?

[Kristen Underwood]

There have been a number of changes made to EI in 2016 and 2017. As mentioned, the EI family caregiver benefit was extended for other family members, for parents of critically ill children. That benefit was also extended for 15 weeks to the care of adult family members. We've also improved the EI caregiver benefit by allowing medical doctors and now nurse practitioners to sign medical certificates. That's particularly helpful for people in rural areas where there's less access to medical practitioners.

There are new options created around EI parental benefits to extend the parental benefits to 61 weeks over an 18-month period. That's at a 33% benefit rate. Parents can now choose between a 35-week option for parental benefits at 55%, or 61 weeks at 33%. Added to the maternity, that goes up to 18 months or a year, depending on what they've chosen. Because it's over an extended period of time, it creates more flexibility, allowing parents to have more choice in how they might share that parental leave.

Changes were also made to allow EI maternity benefits to be—

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Sorry, I was really listening there too, and I let that go way over time. I'm really sorry.

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

Could you just provide us with a list of those, so that the analyst has them?

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you very much, and I am sorry for that. I was just listening very intently.

We're going to Earl for five minutes.

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

Thanks again, Madam Chair.

There are a couple of points I wanted to talk about. There was a discussion on Bill C-25, which is now at second reading in the Senate. I was on the committee that studied that. One of the frustrations was that, as far as quotas are concerned, or decisions, it was all being left to regulation versus being affixed to the legislation that was there.

Has there been discussion within the department as to how this will be dealt with on a regulatory framework, or is it still the thought that you'll wait until it finally comes back to your department to initiate?

[Frances McRae]

To be honest, the actual work around Bill C-25 is done in another part of my department, so on that specific question about where the next steps are, I would have to come back later with that.

I will just say one thing, if you'll allow me to, on Bill C-25. We think that the lack of diversity on corporate boards and senior management is an issue, and we are placing responsibility on Canada's corporations to advance that issue.

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

The other thing, as I mentioned earlier, is about making sure we have some way of taking the talent that we really have here in Canada and trying to make it more entrepreneurial. This is really critical.

We are also seeing that a lot of these folks, men and women, whom we are training are leaving the country. We're seeing a brain drain. We go to all this work and effort, and then the opportunities that are there are either picked up by Silicon Valley, Israel, or another of these different groups that really look at and nurture that kind of talent.

I'm just wondering if we're finding ways of helping, or thinking about doing so in the future. It's one thing to say we're going to train, but if we don't have the opportunities or we're putting up barriers that are causing issues.... One of the barriers that was discussed had to do with child care. Another has to do with our business climate, taxation, and the other sorts of things that are making people want to move away from Canada. I'm wondering if you're looking at strategies to try to keep homegrown talent here in Canada.

[Frances McRae]

For that I would go back to our notion of the continuum. We really believe that addressing the issues around women's entrepreneurship and women-owned business is not really something that can be done with any one specific initiative. In fact, we need to look at the full continuum, from school age all the way through to mature women-owned businesses, and really analyze the gaps and needs all the way along that continuum. That's really the answer. We need to be able to think about where we can support at every single stage, including the stages at which they would be looking for very important growth financing and export financing, and the question of making sure that we keep them here in Canada.

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

The other point that I'd ask you to comment on, please, is about Fierce Founders, the tech accelerator that FedDev worked on. As you indicated, this project was launched in 2014. How is this increase in women's engagement in start-up services helping, and is that something that you see other regional development groups looking at?

[Frances McRae]

As was alluded to earlier, different parts of the country have different needs, so the regional development agencies really work with their local communities in determining the best types of tactics and what needs are manifested.

I can give you a bit of a rundown on a few things that the different regional development agencies do. We do share best practices among regional development agencies.

They all have different infrastructure. For example, FedDev, as we talked about, works with Communitech. Communitech is a very particular organization. It doesn't exist quite in that form in different parts of the country. I could go on and talk a little more about some of the agencies.

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

I think my time is up.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

You never know. I've been listening a lot today.

We'll go to Bernadette Jordan for five minutes.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to all the witnesses for appearing today.

I'm going to take a different approach. We had Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters in earlier this week. They recently finished a survey on women in STEM and women in skilled trades and why they don't stay in the manufacturing sector. The number one reason they don't stay is the sexism in the workplace and what they have to deal with. It was really an interesting report. They provided us with copies of it. They have five pillars of how to encourage more women to be involved and to stay involved. We need to increase the women in STEM and we need to provide mentorship. However, none of them addressed the issue of the sexism in the workplace, which is the reason people leave.

You have a lot of the same types of directives, of increasing the number of women in STEM and mentorship, but if women aren't getting involved because of what they face in the workplace, shouldn't we be dealing with that problem first?

[Frances McRae]

You're absolutely right that there are many reasons, and the environmental factors in the workplace culture are obviously part of what women face. We're finding that many organizations, such as Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters but also private corporations, are seeing that they have a role to play in ensuring men in the workplace are also part of the solution, whether as leaders or as peers.

I was just looking at a transcript of a conversation that Minister Duncan had at a gender summit held earlier this week. One of the things that was noted was that, for example, men in a workplace could make a big difference by just saying to a woman colleague, “There's a job opportunity; I think you'd be great for that.” That respect and acknowledgement of capability goes a long way, so you're absolutely right about that.

In regard to Bill C-25, we believe one of the first important steps in addressing what's actually happening in workplaces is to have people understand what's going on in the sense of encouraging companies to think about what their numbers look like. Critical mass makes a big difference.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

That brings me to my next point. The mandatory mentoring of over 400 women entrepreneurs last year is phenomenal. I applaud that, and it's a great program. Having mentors for women is extremely important.

Maybe what we should have is women mentoring young men so that they know what it's like to walk in their shoes, so that they can see from the other side what women face in the workplace and in higher positions particularly. I know it's focused on women entrepreneurs specifically, but I'm talking more in the broader sense of women in the workplace and young men entering the workforce.