Status of Women Committee on Feb. 27th, 2020

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Yes, that would be great.

[Nancy Gardiner]

Okay, great.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

It's actually any information I can provide constituents about the programs you offer, even descriptions of who they can call. That would be great as a parliamentarian to be able to offer that.

[Nancy Gardiner]

We would absolutely be happy to do that.

There are folks who work in our western region that do visits and outreach in all of the provinces and territories, so that would be no problem.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Perfect. I'll just wrap up with one comment.

I mentioned this last time. I know you have your Edmonton office that serves Manitoba. I just want to encourage you to consider maybe opening a small office in Manitoba given our high needs.

[Nancy Gardiner]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you very much.

Have you guys worked this out, Ken?

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

No.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Ken and Sonia.

Ken would like to speak. We're going to throw the floor over to Ken. He's really excited.

Go for it.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

It's a good meeting, Madam Chair.

I used to work at the metro Vancouver transportation authority. We did roads. We also did public transit. Almost by accident, we stumbled into a process where we used what we called a multiple account evaluation on the services that were offered.

We didn't specifically have a gender-based analysis but we did, for instance, put in a process whereby a bus operator was given permission to stop in-between stops to get a woman as close as possible to her home.

This is an example of a lens through which I think a lot of our infrastructure investments should be put. I'm asking whether or not, in fact, a gender-based analysis is being used when we make decisions on what kind of infrastructure to support.

[Nancy Gardiner]

For sure that is an excellent example of a gender-based analysis approach to the work that you did. As I said earlier, there's a requirement for gender-based analysis work to be done on any programming that's coming into place through memorandums to cabinet, any new programs that are being developed, all those initiatives, which would allow us to take a really close look at how anything that's going to be introduced would have an impact not only from a gender perspective but from the intersectionality piece.

Persons with disabilities would be an excellent example in terms of the work you did on that project to see how that would impact persons with disabilities.

For us, all new initiatives going through cabinet are required to have a GBA+ lens put on them.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

You have one minute exactly.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

My riding is Brampton South where there are lots of start-ups, lots of women entrepreneurs. Are any special grants available? Can you elaborate on that?

[Nancy Gardiner]

I'm going to start on this with the women's entrepreneurship strategy, and then I'm going to turn it over to Suzanne to talk about the strategy.

As Minister Monsef spoke about earlier, the women's entrepreneurship strategy was introduced. The amount of money that's available for the entrepreneurship strategy is a total of $2 billion. Recently, I think it was last year, a call for proposal process was announced by the department responsible for the women's entrepreneurship strategy to enable women entrepreneurs to access funding to advance their small business. I can get a little more detail.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

We're at three minutes.

[Nancy Gardiner]

Oh, sorry.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Okay, but if you wouldn't mind sending that information to us, that would be very beneficial as well.

I'm going to pass it over to Andréanne for one minute .

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

You have already talked about this issue, but I would like to hear you on it again, as operating expenses seem to have been affected again in the women's program. What was that funding intended for originally? Earlier, it was mentioned that the amount was nearly $300,000.

[Nancy Gardiner]

We received money in operating dollars, which is money we can use to have contacts with organizations or to operate within our own organization to hire staff, but we wanted to use that money for community organizations to work in the community, specifically, for this particular fund, related to men and boys. The $300,000 was used to support contribution and grant agreements with organizations to allow them to do the work at the community level, as opposed to our doing the work in the department.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

You have one minute for a final question.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

We were talking about gender equality and its advancement. The minister addressed a bit about pay equity and the legislation. However, at current rates, it looks to be a very long time before we achieve it, 200 years or so.

As Canadian women earn about 32% less and racialized equity-seeking groups earn even less than that, what timelines are you looking at to ensure we get there faster than 200 years?

[Suzanne Cooper]

We are working on the pay equity regime [Inaudible—Editor] that's leading on that and I know they're looking at making amendments to the Employment Equity Act, for example.

One of our roles is to work with....

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Please repeat what you said, as the interpreter has not heard it.

[Suzanne Cooper]

We work closely with labour and ESDC to ensure that we provide them with the research and the gender expertise to make sure we're addressing those issues, but this is under the purview of labour.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Once again, I'd like to thank you, but before we move forward, we have the vote on supplementary estimates (B).

DEPARTMENT FOR WOMEN AND GENDER EQUALITY

Vote 5b—Grants and contributions..........$262,865

(Vote 5b agreed to)

There's one more vote.

Shall I report the Supplementary Estimates (B) to the House?

Andréanne, we have to report this to the House. This is just about reporting to the House.