Status of Women Committee on July 7th, 2020

[Ann Decter]

First, I'm not an expert in long-term care by any stretch, but we do see really big differences in how some provinces have approached it and have had success compared with others.

One of the big factors is how much of it is privatized. The privatization shapes the kinds of jobs. Staff working in multiple care homes was really a problem. British Columbia fared the best in Canada in long-term care. They immediately stopped that back in March. They also brought in pay to make sure everyone working the same position in a long-term care home was making the same amount of money. I think those were really strong steps.

I think the federal government can step into a leadership role in the same way that they are working to do in child care and work with all the provinces to bring their standards up. Canada actually has the worst record for long-term care deaths in COVID in the developed world. We really missed the boat there.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Excellent. Thank you very much for that.

Andréanne, you have the floor.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My questions are for Mrs. Cornellier.

First of all, I want to thank you for attending our meeting today. In your presentation, you propose a number of solutions, especially in terms of compensating the invisible work done by women and doing more to recognize it. As we know, it is not adequately recognized. In particular, you suggest increasing Quebec Pension Plan and old age security benefits and support for women with children, giving caregivers refundable tax credits, and establishing family insurance. So we are talking about a number of solutions to ensure that women receive compensation for their invisible work.

I would like to know how this invisible workload can have an impact. Please tell us about women's quality of life in economic terms.

[Hélène Cornellier]

AFEAS is an education and social action group dedicated to promoting equality between women and men in Quebec and Canada. It does not work directly with clienteles such as day care providers and abused women. It is somewhat more generalist in nature. For over 50 years, since it was founded in 1966, its core issue has really been women's unpaid workload. Beginning then, women realized that they and their daughters would remain poor all their lives if that workload was not recognized, offset and, on occasion, paid.

You mentioned the Quebec Pension Plan. I did not bring it up in my presentation because I didn't have enough time. For AFEAS, it's inappropriate that Quebec subtracts the years that women stayed home with the children, unpaid, from the total number of years worked. A percentage of the average Canadian wage should be used to offset those years. I do not have the exact formula. Whether it's mothers with children, family caregivers with seniors, people with disabilities, minors or adults, or people who are sick, with cancer, for example, all the time during which they had to withdraw from the labour market must be offset so their retirement income reflects the work they did in society, not just their work in the labour market, for an employer, in exchange for remuneration.

That's one type of measure. Tax credits are another. When they are non-refundable, who is entitled to them? You have seen the numbers from the Regroupement des aidants naturels du Québec. Some people make very good incomes. Those with low incomes have no chance at it. If a senior has any sort of substantial income, say, around $20,000 or more, they lose the entire tax credit. It has to be refundable, so that even caregivers or parents without income are entitled to it, just as people are entitled to the GST credit or the Quebec solidarity tax credit.

The same thing goes for caregiver benefits. In the case of the compassionate care benefit, for example, you are entitled to a certain number of weeks—I think it's five or six—if a family member has a high risk of dying within 26 weeks. The first person to receive the benefit is subject to a mandatory one-week waiting period. They can share the benefits with their sister, for example, and the second person will not be subject to the one-week waiting period. So someone always loses at least one week of income, representing 55% of their pay, which is not a lot. You cannot perform miracles with that. However, these individuals devote themselves entirely to the person at the end of their life.

These are necessary and essential measures for women to achieve some equality. Without them, we will never have equality. If we started talking about pay equity, we could spend hours on the issue.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

So this legislation is very important for you.

I am going to ask you a number of questions all at the same time, given that the clock is ticking.

You talked about older women. Do you believe that the problem is generational and that their generation is really less financially independent than new generations? You could also tell us how initiatives designed to assist women must be embedded in a coherent system of healthcare and social services.

What more would that do during a crisis like the one we have recently experienced?

To what extent could austerity measures established in the name of an economic principle harm the healthcare system?

Could improving women's access to employment insurance be a positive measure?

Finally, GBA+ is a way of measuring the gender-specific impact in departments and in each aspect of the recovery. In what respect would that all be important for you?

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

You have 30 seconds.

[Hélène Cornellier]

So let me focus on what is most important for us.

GBA+ is essential, such as parity on all the committees that have already been set up and those that will have to be set up for the end of the pandemic, the second wave, and so on. Without it, we will never know the real situation. At the moment, women are victimized because they have more work than men. They have jobs that pay less, if they have not lost them. Those women will not make it if they are taking care of the elderly. We must not forget all the stress that the current situation is generating and that women are experiencing as they take care of the house, the children and those—

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you.

Our time has run out, and we must pass on to Lindsay.

Lindsay, you have the floor for six minutes.

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

Thank you.

I think all of you touched on the fact that there is no recovery of Canada's economy without women, and they cannot recover without child care. I know that I hear from so many women in my community in London, or parents in general, who are overwhelmed by the high cost of that child care.

I want to ask the witnesses if they could talk about the importance of that affordability piece and what the difference is between the idea of publicly funded child care and what we currently have in terms of the national child care plan that the government has put forward.

I'm also going to throw in there, in case I run out of time, returning to Ms. Ballantyne's point on the establishment of legislation enshrining the right of high-quality child care, affordable child care into our system, what that would mean overall and link it to something like the Canada Health Act where there's equality and accessibility across Canada.

[Hélène Cornellier]

I will be quick, because that is not one of the areas we specialize in.

For women to be at work—as is the case for men too—it is essential to have quality and educational childcare, rather than services where the children are left to play in a corner. That is what was established in Quebec, in the form of early childhood centres, the CPEs. We ourselves are asking the Government of Quebec for more of them, in order to meet the demand from all women and all families. We wish the same for all Canadian women.

It also means that the government must subsidize those services so that the cost to families is minimal. If it is not, they will not be able to access them. If need be, private daycares can also be subsidized; however, the same criteria as in the public network must apply in terms of education, service quality, and the wages of the educators.

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

Thank you.

Could we hear from the other two, as well?

[Ann Decter]

Sure, I'll be quick. We endorse the work that Morna's organization does, and she's really the expert in this field.

I'd just say in response that we do believe that all parents should have access to child care and that it is key to women's economic security, independence and protection against violence. All of these things require access to child care. The rest of the country should have something similar to what Quebec has, which is low-cost, broad-based, affordable child care.

At this point, I'll hand over to Morna on the details, and consider us supportive of everything she says.

[Morna Ballantyne]

Thanks. I think you were specifically asking what the difference is between what we have now and publicly funded child care. Essentially what we have now is that we don't have a system. What I tried to explain in my presentation is that essentially governments have handed over responsibility for child care to the markets. The only exception is in the province of Quebec. That would be a long answer just to talk about Quebec, and Hélène spoke a little bit about that.

For most parents, responsibility for getting child care rests with them, not with the government. Providing child care also rests with individuals, so for the most part the child care that exists outside of Quebec exists because a bunch of people decided to provide it. It could be non-profit organizations or it could be for-profit organizations but it is not really a public system. What we saw through COVID is that when you leave things to the market, something as essential as the safety and provision of care for children ends up collapsing.

A lot of parents, for example, have to turn to unregulated, informal care including relatives. That just fell apart with COVID. I think that's why it took COVID for everybody to understand that we really have a problem here, because there really was nowhere to turn for the care of children. We think this health crisis creates a real opportunity to allow some rethinking to go on, to stop relying on individual solutions for the provision of child care and to look at collective solutions, and that means government solutions. Only government is actually in a place to properly fund the service or organize the service so that we don't end up in a situation where you might have child care that is provided where it's not as needed or in other places where we don't have it at all, what we call child care deserts.

The only way to do that is for governments to step in. Yes, it's under the jurisdiction constitutionally of provinces and territories. However, as we saw through COVID, when the federal government wants to step in and get things done, it can do that. It just needs to do it. The way it does that is by putting money on the table and then saying to the provinces and territories, “Let's sit down. We're willing to help you out with money, but let's also look at what makes sense. Let's draw on the evidence of what makes for a good program and let's stop replicating mistakes and let's start replicating success stories.”

That's what we want to see.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

On behalf of the committee, I would like to thank Ann, Morna and Hélène for taking part in today's panel. We're going to suspend to do a sound check for our next panel and reconvene as soon as possible.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Welcome back, everybody.

We are now on our third hour of today's study. I would like to welcome Sara Wolfe, director, indigenous innovation initiatives, Grand Challenges Canada; Vicki Saunders, the founder of SheEO; and Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich, communications and development manager, Women's Shelters Canada.

We'll pass the floor over to Sara for 10 minutes.

[Sara Wolfe, Director, Indigenous Innovation Initiatives, Grand Challenges Canada]

Thank you.

Aaniin, bonjour and good afternoon, Madam Chair, committee members and everyone.

My name is Sara Wolfe. I am the director of the indigenous innovation initiative at Grand Challenges Canada. Thank you for inviting us to speak today on the gendered impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. This is my first time addressing the standing committee. I hope to be invited back again one day, perhaps in person.

I'd like to begin by acknowledging the long history and enduring presence of indigenous peoples, including first nations, Métis and Inuit peoples, across Turtle Island.

As an anishinaabekwe with strong connections to Brunswick House First Nation in northern Ontario, I would like to acknowledge....

I can hear two soundtracks speaking to me.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Okay. I will have them check on that.

Sara, I hate to do this to you, but while they check on that, I will go to the next person. We'll come back to you for your 10 minutes.

I will ask Vicki Saunders, the founder of SheEO, to take the floor for the next 10 minutes.

[Vicki Saunders, Founder, SheEO]

Thank you very much.

I'm Vicki Saunders, founder of SheEO. Good afternoon. Bonjour.

I started SheEO. I'm just going to give a quick overview of SheEO, how we're dealing with what's happening with COVID and the opportunity going forward afterward.

For those of you who may not be familiar with our organization, we started in Canada five years ago, and we are a complete redo of venture capital. If you were starting all over again and it was designed by women, it would look 100% different from what it looks like currently in the world.

We designed and started this organization to solve the major challenge on the planet that 51% of the population gets 2.2% of the capital out there in the world. It is a global challenge, and it leaves us in a world that's designed mostly by men for men. There are just so many things missing from the existing world that we're living in. Structures and systems are so deeply biased, and that's not a future I want to live in, and so we're tackling this big challenge with SheEO.

We are women who come together in a pretty unique way. We have this model of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing. Hundreds of women in each country come together and each contribute $1,100 as a gift. That money is pooled together and it's loaned out at 0% interest to women entrepreneurs who are working on the sustainable development goals with their businesses. Every business that we fund is majority woman-owned and woman-led, is working on the SDGs and has export potential in its business and revenue generating.

So far, we are in five countries with this model. We have exported it from Canada to the U.S., New Zealand, Australia and the U.K., and we have 70 countries around the world that have reached out to replicate this model. We provide 0%-interest loans to women entrepreneurs, who pay it back over five years, and then we loan that money out again. Instead of the economic model that we have in the world right now, under which people invest to get a 10X return, a huge return, and then hold onto that capital and accumulate it so that we have more and more inequality in the world, we have a model whereby women actually gift their capital forward and then they bring all of their other capital—their social capital, their buying power, their networks, their expertise and their influence—to help these businesses grow.

It's a pretty fun model to be part of. If you're an activator in our network, which is what we call you when you contribute capital, you vote for the ventures that you care about, so we have a 100% democratic selection process. We don't have some expert panel with all of the biases that come with it, some investment committee deciding on what's the hottest and latest; we have the intuition of hundreds of women deciding which ventures are creating incredible innovations to solve major challenges we're facing. Then we get behind them with everything we've got to help them grow.

This ecosystem-based approach has created unbelievable resilience in our network during COVID. We have not had a single business go down. We have funded 68 ventures; we have $5 million loaned out, and we have a 97% payback rate. As soon as COVID hit, one of the first things we did was to gather all of our ventures together globally, to get them all on a call and do a quick triage of red, yellow and green—how they were doing—and we put our resources into the ones that were in the red bucket right away, to help them.

These are things like the venture in Calgary that hires homeless people to do laundry for restaurants all across the city and pays them a living wage, an amazing model called Common Good. With the pandemic, 95% of their revenue was lost in the first day because all of the restaurants closed. She got onto the call—a bucket of tears, I have to say, and it was a really emotional moment—and said, “What am I going to do? I can't actually lay off homeless people during this moment. It's terrible,” and ventures in our network came together and said, “What do you need? How much is your payroll for this month?” and they loaned her money, so that she could get through and figure out how to pivot her business.

We have story after story like that across our network, of women coming together because—we call this whole thing radical generosity—we are here to support each other, and that day it was to figure out how we could make sure no one lost jobs and no businesses went down. It's a community commitment we made to do this, so I'm probably a bit of a good-news story of what's going on here. Part of the challenge, however, is that….

I've been thinking, I did a presentation to the Standing Committee on Finance a few weeks ago. I just found myself trying to find what was the simplest, easiest.... I know you have a million things on your plate. I'm so grateful that you're all in these rooms and not sleeping like the rest of the government officials that I know. I think you've done an unbelievable job during COVID.

If you just look at all the different possible things you can do, I would love to encourage all of you there today to please do whatever you can to solve this child care nightmare that we continue to live with every single year. This is one of the easiest things on the planet to solve. If women and men were at the table when we designed our structures, we would have solved this right up front because it's not a hard thing to solve.

Women who have children and are at home are in a world of pain. Women entrepreneurs are in a world of pain with this. What is happening during COVID is going to adversely affect women in so many different ways because people are having to decide whether they are going to keep their business or take care of their kids.

How do you deal with these issues?

The demand for these services is massive. We've noticed that our ventures are really struggling with this. With the number of relief mechanisms that the government has put forth.... For example, we have an amazing agricultural innovator out on the east coast. She's able to get a wage subsidy to hire somebody or to keep someone on her staff, but what she really needs is to be able to use that money for child care. She's not allowed to do that.

She can hire someone to do the job that she wants to do, but she can't actually hire someone to do child care. There are a lot of these biases built into these relief structures because we don't value unpaid care. We've monetized all of these different elements of our markets. I think this is the one thing that I would love to really focus on.

I also, on a go-forward basis, would love to see more focus, from a government perspective, on innovation being outside the tech space. This process innovation that we've created with SheEO of not just using financial capital to create jobs and economic prosperity, but also actually bringing all the other resources that we have in play—our influences, our networks and our expertise—leads to unbelievable outcomes.

I just want to share something very quickly. In the last year we have received women's entrepreneurship funding from Minister Ng's department to help us get this model scaled. In the last year, we created 276.4 jobs in Canada across our 27 ventures and through SheEO. We got $750,000 from the federal government. That is the equivalent of $2,164 per job that's being created. I'd love to see anyone try to match that in what we're doing.

Women are amazingly capital efficient. It's unbelievable. What we can do with a small amount of money is insane. When you are looking at other models and process innovations as you are out there looking at new economic models, I hope you will pay attention to SheEO going forward.

I have a little deck that I'm going to forward after it's translated into French.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Excellent.

Thank you very much.

Sara Wolfe, we are going to come back to you. Let's try this again. You have the floor for 10 minutes.

[Sara Wolfe]

Thank you. I figured out what the problem was, so we should be good now.

I'm Sara Wolfe and I'm the director of indigenous innovative initiatives at Grand Challenges Canada. I do really want to thank you for inviting us to speak today on the gendered impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. As I said, this is my first time addressing a standing committee, so I hope to get invited back again one day in person.

I want to acknowledge the long history and enduring presence of indigenous peoples, including first nations, Métis and Inuit peoples across Turtle Island. As an anishinaabekwe with strong connections to Brunswick House First Nation in northern Ontario, I also want to acknowledge the territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin people of Shabot Obaadjiwan where I'm currently a visitor. We're experiencing a very warm raspberry moon right now. The raspberry moon in the Anishinabe teaching is the moon when great change begins, so I am particularly looking forward to any questions you might have regarding my statement.

For the last 10 years, Grand Challenges Canada has been dedicated to supporting bold ideas with big impacts. We're funded by the Government of Canada and other partners, and we support innovators who are closest to some of the most pressing challenges in the world. The bold ideas that Grand Challenges Canada invests in integrate science and technology as well as social and business ideas and also, now, indigenous knowledge, to save and improve lives of people in Canada and in low- and middle-income countries.

Our organization has supported over 1,300 innovations in 106 countries and we estimate that these innovations have the potential to save up to 1.8 million lives and improve up to 64 million lives by 2030.

We've been listening to our innovators, our partners and our community members for the past four months to hear how COVID-19 has impacted their lives. Around the world, the pandemic is deepening pre-existing inequalities, particularly for poor and racialized people, and exposing vulnerabilities in social, political and economic systems, which are in turn intensifying the impacts of the pandemic with disheartening evidence of even deeper impacts for those at the intersection of multiple vulnerabilities, such as women living in poverty, and this is also emerging.

An intersectional understanding then is what we need if we're to recover from COVID-19 in a good way in Canada and around the world. The United Nations policy brief on April 9 titled, “The Impact of COVID-19 on Women”, across every sphere from health to the economy and from security to social protection, noted that the impacts of COVID-19 are worsened for women and girls simply because of their gender. Increases in unpaid work we have already heard about. There has been a reallocation of resources and even blunt attacks on sexual and reproductive health services, and increases in gender-based violence. The poorer you were when you started out, the worse the outcomes have likely been.

At home in Canada we have a tendency to think that things are worse in the outside world, but the situation here for many is not actually much different.

So today, as I appear before the committee to discuss the gendered impacts of the pandemic on indigenous peoples in Canada, I also want to talk about what the indigenous innovation initiative is doing about them and how there's so much more that we could be doing.

My sisters have historically experienced higher burdens of poverty, discrimination, criminalization and violence, and there is a plethora of reports on the gendered impacts of being an indigenous women, girl or gender-diverse person in Canada, including the pivotal findings from from the final report on the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, “Reclaiming Power and Place”. The final report confirmed that domestic violence, human trafficking and health-related concerns were already among other significant issues for them, even before COVID-19, and I sincerely hope that everyone on the committee is already very familiar with the report and its corresponding calls for justice.

The indigenous communities are awaiting the government's action plan on that, but there are also new reports that have recently surfaced about the gendered impacts of COVID-19 for indigenous peoples. Last month, the Native Women's Association of Canada published an online survey of 750 indigenous women and gender-diverse people, and they noted a deeply concerning spike in the number of indigenous women facing violence during this time of sheltering in place. Almost one in five have reported a violent incident in the past three months.

In fact, of the indigenous women surveyed, more were concerned about violence than about the virus itself. Another key finding was that the financial impacts of COVID-19 are strongly correlated to violence against indigenous women.

Also, in June, Pam Palmater, the chair in indigenous governance at Ryerson University, wrote an article entitled “Gendered Pandemic Response Needed to Address Specific Needs of Indigenous Women”. In it, she wrote:

Canada’s failure to use a gender lens on its pandemic measures ignores the many ways in which the covid-19 pandemic is disproportionately impacting women in general.

and

Now consider the dual disadvantage of Indigenous women who are also forced to navigate an “infrastructure of violence”...

The article goes on to give evidence of the several ways in which indigenous women and gender-diverse people have been disproportionately impacted and where there's an urgent need for dedicated pandemic planning for this demographic.

In a previous life, I worked as a midwife with urban indigenous families. That was for about two decades. My friends and former health care colleagues are reporting that at the street level, the impacts of opioid overdoses, untreated sexually transmitted infections, assaults, trafficking, street work, homelessness, mental health issues and unplanned pregnancies are all increasing, particularly for indigenous people.

To maintain the status quo means that the gaps will continue to widen and that indigenous women, girls and gender-diverse people will continue to fall deeper, but it doesn't have to be this way. The root causes of the gendered and racialized pandemic inequities that we are seeing are ingrained much deeper than extra masks and hand sanitizer. We need attention to be focused on creating sustainable, long-term solutions. This is an opportunity for Canada to commit to a gendered response, one that includes a specifically tailored approach for indigenous women and gender-diverse people and their needs and which takes into account the context of racialized violence and poverty.

Small and medium-sized enterprises play a key role in the Canadian economy, as well all know. Women—indigenous and non-indigenous—are also the foundation of families and communities. Between 2013 and 2017, small and medium-sized enterprises made up 85% of the net job creation in the private sector, and in 2017, small and medium-sized enterprises employed almost 90% of the private sector workforce in Canada. However, only 1.4% were indigenous-owned, despite indigenous people being 5% of the national population, and of those, only 25% were majority indigenous women-owned. There's a lot of work to do.

For indigenous women and gender-diverse people, economic reconciliation is critical to their emergence. That will require sustainable investments in dedicated economic recovery efforts. Imagine what would happen if, as part of the COVID-19 economic recovery plan, we invested in indigenous women and gender-diverse individuals, so that they could position themselves to thrive when the Canadian and global economies re-emerge.

Seeded with $10 million in matching funds from the Government of Canada's Department for Women and Gender Equality, we've already started this work at Grand Challenges Canada. We were overwhelmed by the results of our recent call for proposals to accelerate gender equality through indigenous innovation and social entrepreneurship. We've received 238 applications across business, health, social, tech, environmental and cultural innovation. Unfortunately, we will only be able to fund the top 3% in this round, about five to seven projects.

Think about the impact for indigenous women and girls once the best ones are operational. Think about what the potential impact for indigenous women and girls could be if we were able to fund even, say, the top 10%. What if we invested even more in indigenous innovation using a gender lens to give them and the next generation an even better chance to reach their fullest potential? After all, this is helping them to also take care of their families.

What if we started off by offsetting emergency relief funds and longer-term unemployment expenses for indigenous folks who have lost their jobs because of the falling economy? I happen to know a group of indigenous innovators who have some awesome ideas, lots of support from their communities and tons of grit.

It's crucial that any COVID-19 recovery plan, globally and within Canada, places women, girls and gender-diverse individuals, as well as their inclusion, representation, rights, social and economic outcomes, equality and protections, at the centre if it's to have the necessary impact. This recovery plan is also an opportunity to invest in equality from a gender and an anti-oppression lens, so let's give the world more of what Canada and all of us aspire to, where everyone has the opportunity to reach their fullest potential.

Meegwetch.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Excellent, and thank you very much, Sara.

We're now going to move over to Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich who is with Women's Shelters Canada.

You have the floor for 10 minutes, Kaitlin.

[Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich, Communications and Development Manager, Women's Shelters Canada]

Good afternoon and thank you for this invitation. My name is Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich, and I am the communications and development manager at Women's Shelters Canada, or WSC.

WSC is a national organization representing over 550 shelters and transition houses serving women and children affected by violence against women and intimate partner violence. We were created by the provincial and territorial shelter associations that wanted a voice on the national stage. Today, these 14 associations are our full members and make up our advisory council.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we held weekly Zoom meetings with our advisory council, both to support them in learning from each other's contexts and to provide us with a sense of what was happening across the country. These remarks are informed by their experiences.

I would like to begin by prefacing that while WSC's overall goal is to see an end to all violence against women, my remarks will focus on domestic violence, which includes family violence and intimate partner violence. I'm sure you will hear from other witnesses who will speak to other effects the COVID-19 pandemic has had on women, such as limits to reproductive choices and freedom, disproportionate job loss, increased child care responsibilities, and police violence against indigenous and racialized people.

Before the COVID pandemic arrived in Canada, things were already bleak for women fleeing violence. In fact, many have called violence against women, or VAW, the pandemic within the pandemic. The stats are indicative: Every six days a women is killed by her current or former intimate partner. Indigenous women are 2.7 times more likely to be victims of violence than non-indigenous women. However, femicide rates for indigenous women are six times higher than for non-indigenous women. We also know that certain groups, such as women aged 15 to 24, racialized women, women living with disabilities and LGBTQ+ people experience violence at disproportionate rates.

During COVID-19, this violence did not stop. In fact, it increased. Across the country, there have been reports of 20% to 30% increases in rates of domestic violence. Police in some areas have also noted an increase in domestic violence calls. In Ontario, the Assaulted Women's Helpline, a 24-7 crisis counselling service, has seen a total increase of only 5% in the number of calls it received but now has four times as many of those calls relating to women seeking shelter. Several shelters told us that it was not just the number of calls that increased but the severity of the abuse they were seeing.

Women's Shelters Canada's website—sheltersafe.ca—is an online clickable map for women, or friends and family, to find their closest shelter and its 24-7 crisis number. In April 2020, visits to sheltersafe.ca were double what they were in March 2020 and as compared to April 2019. Our May 2020 visits were triple what they were in May 2019. We have also heard from shelters across the country that they are receiving more calls from family and friends trying to help their loved ones.

On the other hand, calls have been greatly reduced in regions such as the Northwest Territories and P.E.I., in indigenous communities in Manitoba, and in other rural and northern areas. We heard from some shelters that their phones were silent, their buildings nearly empty. This was perhaps even more terrifying than an increase in reported domestic violence, because it meant that women, hunkering down at home as was recommended, were potentially trapped with their abusers and unable to call for help.

Anecdotally, we heard from our members that abusers were using the COVID-19 pandemic as another tool in their tool box. Some shelters spoke of women calling them from inside a locked bathroom, saying they only had a few minutes to speak. Others noted that abusers told their partners that they would get COVID if they left the house, or threatened to tell their family and friends that they had COVID.

Various factors associated with COVID-19 likely influenced the heightened rates of violence against women. Various studies have shown that stress, job loss, alcohol intake and mental health issues can all exacerbate violence. However, we want to stress that COVID-19 does not turn people into abusers. While the pandemic can aggravate stress and violence, we cannot blame the violence we've seen during COVID on the pandemic itself.

At times, the measures imposed by different levels of government had unintended consequences. Social isolation is an abuser's dream. Now that this isolation was government-sanctioned, the situation for women living in violence worsened. Border closures also caused problems for some women. We heard of one woman who was fleeing her abuser in Alberta and tried to cross the Alberta-NWT border to stay with her mother in Yellowknife. She was refused entry into the territory and told to “go find a shelter in Alberta”.

Too often, domestic violence can lead to domestic homicide, or femicide. In the first month of pandemic-related lockdowns in Canada, at least nine women and girls were killed in suspected domestic homicides. This does not include the Nova Scotia shootings that occurred in mid-April, where nine men and 13 women were killed in a rampage that started with the perpetrator attacking his female partner in a case of domestic violence.

For women's shelters across the country, COVID-19 highlighted something that we at Women's Shelters Canada have been saying for the last few years: that the services a woman can access when she's fleeing violence should not depend on her postal code. During the pandemic, we asked our member shelter associations what was happening in their province and territory in relation to five questions. This was updated at the end of June.

First, are the VAW shelters or transition houses in your province or territory receiving provincial or territorial funds specifically for COVID-19? Seven answered no, two answered yes and three said that it was complicated—for example, some but not all shelters were receiving funds.

Second, is your provincial or territorial government ensuring shelters have PPE and EPA-standard cleaner? Four said no, two said yes and six said it was complicated.

Third, are VAW shelters considered an essential service in your province or territory? Two said no, six said yes and four said it was complicated.

Fourth, in your province or territory, are VAW shelters receiving priority access for COVID testing? Five said no, including P.E.I., which said it wasn't needed. Two said yes and five said it was complicated.

Fifth, has your premier or provincial or territorial government made a public statement about not staying home if home is not safe? Three said no, five said yes and four said it was complicated.

While the federal government normally only funds on-reserve shelters, the rest are funded provincially or territorially. It did allocate $26 million for VAW shelters and transition houses across the country due to COVID-19. The Department of Women and Gender Equality asked Women's Shelters Canada to distribute $20.5 million of these funds, which we agreed to do, knowing how important it was for shelters to receive these funds quickly.

COVID-19 emergency funds were distributed to over 400 shelters across the country. However, those in Quebec waited weeks longer, if not months, to receive their funds distributed by their provincial government. We have also heard from several shelters expressing concern over eventual clawbacks from their operational funds from their provincial government because they received these federal emergency COVID funds.

It wasn't all bad, of course. WSC personally saw an uptick in donations from individuals and organizations. We received our largest-ever gift from the Rogers family last month. People were reaching out to us constantly by email and on social media to find out how they could help shelters across the country. We saw an increased number of stories in the press focused on domestic violence in the pandemic, and we were also pleased to see the federal government's commitment to build 10 new shelters on reserve and two in the territories. We have hope that this issue is now firmly on the agenda for both government and individuals across the country.

I'll move on to recommendations for a potential second wave of COVID. We have five.

Number one, shelters need more core funding. Before the pandemic, shelters were already grossly underfunded. Our “More Than A Bed” study, published last year, showed that 56% of shelters indicated that they could not meet their operating expenses without fundraising, while 11% said they could not meet their operational expenses even with fundraising. While the $26 million given by the federal government was badly needed and gratefully accepted, it is a drop in the bucket. We also echo Pauktuutit Inuit Women of Canada's call on the federal government to provide $20 million in its next budget for transitional housing and shelters in Inuit Nunangat and Ottawa for Inuit women and children fleeing violence.

Number two, all levels of government must stress the message to stay home only if home is safe. Our sector worked diligently during the pandemic using social media, traditional advertising and countless media interviews to get the message out there that shelters were open and available and that women did not need to stay home if home was not safe. In a second wave, all levels of government need to relay this message.

Number three, Canada needs to look to promising practices from around the world when it comes to domestic violence and COVID-19. For example, in Tunisia, there's a quarantine centre for women escaping domestic violence. In India, police checked up on women who had previously filed reports of domestic violence before the lockdown. In France, 20,000 hotel rooms were made available for survivors of domestic violence. New Zealand included domestic violence preparations in its lockdown planning from the start.

Number four, the process of designing and implementing a multi-year national action plan on violence against women and gender-based violence must begin. We have been advocating for this for over five years with a coalition of organizations across the country. As you've heard, the situations of women fleeing violence and of VAW shelters across the country during the pandemic differed according to where they were located. We are pleased with the current government's commitment to a national action plan and strongly urge that its development begin without delay. This plan needs to be robust and well resourced.

Number five, we also stand with the national action plan and the recommendations of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and implementing a national action plan in response to that.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Excellent. Thank you so much, Kaitlin.

We're now going to start our rounds of questioning with six minutes for Nelly Shin.

Nelly, you have the floor.

[Nelly Shin, Conservative, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you so much.

I'd like to begin by thanking all of the witnesses today for sharing your hearts and a concern that is actually fundamental to the wellness of our whole nation, because wellness begins at home. Of course, with women being mothers and the nurturers in many cases and having way more dynamic capacity and potential, I'm very happy to hear all the recommendations and insights you've provided today.

I want to direct my first question to you, Kaitlin, in regard to domestic violence. You said that it's a “pandemic within the pandemic”. I understand that it's something that has always been with us, but because it has come to public attention in a certain way, I think we are in a time now when we can do more with it. I'm happy to hear that there are initiatives the government has been making to start dealing with this.

What do you feel is a core, root problem that every tier of government can address and, since we are at the federal level, what can we do to mitigate some of the core, root issues of why domestic violence happens?