Status of Women Committee on Feb. 18th, 2021

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Earlier you said that certain long-term care centres, and even some caregivers lacked…

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Ms. Larouche, can you raise your mike a little bit?

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Of course.

You said that some centres lacked resources, whether financial resources or personal protection equipment, to care for patients during the pandemic. You said that also applied to caregivers.

Can you confirm for us that the needs of long-term care centres are actually financial in nature and that those centres need a helping hand in that area?

That's for either one of you, since you both raised the issue and mentioned the provinces. Here's another example. Where I live, we have respite homes to assist caregivers. We're already trying to help them in Quebec, but we lack the resources, both finances and equipment. I'd like to hear what you have to say on the subject.

[Amy Coupal]

I'm not able to comment on the provisions within long-term care or other settings. I'm not sure if that was the full extent of your question, but that's just not an area where we have insight. Is there another part of your question that I may answer?

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

What I mainly wanted to say is that caregivers, those who do invisible work, need better support from the health system, but the system itself lacks the financial resources to support them.

[Amy Coupal]

I do think that caregivers primarily are looking for recognition and inclusion as a part of the health care team and as a part of the health care system. There's a microcomponent to this when it comes to the individual care of the person they're caring for. This doesn't mean simply being something like a substitute decision-maker. There are many caregivers who take on this role and wouldn't be in a substitute decision-making capacity, but who play a fundamental role in the care of the person they're caring for. Recognizing that person, ensuring that they are a part of that health care team, including formal structures like caregiver identification, which make very clear what the permissions and responsibilities are for an individual caregiver, can go a long way.

The other thing that's very critical is the inclusion of caregivers at the individual hospital or long-term care or broader policy levels, so that caregivers are at the table and part of those processes. It's really an important consideration to make sure that caregivers can be part of that input and decision-making process through health care transformation.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

That's very good.

Now we'll go to Ms. Mathyssen for two and a half minutes.

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

Thank you.

The other study we're discussing at the same time as this is the impacts on rural women and how there is a disproportionate disadvantage for them.

I'm not sure if your organizations advocate heavily for that idea, the fact that there's a rural-urban divide. You were certainly talking about the shifting of resources, especially during COVID, to virtual supports for caregivers. Can we talk about what you're seeing in terms of unavailability in those rural areas for caregivers, and potentially if you've heard that they are specifically having issues?

In a lot of rural areas, the cost of the Internet is very high. They don't have access yet to some of the broadband services they need. They travel to cities where they may be able to receive that respite or those services that you were talking about. Is there a divide there and a recommendation that you could make or that you've heard from your members and your advocates?

[Tracy Johnson]

We haven't specifically done an analysis on a rural-urban split for the caregiver distress that we see for those on home care.

We do know we have geographical access challenges across the country. Because home care is the purview of regional health authorities in some provinces and other bodies in other areas, there are disparities, and those rurally are likely at a disadvantage. We certainly see it when we look at how primary health care is delivered in the rural areas.

There was another aspect to this I was going to...but I'll leave it at that. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

That's the end of your time.

Thank you to our witnesses for their excellent testimony today.

We'll suspend while we do sound checks for the second panel. Everybody, just hang on, grab a coffee and we'll be ready to go.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I'd like to welcome our witnesses.

Today we have Hélène Cornellier and Lise Courteau from the Association féminine d'éducation et d'action sociale and Marianne Pertuiset-Ferland from the Inter-organizational Committee for the Recognition of Invisible Work.

Ms. Cornellier, you have the floor for eight minutes. Please go ahead.

[Hélène Cornellier, Director, Policy and Communications, Association féminine d'éducation et d'action sociale]

With your permission, Ms. Courteau will speak first for four minutes, and I will speak for the remaining four minutes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

That's fine.

[Lise Courteau, President, Association féminine d'éducation et d'action sociale]

Good afternoon, everyone.

The Association féminine d'éducation et d'action sociale, or Afeas, was established in 1966, and its mission is to promote and advocate women's interests and gender equality.

The recognition and valuing of invisible work are central issues in achieving equality between men and women. They have been at the very heart of our association's demands since it was founded, when we addressed the invisible work issue head on by attacking flagrant injustice.

In 1968, Afeas submitted a brief to the Bird commission denouncing the invisible work done by women as a factor of dependence and poverty. Since 1974, Afeas has sought legal and financial status for women who work in family businesses and those of their husbands. These women perform work for family businesses and as mothers and homemakers without being recognized or receiving a salary. In 1980, Jacques Parizeau, then Quebec's finance minister, granted “spouses” the same rights as those of all other employees.

For more than 50 years now, Afeas has adopted numerous recommendations for the recognition of legal status for “homemakers” and recognition of this still invisible work and has submitted those recommendations to the governments of Canada and Quebec and to delegations to international conferences on the status of women.

Despite some progress made in 2015, women farmers in Quebec perform $108 million worth of unpaid work every year. Unpaid work is considered “invisible” work because it doesn't appear in the national accounts and is thus not considered part of the labour market economy in the same way as consumer spending and business, commercial and institutional transactions.

The unpaid, or “invisible,” work we are discussing today is directly linked to the social roles that have been assigned to women in all patriarchal societies and that fall within the private sphere. We therefore define invisible work as unpaid or underpaid work, particularly work performed within the family by mothers, fathers and other family members, and includes domestic tasks, care provided to individuals, planning work that is considered a mental burden; work performed by caregivers for family members who are sick, aged or losing their independence or who have special needs; work done within a family business or a spouse's business; volunteer work for various organizations or public, private or community institutions providing essential services to the public; and work mostly performed by women as part of an unpaid practical training course.

On the first Tuesday in April for the past 21 years now, Afeas has drawn attention to the same issue: invisible work by informal caregivers and invisible work by homemakers who, in many instances, are also in the labour force. Nor should we forget volunteer work, which is of inestimable value to society yet is neither recognized nor recorded in public accounts.

We at Afeas feel it is essential that we continue seeking political, social and economic recognition for invisible work.

Thank you for listening.

[Hélène Cornellier]

The gap between male and female representation in the Canadian labour market declined from 32% to 9% from 1976 to 2017. Although that development has brought changes in the allocation of tasks within families, inequalities still persist.

As regards parents, according to a 2017 Statistics Canada survey, the distribution of domestic tasks is still gendered and varies with spouses' participation in the labour force and certain characteristics such as type of union and age group.

Some 8.1 million Canadians, one in four Canadians aged 15 and over, were informal caregivers in 2012. Of that number, 46% were men and 54% women. In that same year, the number of hours during which those individuals provided care was equal to the number of hours worked in 1.2 million full-time positions.

What can we say about the amount of unpaid work performed since the pandemic began? According to the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, women are still the main providers of unpaid work within the family, even where they are still working outside the home during the pandemic. If they are teleworking, they must juggle both paid and unpaid work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Some task-sharing is possible in certain families where a spouse is present, but all work falls to one and the same person in single-parent families.

Informal caregivers who provide care and services in a person's home, or who live with that person, have become doubly invisible as a result of what has occurred in long-term care facilities and private residences. And yet these individuals work in the homes of family members in need every day. More than 80% of seniors live in their homes or with a caregiver. We therefore need to form a clear idea of all the work these informal caregivers do and of the impact the pandemic has had on them and on those they help.

As regards the recognition of invisible work, in 1970, the Bird commission analyzed the unpaid work done by women in the home and those in the workplace. At the first UN conference on the status of women, in 1975, recognition of invisible work was front and centre in the discussions. Over the years, Canada and the other UN member countries have undertaken to value and record that work and to include it in their GDP. In 1995, the UN valued all unpaid work performed by women and girls around the world at $11 trillion U.S. In 2020, Oxfam reported a value of $10.8 trillion U.S., roughly the same figure.

In Canada, it is essential that Statistics Canada assess and include the monetary value of unpaid work in our GDP every five years. It should also expand its analysis of the invisible work performed by families and informal caregivers by adding the number of hours per task and per responsibility, direct and indirect costs and their impact on the finances and health of the individuals who perform that work. This will make it easier to assess what social, physical and economic measures may be needed.

Thank you for listening.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you very much.

Thanks to you as well, Ms. Courteau.

Now, Ms. Pertuiset-Ferland, you have five minutes.

[Marianne Pertuiset-Ferland, Director, Inter-organizational Committee for the Recognition of Invisible Work]

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

In recent years, Afeas has observed that, while many associations worked to achieve recognition for invisible work, the lack of a concerted approach was undermining that effort. As a result, in early 2020, with financial support from Quebec's Secrétariat à la condition féminine, we established an inter-organizational committee for the recognition of invisible work to combine our efforts to achieve genuine social change. The timing was all the more appropriate since invisible work, both unpaid and underpaid, had been making the headlines since the coronavirus pandemic started. Confinement, school and business closings and the additional workload for parents and caregivers alike made the scope of that work obvious to all and sundry.

Together with a dozen other organizations, the names of which you will see in the brief we have submitted to you, we formed the Inter-organizational Committee for the Recognition of Invisible Work. Based on the joint definition that Ms. Courteau presented, the committee wishes to highlight the economic and social contribution of invisible work, establish a clearer understanding of the issues associated with invisible work among the public, employers, public institutions and decision-making bodies, and develop new solutions for a more balanced sharing of tasks among men and women and of responsibilities among families, governments and the private sector.

Afeas and the Inter-organizational Committee for the Recognition of Invisible Work hereby present the following recommendations, which the federal government should promptly implement, above all, to recognize invisible work and to offset the pandemic's impact on the women who bear that burden. We present them under three headings.

First, with respect to the recognition of invisible work, we ask that the government designate the first Tuesday in April, by law, as national invisible work day across Canada and encourage UN member countries to designate that same day as international invisible work day.

We hope it will then apply intersectional gender-based analysis, or GBA+, and integrate it as a cross-cutting issue in assessing labour levels and evaluating and implementing government measures to recognize invisible work. We want to deconstruct gendered stereotypes and introduce incentives for a more equitable sharing of tasks and responsibilities within households and across society.

Second, as regards the valuing and recording of invisible work, we ask that government include the economic value of unpaid invisible work in calculating gross domestic product, or GDP, every five years and add a question designed to assist in calculating unpaid work hours to the long-form questionnaire used in the census that Canada conducts every five years.

Third and last, with respect to tax, economic and social measures, we ask that the government: convert existing non-refundable income tax credits to refundable tax credits for relatives and informal caregivers and create new tax measures truly suited to their circumstances; introduce fair and equitable benefits to government pension plans, such as the Quebec pension plan and old age security, for relatives and informal caregivers to compensate them for periods of time during which they are required to withdraw from the labour market to care for their children or other family members who are sick, elderly, disabled or losing their independence; add paternity benefits to the maternity and parental benefits currently provided under the employment insurance system; amend the compassionate care, adult caregiver and child caregiver benefits provided under the employment insurance regime to make them more accessible; and establish a Canadian public network of low-cost educational childcare centres from which Quebec may opt out with compensation.

In conclusion, the unequal sharing and non-recognition of invisible work undermine de facto gender equality in Canada. Invisible work is essential to our society's proper operation, particularly in the circumstances of the current pandemic, and the government has a central role to play in ensuring that the people who perform that work, who, for the most part, are still women, enjoy better protection and support and in promoting a more equal division of those tasks within families and across society. These measures will directly contribute to greater gender equality in our society.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you very much.

We will now go to the first six-minute round of questions. I will raise my yellow pen when you have only one minute left.

Ms. Wong, you have six minutes.

[Alice Wong, Conservative, Richmond Centre, BC]

Good day and thank you very much to both of you. I really love the work your two organizations have been doing. I think we have a lot to learn from different provinces and territories.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

I have a point of order, Madam Chair. Ms. Wong's mic is causing problems for the interpretation.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

I was going to make the same comment.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Alice, could you put it up by your nose? Thanks.

[Alice Wong, Conservative, Richmond Centre, BC]

Can I start again and count the time from now?

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Sure.

[Alice Wong, Conservative, Richmond Centre, BC]

Thank you.

Thank you very much to both of you for shedding light on the different organizations you've been working with. I especially like the idea of interorganization. Very often we talk about intergovernmental coordination and working together.

My questions are for both of you. In what ways, if any, has the COVID-19 pandemic affected the distribution of unpaid care work and domestic workload between men and women in Canada, including in your province?