Evidence of meeting #18 for Status of Women in the 43rd Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was employers.
A video is available from Parliament.
11:55 a.m.
Liberal
Anju Dhillon Liberal Dorval—Lachine—LaSalle, QC
Thank you very much.
I'd like to build on that a bit. You've mentioned many times—and it's the truth—that the pay equity commissioner is very important and that undertaking a pay equity plan is very complex. Can you speak a bit to this complexity and why it's prudent to take the time to put in comprehensive planification so that we can make sure things are done correctly? Why is it complex?
11:55 a.m.
Liberal
Filomena Tassi Liberal Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON
This is the root, I think, of the differences of opinion. The complexity, I am hoping...that Ms. Jensen, when she gave her testimony, there was a greater appreciation.
Again, we are not talking about comparing two jobs that are the same. We're talking about taking jobs that by nature are completely different, and applying criteria to those jobs to determine what the pay should be. What is equal work of equal value? This comparator is complex. This comparator is getting information, bringing forward information and studying it in terms of the conditions of work, in terms of the value of the work. Then there are exemptions, such as seniority or specific programs. In addition to that, you have to determine which criteria, which formula, you will use. Two different formulas are presented, and you have to understand what those formulas are. If those formulas don't work, you have to opt for another formula.
This is not straightforward in terms of “we can do it overnight”. It is incumbent upon us...and I take this very seriously. We have to get this right. This is an opportunity that is a lifetime opportunity, and we are going to put the resources there in order to get it right.
11:55 a.m.
Liberal
Anju Dhillon Liberal Dorval—Lachine—LaSalle, QC
Thank you very much, Minister.
When it comes to the pay equity commissioner, you've testified that there are tools being put in place to facilitate the work of the pay equity commissioner. Can you please talk to us a little bit about this?
Just in case I run out of time, I will ask my second question. It's about something you said that was very interesting. You were about to tell us what work our government has done, other than supporting pay equity, when you ran out of time. Can you tell us what other work our government has done?
Noon
Liberal
Filomena Tassi Liberal Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON
This work is extremely important. You don't fix it with one piece of legislation. You fix it with a holistic approach. This committee knows that more than any other in terms of women.
Look what we have done for supporting women in the workforce. There's pay transparency to tighten the wage gap for the four groups, women being one of the groups included. There's skills training, making significant investments so that if I want to be a welder or I want to be a framer, I'll be given that opportunity. I've sat around tables with women who have had these opportunities opened to them because of the investments this government has made. I can tell you that they have gotten a second lease on life. They are over the moon. They are able to fulfill their dreams.
There's Bill C-65, the Employment Equity Act review, the commitments to child care—
Noon
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
I'm sorry, Minister. We are at the end of our time.
I really want to thank you for coming and for enlightening us about what's happening with pay equity.
Thank you as well to the members of the department.
We will suspend briefly while we do sound checks for our next panel on unpaid work.
Noon
Liberal
Noon
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
Welcome to our panel on unpaid work.
We're delighted to have with us Dr. Kate Bezanson and Camille Robert.
Welcome. We will give each of you five minutes to begin.
We'll start with you, Dr. Bezanson.
12:05 p.m.
Dr. Kate Bezanson Associate Professor and Associate Dean, Brock University, As an Individual
Thank you so much.
Good afternoon, and thanks to the committee for this opportunity.
I bring greetings from Niagara, Ontario, the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabe peoples. This territory is covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and is within the land protected by the Dish With One Spoon wampum agreement.
In addition to offering gratitude and recognition for the land, I have taken in pandemic to also acknowledging care. Many in this virtual room have someone just off-screen who requires care, attention and support, or are able to be here because someone else is providing care, attention and support. Care work—its glories, challenges, limits and consequences—has been starkly revealed in the pandemic, and how we understand and support it is our subject today.
My name is Kate Bezanson. I'm an associate professor of sociology and associate dean of social sciences at Brock University. My areas of expertise are in social and family policy, constitutional law, political economy and social reproduction, or what is sometimes also called “care” or “care work”.
As you have heard from colleagues testifying to this and the gendered impacts of COVID meetings, there is a deep and usually gendered connection between care responsibilities and labour market attachment, advancement, outcomes and risks of poverty. In Canada, outside of Quebec, we largely have a dual-earner/female-carer model of reconciling work and care. Our relatively weak and uncoordinated pre-pandemic family policy contributed to the care vulnerabilities we see in the pandemic.
To address Canada's very first she-cession, among the most important policy tools is building a national system of early childhood education and care, and coordinating it with revisions to maternity and parental leaves. I hope that we can talk about both, and of course about social reproduction and care generally, but I'll focus on child care, given the time constraints.
There is a strong consensus that child care is the magic lever to address Canada's care crisis, to avert a gender-regressive economic recovery, to spur sustained economic growth and to enhance gender equality. This consensus extends more widely than ever before, with chambers of commerce, banks, civil society and international organizations calling for investments in child care.
Earlier this week, the Governor of the Bank of Canada indicated that investing in child care was a step to avert what he termed “economic scarring from the pandemic”. The federal government has affirmed its commitment to long-term, Canada-wide system building, and that the time to do so is now.
Getting the outcomes that will support economic recovery and yield the promised economic and gender equality returns rests on, of course, a number of variables, including, first, addressing what I call “postal code social policy”; and second, committing to good policy design.
Canada faces the prospect of uneven labour market engagement capacity in which women in provinces and territories that currently have more mature child care systems can more readily recover, while others may falter or regress. This postal code social policy means that where Canadians live will be a determining factor in how and to what extent they and their respective economies recover. The economic consequences of this unevenness touch all levels of government, and the political risks of inaction on child care are shared across jurisdictions. Simply, if women's labour market position does not recover, the economy can't rebound, and that immense risk doesn't respect borders.
Of course, design matters to outcomes. Federal investments in child care, absent a vision for system building, can contribute to inaccessible, unaffordable, variable quality and inequality-enhancing child care delivery at provincial and territorial levels, using fiscal room on weak policy choices and extending child care patchworks.
The approach that should be followed can be summarized in a handy three-word mantra: fund the services. Federal funding should be directly provided to provinces and territories where the investment will grow and develop a quality child care system. There are no shortcuts. While there are competing visions of family policy—and family policy is politically fraught terrain—system development does not include cash for care, tax credits or vouchers that stimulate a low-wage, female, precarious child care labour market.
In every crisis, Canada has reimagined its federation. Pandemic federalism has demonstrated a renewed understanding of the fragility and resiliency of our federation and its shared values. Building strong and comprehensive family policy ensures a future that is better insulated against social and economic shocks. The federal government has indicated it's ready to fund what is required to build a system, and broad multisectoral support for a national child care system has never before been so robust. The time is, indeed, now.
12:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
Thank you very much.
Ms. Robert, you have the floor for five minutes.
12:10 p.m.
Camille Robert Historian, As an Individual
I would like to thank the members of the committee for having me here today.
My name is Camille Robert. I'm a doctoral student and history lecturer at the Université du Québec à Montréal. I've done research on the history of feminist mobilization for the recognition of housework.
12:10 p.m.
Liberal
Gudie Hutchings Liberal Long Range Mountains, NL
The translation is not working, Madam Chair.
Now it is.
12:10 p.m.
Bloc
12:10 p.m.
Bloc
Andréanne Larouche Bloc Shefford, QC
Still, I invite you to speak in French. You're from the Université du Québec à Montréal. So, we're happy to hear what you have to say. The interpretation service is for your use as well.
12:10 p.m.
Historian, As an Individual
I've done research on the history of feminist mobilization for the recognition of housework in Quebec. I also co-authored, with researcher Louise Toupin, a collective work on the invisible work of women today.
We've worked with activists and intellectuals from a variety of backgrounds. Each of them has made a contribution with a goal of proposing concrete courses of action. I've also delivered conferences and workshops, and participated in consultations with unions, organizations and community groups over the past few years. This has led to several conversations at the ground level.
My presentation today draws on these research experiences, which have been enriched by perspectives of other women I've met. I want to point that out.
It was probably from the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada, the Bird commission, which released its report in 1970, that the Canadian government became more formally interested in women's unpaid work. It was seen as a barrier to their full integration into the labour market. Because of their household workload, there were significant inequalities between men and women in terms of pay, advancement and promotion, both in the public and private sectors. To remedy this, some of the Commission's recommendations were implemented, for example, the first maternity leave granted under unemployment insurance in 1971.
Other commission recommendations have yet to be implemented or are in the works, such as the creation of a public child care system at the federal level, the deconstruction of sexist stereotypes in education, or the granting of a personal pension to housewives under the Canada pension plan or the Quebec pension plan.
For feminist groups, from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, three avenues were considered for the recognition of women's invisible work: wages for housework, socialization of services and government reforms. I can come back to each of these proposals during the question period. They are still important and can be used to understand the approaches favoured in the past.
In my research, I found that women's unpaid work has gradually been left as a political issue since the second half of the 1980s, as more and more women entered the labour market.
However, a number of problems have been left unresolved, including the impossibility of reconciling family, education and work, while women remain primarily responsible for raising and caring for children and the vulnerable people around them; the devaluation of traditionally female jobs, which are linked to the qualities generally expected of women in the private sphere; reducing the division of family tasks and responsibilities between spouses to a matter of individual arrangements—arrangements that would be determined based on individual preferences, rather than as a division based on gender, class, race and so on; and increasing inequality among women, with the growing use of migrant, immigrant and racialized workers to bridge the gap in “care”. I can come back to this concept later.
It must be said that, in crises such as the one we are currently experiencing with COVID-19, all these problems are exacerbated. Mothers telework while home-schooling their children, or racialized women find themselves on the front lines in seniors' residences and become ill due to the lack of personal protective equipment or the movement of staff between institutions, a situation that is particularly serious in Quebec.
All of this leads us to ask what changes need to be implemented so that women's invisible and unpaid work is more widely recognized. In terms of approaches to take, I would like to share with you a few points from the conclusion of our book Travail invisible.
To begin with, government, employers and even some social movements tend to view issues related to invisible work as a series of separate, detached issues, and therefore tend to consider piecemeal solutions.
However, if we are to implement concrete changes, it is imperative to understand the practice of invisible work in its entirety. This includes both labour law and labour relations, migration policies, education, family policies, funding of public services, accessibility of child care, the right to housing and government benefits, among others.
I'll give you a case in point. A young mother, at the end of her maternity leave, leaves a good unionized full-time job to go to a part-time job because she can't find a day care space. This woman also assumes responsibilities, for example, as a caregiver to her mother who is losing her independence, doesn't receive free home care services and can't afford a room in a private seniors' residence. This woman may return to work and then hire a live-in caregiver to care for her child and her mother, who may have moved in with her.
This situation is rather commonplace, but I think it shows how different forms of invisible, paid and unpaid work of women can be intertwined.
So decision-makers need to develop a vision in public policy—
12:15 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
Thank you. That's the end of the time we have for you.
We are going to begin our rounds of questions for six minutes, starting with Alice Wong.
12:15 p.m.
Conservative
Alice Wong Conservative Richmond Centre, BC
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to both witnesses. I apologize for the technical challenges. These days we are all zoomed out, and so is our equipment. I think it's about time I had a new one.
I want to thank both witnesses for joining us this morning—morning in British Columbia, but of course afternoon in other parts of our great nation.
I have glanced through the International Labour Organization's report, which is 526 pages. Of course, I'm not quoting all of it, so don't worry about that. I would like to quote one line at least. “Care work, both paid and unpaid, is at the heart of humanity in our societies. Economies depend on care work to survive and thrive.”
I think this is a good quote to start this last session of our five days of studies.
Why should we also look at the global scenario? It's not unique to Canada. It's all over the world now. We are looking at a much wider scope, in which unpaid carers can enjoy the rewards of care provision without paying social and economic penalties.
In your presentations, both of you mentioned that many family caregivers—we call them informal family caregivers—lose their productivity. This is especially the case when they are well educated and have well-paid jobs, yet they have to give up their jobs to go into part-time work so they can fulfill their caregiving responsibilities.
I would like to ask both of you what role you think the employer can play in making their employees who are caregivers more productive, but allowing them more support and also creating a working environment in which the other colleagues understand that if they are absent it's not because they are lazy. Very often their colleagues will say, “You're taking leave again, and I'm doing your job.”
I would like one of you to shed light on this part.
12:15 p.m.
Associate Professor and Associate Dean, Brock University, As an Individual
Of course, it's always important to centre our conversation on unpaid care in a global context. We know, of course, that the work of care—the work of social reproduction and the daily and generational production and reproduction of the population—is the stuff that keeps everything else going. It's the architecture that makes all of our market interactions and all of our aspirations possible.
Your question about the role for employers is a good one. Of course, there isn't one magic role for employers, because we have employment situations that are varying sizes, varying scales, varying locations and so on.
I can give a few examples of what is useful. Certainly, we know—and there's a theme to what I'm going to say—that supporting and speaking loudly in support of a child care system is of huge benefit to families with young children.
However, what we also see at the employer level is that employers can play a big role in both supporting caregivers and creating a culture where care is shared. One question that often comes up is how we can encourage fathers, for example, to take more paid leave and to take more time for caregiving. It can start at the very first conversation a prospective parent has with his or her employer or HR department, where that employer assumes they will take the maximum amount of leave.
The conversation is not then that the person seeking to take, for example, parental leave or leave to care feels that they have to negotiate the smallest amount possible, but the conversation begins with assuming the maximum amount and creating a culture where care is shared among employees. That can go some good distance in beginning to shift those kinds of gender norms in households and care work.
Another thing is being cautious about working from home and flexibility. Sometimes it has not worked out super well for women. The lack of face time and the lack of opportunities for the kinds of conversations that would lead to promotion tend not to be necessarily evenly shared, so there are some gender cautions there as well.
12:20 p.m.
Conservative
Alice Wong Conservative Richmond Centre, BC
My next question covers a wider scope, coming back to our own country.
In what ways are specific groups of women, such as women living with disabilities, indigenous women, or immigrant, refugee and newcomer women, affected by the unpaid work and care responsibilities in particular?
That is a huge question, so both of you can pick and choose which area you'd like to comment on.
Thank you.
12:20 p.m.
Historian, As an Individual
I'll answer the first question to start.
Access to child care is fundamental to employment and child care responsibilities.
On the employer side, there is the whole issue of flexibility. It seems to me that over the last few decades this flexibility has been done in a one-way fashion to benefit employers. Employment has become very precarious. Conversely, employers haven't adapted well to the growing presence of women in the labour market. As a result, it's often up to women to shoulder family responsibilities, even if it means taking part-time and lower-paying jobs.
I also think it's necessary overall to—
12:20 p.m.
Conservative
12:20 p.m.
Liberal
Marc Serré Liberal Nickel Belt, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I'd like to thank the witnesses, who have given us some good information today.
My first question is for Dr. Bezanson.
Dr. Bezanson, you talked about fathers and the culture of shared parental leave. For my part, I have already mentioned to the committee the challenges I faced when my daughters were born in 1994 and 1997. I still took a short parental leave, even though I wasn’t entitled to it.
Can you talk about what our federal government has done recently with respect to shared parental leave?
Do you have any other recommendations for us so that we can make a difference in this regard and ensure that child care is shared within couples?