Status of Women Committee on Feb. 25th, 2021

[Camille Robert]

I think it goes back to the issue of choice and accessibility. Of course, families have to have a choice.

I was with a group yesterday, and we discussed children with disabilities. The benefits given to families to care for these children are much lower than the amounts allocated when children are taken into care outside the home.

As long as young children are at home, the government must provide funds to these families so that there is no significant economic impact. However, this choice mustn't be imposed. The Harper government had already proposed allocating money to families who decided to keep their children at home rather than send them to day care. It can also be a trap, because for many families, particularly those with several children, the idea of keeping them at home can become an economic choice, particularly in provinces where fees are quite high.

The door needs to be opened to this possibility, by always offering the choice of whether or not to keep children at home.

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

Thank you so much for that response.

My next question has to do with racialized women who are often hired as care workers, especially with what you mentioned about the pandemic creating challenges that put them in not very good predicaments.

What are some of your suggestions and comments on how we could provide more support for those kinds of women in those situations?

[Camille Robert]

In Quebec, many racialized women, especially Black women, many of whom were refugees, worked in private residences for seniors.

I believe that improving employment conditions in these sectors is fundamental. Currently, it's mainly racialized women, who sometimes have precarious immigration status, who are in these jobs, precisely because white women or women with Canadian citizenship no longer want to work in these jobs because they're too hard.

On the one hand, employment conditions must be transformed. On the other hand, there needs to be more investment in public services, which offer more secure, better unionized jobs—

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Excuse me, but your time is up.

Now we're going to Ms. Zahid for five minutes.

[Gudie Hutchings, Liberal, Long Range Mountains, NL]

I think it's me, Madam Chair, if you don't mind.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

No problem. You just keep me guessing today. It's fine.

[Gudie Hutchings, Liberal, Long Range Mountains, NL]

All right, thank you.

Thanks to both our witnesses for this exciting conversation today.

I'm going to ask you each two questions and you each have two minutes to answer.

We've spoken a lot about a system model. How could we, as the federal government, ensure accountability with a system in working with the provinces and territories?

Dr. Bezanson, I loved your postal code social policy analogy.

I'm delighted to be part of a government that does put the GBA lens on everything, and I'm one who speaks about a rural lens. I'm from a very large rural riding. My riding is bigger than Switzerland, with 200 beautiful, tiny towns.

To get to the child care issue, with your knowledge and experience on child care, what recommendations do you give to ensure that a Canada-wide system not only works across the different provinces and territories, but also works in different types of communities, from the big urban centres to the really rural, really small communities, because it's different in those small communities?

Those two questions are for you both, and whoever wants can go first.

[Dr. Kate Bezanson]

Certainly we live in a tremendous, varied federation that has really dense urban centres and vast, more rural areas.

On your first question about a system model, of course, in any area of social policy, we want to have benchmarks. We want to have tracking. We want to be paying attention to how we are assessing, reassessing and striving, and nowhere is this more important than when we think about our smallest humans.

We often use language of accountability, which tends to be used more in relation to the financial side of the ledger. If we're talking about accountability for spending and investments, we also have to transform that a little bit to think about those kinds of shared goals, shared benchmarks, shared access to child care services, affordability of services, expansion of services and the attention of those services to the kind of communities they are serving.

One thing is very interesting, and my colleague Susan Prentice has written about it in Manitoba. Child care is a really big labour market booster and economic development mechanism for rural communities—this is also true of long-term care—so there are some economic development strategies that really are well served by child care.

We have to think about developing a national strategy and also think about really high-quality, home-based child care delivery that's regulated and that can attend to the transportation issues, needs and choices of those in rural communities.

[Gudie Hutchings, Liberal, Long Range Mountains, NL]

I'll go over to you, Madam Robert.

[Camille Robert]

Thank you for the question.

I’m less familiar with provincial accountability, so I won’t comment on that. However, I think your point about access to services, particularly in rural settings, is fundamental.

There are serious problems with access to child care in many remote regions in Quebec. I'm not talking about early childhood centres, public day care centres, but private or family day care centres. They are extremely difficult to access.

Sometimes children enrolled before they've even been born won't have a place until they're 24 months old. In this case, mothers will very often have to take unpaid leave to stay at home with their children and will have to postpone their return to the labour market.

I don't have any specific recommendations, but I think the issue you've raised is extremely important.

[Gudie Hutchings, Liberal, Long Range Mountains, NL]

Okay. I'm sure I have a couple of seconds left.

Again, in your professional experience, are you finding that the younger generations of families are showing progress on sharing responsibility? How can we engage more men on this issue and encourage more men to participate in addressing this whole gender inequality related to unpaid work, especially home care work?

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

You have 15 seconds

[Camille Robert]

As Dr. Bezanson pointed out, paternity leave is fundamental to promoting men's involvement in the family. Many studies have shown that the earlier men get involved in their children's lives, the greater their involvement in family life later on.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Larouche, you have the floor.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Once again, I would like to thank both witnesses for being here today.

You bring fascinating insights on unpaid work.

I'd like to come back to something we saw during the pandemic and that Ms. Robert raised, which is that women from abroad came to lend a hand in the long-term care facilities. In fact, I would like to highlight the Bloc Québécois' work to speed up recognition of their status as guardian angels who help seniors. Once again, we need to strike a balance, because we must ensure that it doesn't become a form of disparity among women themselves, as we have heard. At the same time, many of these women saw it as a great opportunity to come here and establish themselves in our country.

[Camille Robert]

Our collective work, Travail invisible, has a very interesting chapter by Sonia Ben Soltane, a professor at the University of Ottawa. She talks about the journey of immigrant women. Those who come here are mostly from North Africa and Haiti. For them, it's an opportunity to improve their situation. However, we have to wonder what choices are available to them.

Typically, immigrant women will prioritize their spouse's professional advancement as soon as they arrive here. Sonia Ben Soltane pointed this out. They will mostly go for work as caregivers, which requires little training and helps them to integrate very quickly into the working world and get a stable income.

So I think it also has to do with the immigration model and the choices available to these women once they arrive in Canada or Quebec.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

So it's really a matter of providing them with better guidance.

In conclusion, I'd like you both to answer my question in one sentence. We talk a lot about unpaid work, but sometimes we get the feeling we don't have enough data. Groups like AFÉAS are putting two ideas forward: first, to start a national day to raise awareness of unpaid work, and second, to include the income from unpaid work in the GDP in order to put a figure on it.

How significant could that be in helping all those who do unpaid work?

[Camille Robert]

It's important, because it puts the matter out in the spotlight, but these forms of recognition remain quite symbolic. We absolutely need to have forms of financial recognition in addition to that and we must improve funding for public services to really give women and families a choice.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Ms. Bezanson, in one sentence...

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I'm sorry, Madame Larouche.

Ms. Mathyssen, you have two and a half minutes.

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

Actually, I'll pick up on what you were just saying in terms of how we value care work and work typically done by women, that female idea of work.

There has been a lot of pressure on the federal government to bring in a federal minimum wage. I know that a lot of this depends on each different province, but providing that kind of leadership could potentially help to solidify it. Actually, $15 an hour isn't even really a livable wage anymore. I think we really need to go beyond that, but to have that sort of set.... Maybe you could talk about that.

Again, when we talk about labour law, it is typically provincial, but there certainly is the Canada Labour Code. Are there any provisions that you were talking about when you were discussing this more fulsome idea of how we look at unpaid care? It comes from a labour law standard or changes, and it comes from the provision of affordable housing. Certainly, New Democrats believe in those universal ideas of programming that help with those everyday costs. Could you talk a bit about some of that, Ms. Robert?

[Camille Robert]

I'm sorry, I missed the last part of what you said.

Could you quickly repeat the question, please?

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

We're looking at those national programs and we're looking at changes in labour law. What would you prescribe on a federal level? I know they're mainly provincial, but I'm thinking in terms of those changes in labour law, livable income, federal minimum wages and that sort of thing.

[Camille Robert]

What I have observed, basically, is that the unequal division of labour in the family has a lot to do with wage inequality. For example, when families are deciding to take parental leave or send children to daycare, they are often guided by financial issues. Those issues are themselves linked to issues of wage inequality.

I feel that, if we want to see invisible and unpaid work shared in families, it is particularly important to look at the labour market.

Another thing—

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Very good. That's the end of your time.

Ms. Hutchings, do you have a point of order?