Status of Women Committee on April 27th, 2021

[Aline Lechaume]

That's a very important question. There is no single child care model that works for everyone, but what should be universal is affordable access. That isn't the case now. Child care services vary significantly from one province to another and from one territory to another; the differences are also pronounced in rural versus urban communities, not to mention when you factor in a person's immigration status.

Immigrant women with temporary or precarious status, especially refugee claimants, have no access to reduced-contribution child care and, in some cases, no child care access at all. The extremely limited availability of child care undermines the integration of immigrant women in every way, impeding their participation in society overall—when it comes to building support networks—their ability to enter the workforce and their access to language training. All of those things suffer mainly because of a lack of access to child care.

As a society, we all benefit when immigrant children have access to day care, which contributes to their socialization at a very early age and supports early learning.

[Alice Wong, Conservative, Richmond Centre, BC]

Ms. Dhillon.

[Dr. Puneet Dhillon]

Thank you so much.

That's a very important question. I would just like to answer it in two ways.

First, with regard to single mothers and immigrant women, it's really important for them to get integrated into their society in two aspects. First is the job aspect, and the second is the social aspect. These are both compromised when they do not have proper child care in place.

Then there is another sector that we have not talked about yet, which is the international students. Sometimes they also have problems because they do not have the status, and do not have other privileges. They also face these barriers, and this affects the purpose for which they have come here: studies. Secondarily, it affects their further job integration in this land of opportunities, and then, next, their social integration or any other sorts of advances they make when coming to Canada. These are really important.

I will talk from my lived experience as a single immigrant woman. It is really difficult for you to manage the child care, being it very expensive, and sometimes there's a huge wait-list, which totally makes everything very meaningless. You just keep on waiting from one month to two months. I think it should be more equitable and more accessible, and there should be some reduced prices. This is what I suggest.

[Alice Wong, Conservative, Richmond Centre, BC]

Madam Chouakri.

Excuse my French. That's my challenge: learning French.

Would you like to add something?

[Yasmina Chouakri]

I think everything has been said, but I want to point out that the challenge is even greater for immigrant women who head single-parent families. They already have relatively precarious jobs and may not have access to affordable child care. This certainly represents a barrier that I call structural and is one of the other barriers that are serious enough to prevent real integration for these women.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Very good.

Now we'll go to Ms. Sidhu for six minutes.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for being here.

I know that Punjabi Community Health Services is providing important services to Bramptonians. Thank you for that.

I would like to direct my question to Ms. Dhillon.

Ms. Dhillon, we live in the same community. We see the impact of the pandemic every day in Brampton. We have heard in this committee how racialized communities have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. How can we ensure that they have access to health services and are supported as we recover economically?

[Dr. Puneet Dhillon]

Thank you, Ms. Sidhu. This is a very important and much-needed question at this time. I'll try to answer it to the best of my capacities.

First, what I see as the solution to the problem that we Torontonians are all facing is that one barrier to accessing the services could be a lack of awareness about the resources that are present.

Another important barrier is lack of knowledge of the language, because most South Asian women who are homebound and are working at home and do not have access to any of those language instruction classes have very big barriers. Being a South Asian woman myself, I have also met many others who do not even know how to navigate with a GPS, how to connect to these resources, or even how to make a phone call, so language has become a huge barrier.

A third barrier, which has come since COVID-19, is mobility, because when we come here as immigrants, the major problem is that there is always a barrier to mobility, both from a financial point of view and physically. Sometimes South Asian women, especially Punjabi women, who want to go from here to there have to depend on their male counterparts in the family. They have to wait for them to come home from work and then for them to take them somewhere. This is one of the problems. I think awareness and education about all the resources available are the key. More connection between the community service organizations and the communities and a more diverse touch to these types of services will help us remove at least some of these barriers. This is my belief.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Thank you.

You raised an important point on access to child care. One of the long-term consequences of establishing a national early learning and child care system as proposed in Budget 2021 is the opportunity for more women to take on full-time careers, as opposed to part-time work, in addition to looking after children. How do you believe this will impact women's careers once the system is implemented?

[Dr. Puneet Dhillon]

That is an excellent step that has been taken. I really appreciate it, and in fact, I think in my heart of hearts that we have all been looking forward to it, especially the immigrant single mothers. It is really, really important, as I mentioned earlier in my presentation, that when an immigrant starts their life in Canada, they look for a job, any job. If it is a career demotion, they do not care. If it does not match their skill set, they generally do not care. I think this is a very important step when we realize that when this step is integrated or brought into practice, it will help many women to pursue their careers of choice, something that matches their skill set and interests.

This will also help with respect to the vulnerability of our women, because when there is any type of crisis, whether it is a financial crunch or family violence, women tend to become more vulnerable compared with other members of the family. The moment you are in an abusive relationship or realize you are being abused, you become very vulnerable to these things. The first thing is the financial burden. “What would I do with my kids?”, “What would I do with my part-time job?” I think it is a very nice step, and I really appreciate the step. It will really help especially immigrant women.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

You know quite well that many seniors in the South Asian communities have real language barriers. Do you believe they are at a disadvantage when it comes to accessing any services, such as health care services or vaccination services? What is your advice on that? How can all levels of government bridge the barrier?

[Dr. Puneet Dhillon]

Thank you, Ms. Sidhu, for giving me an opportunity to answer this question, because seniors definitely feel kind of abandoned or alienated in a society where the language is a big barrier. We often come across senior clients who drop in or who call in because they do not understand. Sometimes, it's even worse. They do not want to pick up the phone to call. They do not know what language the phone operator on the other end will use. I think more culturally competent services and more linguistically appropriate services are required for seniors. There has definitely been a huge barrier, and in fact, there have been many cultural taboos around vaccine. There have been many myths. We try our best in our languages to get those myths resolved and to give proper answers about those myths, but still they do not reach those targeted areas in a targeted language. We need a more culturally and linguistically sensitive approach to reach out to our seniors.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

With the increased use of telehealth and virtual patient care, what kinds of challenges have you witnessed diverse communities facing, from your line of work?

[Dr. Puneet Dhillon]

It was actually difficult initially for the service providers. As employees, it was very difficult to get used to the technology, or get our hands on Zoom meetings and providing telecare to our clients. If we talk about it from the client perspective, it is very difficult for us to expect an abused woman to call in and to understand how to meet on Zoom.

For our Punjabi seniors, our South Asian seniors, it's really difficult for them to become familiar with the technology, especially when somebody is in a situation. Anybody who has a problem in their social life, financial or any other status, will call in to PCHS for services. When that person is experiencing a problem, we cannot expect them to follow this technology and this very, very complicated process of reaching out to PCHS. Then there is a huge wait-list and a huge language barrier.

I often come across many seniors who call me and ask, do you speak Punjabi? “Oh, thank God you speak Punjabi. You are just like my daughter.” They then try to connect to you in that cultural way. Otherwise, sometimes what I feel about these calls is that if the person is speaking in some other language, they don't open up; they don't talk about their problems.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I'm so sorry. That's the end of your time for that question.

Now we're going to move to Madame Larouche.

You have the floor for six minutes.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I thank the witnesses for being with us today to talk about the realities of women in our country, and specifically the experience of immigrant women and the different realities they face depending on whether they are settling in a rural or urban setting.

First, I would like to hear more about invisible work. As we know, invisible work is already disproportionately taken on by women. All three of you have addressed this issue in your own way.

Ms. Chouakri, can you tell us in what ways this reality manifests itself more for immigrant and racialized women?

[Yasmina Chouakri]

As I said, they share the same problems as all women in terms of invisible work, that is, all of the domestic tasks, and child care or care for a dependent relative; however, all of the barriers they face increase this invisible work and the mental burden that comes with it. This is especially true for newcomers, women who have been in the country for less than five years. For them, there is also the obligation to understand the functioning of the host society, the labour market, the francization system or the education system, for example, if they want to return to school. They have to deal with all of this, while they have lost the traditional support network they had in their country of origin. Often the traditional networks are based on an extended family model or a larger family structure, where raising children is not the responsibility of one couple, but of the whole family. They have lost all that and have not had time to rebuild a new support network. They don't necessarily know the networks that are in place, either.

At the Réseau d'action pour l'égalité des femmes immigrées et racisées du Québec, the organization I work for, we conducted an investigation about the impact of the pandemic on immigrant women.

In the first instance, several immigrant women reported that they found it extremely difficult and burdensome to cope with the family overload of caring for children and schooling at home, especially during the total lockdown. These women were in great need of respite and support from the school system, child care, homework help, and so on. They were not necessarily prepared to live with the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I would like to highlight another of the most important findings that came out of our survey. This was briefly discussed earlier. In fact, many immigrant women who are not fluent in the host country's language told the stakeholders we interviewed that they do not have access to information about resources available in their language. Thus, the only information they can get is from a family member, which does not guarantee access to the right information. Many of these women therefore made a joint request. Since these women often have not yet had the opportunity to learn the language of the host country, they would like to have access to information in languages other than French and English about the range of resources that are available to them, whether it is government assistance or resources that are available to them if they are ever abused, for example.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

This is one more reason to highlight the work of organizations in my riding such as Solidarité ethnique régionale de la Yamaska, which helps women with francization, or Valcourt 2030, which helps out-of-town workers and works to integrate not only the workers, but also the families, in order to create this famous network.

You also talked a lot about how important it is for immigrant women to recreate a network. This is true in urban areas, but it is even truer in rural areas. We know that the lottery system put in place by the federal government to reunite families is not working. So resources should be given back to Quebec to really capitalize on this family reunification and manage to decrease the invisible work and mental burden on women.

In addition, there is a lot of talk about the cumbersome administration at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, a situation that we deplore. Speeding up the immigration process would allow immigrant women to obtain full status more quickly, which would then help them access all services.

[Yasmina Chouakri]

This could certainly play a role, but I think increasing the number of affordable child care spaces is a priority. That's just as important as making it easier to reunite families.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Very good.

Now we will go to Ms. Mathyssen for the final six minutes.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I would love to continue on that path set forward by Madame Larouche. I know from my constituency office that we have been bombarded with calls. People are frustrated. I know that it's during COVID and that things are different right now, but they're frustrated with the status of their own or their loved one's immigration case file. Oftentimes, we have heard from them that they are even more isolated here. They are so saddened, and there's the mental health stress of not being able to have those supports with them here in Canada. Maybe you could talk about that.

I also wanted to add that I have this incredible community in my riding—and they are exactly what you described—of a group of women who are of Southeast Asian background or descent. They cannot go anywhere without the support of their husbands. They are away from our community in the city, in a new neighbourhood, and they don't have access to traditional transportation and all of those things.

Could you expand on that as well, Ms. Dhillon, and talk about the needs and what we can do to increase the supports, whether it's through subsidized transportation from the feds to municipalities or what have you? It's all linked together, I think.

[Dr. Puneet Dhillon]

Thank you so much.

I'll begin by answering my question with the manifestations of all of these problems. This is a three-level intersectional problem of being a minority within a minority. I call immigrants minorities. Then I call women minorities within a minority, and single women become a minority within a minority within a minority. Therefore, there are three tiers of minorities when we talk about single immigrant women. It also manifests at three levels. First it manifests at the mental level and then in the social and physical levels. The mental one definitely affects the services. The social one affects the social integration of our society. Then, physically, it does affect the health system of our country.

It's really about looking into providing more accessible and equitable resources, and definitely with subsidized public transport and other things. Definitely, we can also look into the fourth R, which I mentioned previously—reward—which could be given by offering a different tax bracket for these women and definitely offering child care rates geared to income and also, then, subsidized insurance to single women. This may be my view but women definitely are responsible drivers, and if we have that subsidized insurance on homes, auto and other things that are applicable, that would be great.

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

Does anyone else want to add anything on that immigration piece? We certainly have seen that there's a suburban system, and the lottery system that came forward didn't necessarily work. What supports for citizenship and immigration need to occur? That's for any of the witnesses.

[Aline Lechaume]

I would like to add that, in terms of access to all of the services discussed, one of the major problems remains the significant divide between those who have permanent residence and those who do not. Women with temporary status are in a much more precarious situation, whether they are international students, temporary foreign workers, people in the process of family reunification, asylum seekers, or people who do not even have that status.

Making access to these services universal, that is, making them available to all immigrant women regardless of status, would be a fundamental element. If we want access to employment and integration into the workforce to be beneficial to these women, we must act at the beginning of the integration process, because once you enter the spiral of precariousness, you stay there. It then becomes very difficult to get out and successfully integrate into the labour market as well as into society in general.

The earlier we act to make access to these services universal, the more beneficial it will be for these women and for society as a whole.

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

Ms. Dhillon, you talked about international students. I know there is a very large contingent in my riding who are really frustrated about the fact they pay exorbitant fees. They support our post-secondary education system financially maybe more than they should be required to, but then they also don't have the ability to access traditional employment within our communities. Could you talk about some of the things we could do to remove those barriers?