Status of Women Committee on Nov. 3rd, 2020

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Good morning. I call this meeting to order. Welcome to meeting number three of the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women. Today’s meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the House order of September 23. The proceedings will be made available via the House of Commons website. The webcast will always show the person speaking rather than the entire committee.

With regard to the speakers list, the committee clerk and I will do the best we can to maintain a consolidated speaking order for all members, whether or not they are participating virtually or in person.

Today our committee is meeting on its study of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on women. I will make a few comments for the benefit of our new witnesses.

At the beginning, you will each have five minutes to make your speech. I will recognize you by name and when you're ready to speak, you can click on the microphone icon to activate your mike. The interpretation in this video conference will work very much like it does at a regular committee meeting. You can choose at the bottom of your screen the floor, English or French. When speaking, please speak slowly and clearly. When you are not speaking, please have your mike on mute.

Our first panel will be for one hour and the second panel will be 30 minutes. Then we'll go in camera and switch to the other Zoom link, which will take a few minutes.

Without any further ado, I would like to welcome our witnesses who will begin our discussions. We have today Penny Wise, the president of 3M Canada; Kevin McCreadie, chief executive officer and chief investment officer, AGF Management Limited; and Leah Nord, senior director, workforce strategies and inclusive growth, council for women's advocacy, Canadian Chamber of Commerce. Then we also have Vicky Smallman, national director, women's and human rights, Canadian Labour Congress. We'll start with Penny.

[Kevin McCreadie, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer, AGF Management Limited]

Actually, Madam Chair, I will lead this morning.

[Salma Zahid, Liberal, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Madam Chair, I'm sorry for interrupting, but there's a lot of echoing in the voice on Zoom.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Can we have the technical people address that?

Go ahead, Mr. McCreadie.

[Kevin McCreadie]

Thank you Madam Chair, vice-chairs, and committee members. It is a pleasure to be here today. I am the CEO and CIO of AGF Management Limited, and the co-chair of the Canadian Chamber’s council for women’s advocacy. I am joined by fellow co-chair Penny Wise, who is the president of 3M Canada, and Leah Nord from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

The Canadian Chamber is the voice of Canadian business. We represent 200,000 businesses across the country, across sectors and across sizes. Our network consists of 450 chambers of commerce and boards of trade, alongside more than 400 corporate members and an equal number of association members. Earlier this year, the Canadian Chamber launched its inclusive growth campaign, including the council for women’s advocacy. The council is an executive table of men and women from across this country and across sectors, including the chamber network.

In the spring of this year, with the onset of the pandemic, we needed to quickly pivot the council’s focus as we watched the disproportionately negative effects on women. This included nationwide lockdowns in March that immediately and drastically affected women-dominated sectors, including retail, non-profit, salon services, etc. For women who were able to work from home, as schools went online and child care was curtailed, they had to deal with family in long-term care homes and they took the brunt of other family and domestic responsibilities. It is well documented how their labour participation and utilizations rates, not to mention mental health, have suffered.

Recent labour force survey numbers do indicate solid progress, but these numbers will swing, sway and even ping-pong over the winter months as we move in and out of the second and third waves and other hot spots across the country.

Through the crisis, we have used the word “emergency” in any number of programs—the emergency wage subsidy, the emergency relief benefit, the emergency business account. We are here today to underscore the emergency vis-à-vis women in the workforce.

We need to keep women in the workforce. We are here not only to talk about the urgency, but also to provide solutions. The council for women’s advocacy has five key recommendation for the federal government that you, committee members and your fellow parliamentarians, need to do to provide emergency support for women through the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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

Excuse me, Madam Chair. Every time the witness, there is a garbled sound. I think it's on your end.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Yes, we have the technical team trying to address that right now while we continue.

Go ahead, Mr. McCreadie.

[Kevin McCreadie]

These recommendations cover the areas of child care and schools, and facilitate the upskilling, re-skilling and job pivots for women.

I'll ask my colleague, Penny, to provide some details.

[Penny Wise, President, 3M Canada]

Thanks, Kevin.

Good morning, committee members.

The council initially issued five recommendations in mid-August in advance of the school year. We expanded that to 10 recommendations in advance of the Speech from the Throne, to include some recovery focus ideas.

This week we have returned to our initial five recommendations for the emergency and urgency reasons Kevin just spoke to. Women need support now. To keep women in the workforce, we need to keep children in schools and day cares. While we welcome the federal government's announcements regarding national leadership and longer investments in child care, we need action now focused on ensuring child care capacity.

Establish, without delay, an inclusive task force to focus on child care support through the continued crisis. A task force can support data-driven and parent-focused decisions on where—whether it's provinces, territories, child care providers, or parents—funding such as grants or tax incentives should flow, and in what form. Those who receive funds will also need to be held accountable.

Concretely, for example, earlier this week at the Canadian Chamber's annual general meeting, a resolution was passed entitled “Child care credits for small and medium size businesses”. It recommends that the Government of Canada permit owners of Canadian-controlled private corporations—CCPCs—receiving non-eligible dividend income to claim child care expenses against that income and to permit CCPC owners receiving non-eligible dividend income to transfer child care expenses to the higher income earner of the family.

We are also asking for the federal government to continue to build on the safe restart transfers to ensure that schools and day cares remain open through the second waves across the country. We ask that the government work with provinces, territories and stakeholders on rapid testing and rapid testing turnaround times, alongside other technology supports including robust tracing.

Our third recommendation regarding child care—which also focuses on supporting female business owners and entrepreneurs—is to extend eligibility for the Canada emergency wage subsidy to include hiring in-home child care, so that business owners can return to work. Female business owners continue to indicate that child care is their number one issue.

These are some easy, practical and incredibly helpful actions that the government could undertake now.

Further, we have asked for the federal government to track and break down data for federal funding and programming for businesses in a way that has been done for individuals, looking specifically at female-owned businesses and entrepreneurs. We recommend that it ask questions regarding ratios of applications, rates of successful applications, timing for funding received and adapted eligibility, funding and programming accordingly going forward. We recommend that the government consult widely as this is done.

Our final recommendations—and hopefully we will be able to elaborate on this further during the question period—is to earmark some of the recovery funding for upskilling and re-skilling women, ensuring there is an intersectional lens and BIPOC focus, appreciating that this is a significant and groundbreaking undertaking that is critically important to start now.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

That's very good.

I understand that we are still having technical difficulties. The clerk has advised me that we should suspend momentarily.

Clerk, can you verify if that means people should stay on the line and we will fix it?

[The Clerk of the Committee, Ms. Stephanie Bond]

Yes, please just sit tight. We will work on this from our end. We'll suspend now and we'll be back very shortly.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

[Technical difficulty--Editor]

Does Ms. Nord from the Chamber of Commerce want to say anything?

[Leah Nord, Senior Director, Workforce Strategies and Inclusive Growth, Canadian Chamber of Commerce]

No, thank you. Not at this time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

All right. We'll go along to Ms. Smallman from the Canadian Labour Congress.

You have five minutes.

[Vicky Smallman, National Director, Human Rights, Canadian Labour Congress]

Thank you very much for inviting me to be a part of your discussion today.

The CLC, as you know, is the largest labour organization in Canada, bringing together dozens of national and international unions, provincial and territorial federations of labour and community-based labour councils to represent more than three-million workers across the country. More than half of these workers are women, many working in the sectors most devastated by this pandemic, who were finally recognized as essential to protecting the health and well-being of our communities.

It's difficult to capture in a brief five minutes the many ways that women workers and women's jobs have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. You've heard from others today about the disproportionate impact on women who have lost jobs or have reduced their hours and income in order to care for children or other family members, and the pressures that are going to be continuing through subsequent waves of the pandemic.

I would like to add that the hardest hit are low-wage and precarious workers and those who already face marginalization and discrimination: black and indigenous women, women of colour, women with disabilities, migrants and newcomers.

While women bore the brunt of the job losses, they've also been on the front lines of this pandemic doing the work that keeps our communities healthy, safe, fed and supported. The work in these essential sectors is often invisible, undervalued and unrecognized; marked with poor working conditions, exposure to violence and harassment and other health and safety risks; and with limited job security and access to benefits, including paid sick leave.

The pandemic brought many of these realities to the surface and brought new or greater risks and inequities, such as a higher risk of exposure to COVID-19 for those workers who are mostly black and indigenous women, women of colour, migrants and recent immigrants. Unlike other countries, women make up the majority of diagnosed COVID-19 cases in Canada, and more women than men have lost their lives.

We also know that women have not benefited equally from the gradual reopening of the economy. Again, the most marginalized are the most impacted. A key reason for the slow recovery is women's unpaid work caring for children and family members. The pandemic has placed many women in a very impossible situation, and something has to give.

We have seen women's labour force participation set back more than 30 years. Unless we address some of the profound structural barriers, recovery from what many have dubbed the “she-cession” will be long and difficult. Among the most challenging of these barriers is women's unfair share of unpaid care work. This committee has an opportunity to make a strong case for a gender-responsive recovery aimed at restoring women's labour force participation, creating decent jobs and narrowing the gender wage gap, reducing and redistributing unpaid care work, and disaster proofing our social safety net. Feminist recovery would centre the needs of the most impacted and ensure that no one is left behind.

We need a jobs plan that invests in the sectors where women work and in the services that women and families rely on. That's the caring economy. Care is a vital part of Canada's social infrastructure and is an economic generator. Quality public services and social infrastructure, such as child care, elder care and other social services, cannot only create decent jobs, they help boost labour force participation overall by reducing the burden of unpaid care work.

However, decades of austerity-driven fiscal policies and a market-based approach to the delivery of care have created inequities and gaps. Our economy is relying more than ever on women's unpaid labour, and also on precarious low-wage women workers, a disproportionate number of whom are racialized. Canada needs a care-focused solution for the recovery. We can't just apply band-aid solutions to a crisis that has been building for some time.

That's why we're proposing, among other investments in child care, health care and long-term care, a federal care economy commission to do the following: study, design and implement a care strategy for Canada that would create a broad and inclusive labour market strategy to achieve high-quality, equitable care jobs; examine paid and unpaid care work; and develop a road map to meet the increasing demands for care and reduce and redistribute women's unpaid care work by improving access to public care services for children, the elderly and people living with disabilities.

There's a lot more to discuss. I'm hoping that we'll get to it in the question period.

From our point of view, our plan, which we put together in our Forward Together campaign, is rooted in our ways of doing things. That means taking care of each other. Public investments in services, not austerity, are a key part of a robust response and recovery that ensures our collective well-being.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Very good.

We will go to our first round of questions. The way this works is that each party gets six minutes. I will try to be kind when I come to the end, but this is just a warning to the witnesses that I may say, “And that's your time”, after which we'll move on.

We'll start our questioning with Ms. Sahota for six minutes.

[Jag Sahota, Conservative, Calgary Skyview, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to all of the witnesses for your presentations and your time.

I have the same question for Penny, Kevin and Leah. Women were hit the hardest, as we've heard many times, by the COVID-19 pandemic, from working in service industries that were ordered to be closed or workplaces that were closed up completely, or from deciding to leave the workforce to take care of children and the elderly. Of those who left the workforce, only about 20% are planning on returning to the workforce, with child care being a big reason why.

How have your organizations adjusted to this new reality? What measures are you taking to work with those who've had to leave to be at home?

[Penny Wise]

It has been a very challenging time for all of us as we've moved through the pandemic. It certainly has, as you said, disproportionately affected women in the workplace. A significant portion of the people who work at 3M Canada are women. I'm really proud of the proportions we have.

I have a couple of comments. We have been working very hard on ensuring what we are calling “flexibility”. For our employees who work from home, it's making sure that we are helping them plan their days; making sure they have the time to support their children, to support elder care, and to support the kind of family care they provide; and making sure their workload is balanced and they still have time for themselves and for their family. We've been working very hard on that. We're providing other additional supports around mental health as well as work-life balance in order to provide as much support as we can to people in the workforce. I've attended more than my fair share of meetings where there have been additional co-workers who are younger, who have louder opinions than their parents potentially do, during our meetings as well. I think that is just a part of all of us participating in a pandemic economy.

For our individuals who were not able to work from home, because we have manufacturing across the country, again, we have promoted flexibility in making sure we are helping people with support when they need to stay at home with children and when they can come into the office, making sure we have shift flexibility in order to provide that for people as well. I think flexibility has been the key to what we have provided.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Mr. McCreadie.

[Kevin McCreadie]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Different from Penny, I employ what I call “knowledge workers” for the most part. When the pandemic hit, within days we were able to basically pick up our entire firm of 700-odd people here across the provinces—actually around the world—and move them home, with maybe five or six people left. We had that ability.

Half our workforce is women, and one of the things we saw right away was that, disproportionately, our single mothers, even though we're in the knowledge industry, were struggling immensely with home-schooling children, taking on the domestic responsibilities and then trying to fit into their schedule their own jobs. We were able to work with them. We had time outs built into the day when we'd schedule no internal meetings so mothers could try to deal with some of this at once. We provided a lot of direction on online tutoring services and things that could help them, but the struggle, even though we're in the knowledge industry, was so apparent.

We can take care of our folks. We can be flexible about when they can work and how they come back.

Even going to the two-parent families, the domestic work, the home-schooling and the burden of their being no summer camps fell disproportionately on those women, even though they were in a family situation with a husband. We saw that stress. Think about trying to deal with keeping pace with your male colleagues while saying you can't take a meeting because you have to get a child's assignment uploaded. We preached empathy; we preached working with your partner and your teammates and putting yourself in everyone else's shoes throughout this.

Then I go to the people we contract to work with us as consultants and accountants, who are small business owners. They're single practitioners and when they had to go home to take care of their kids, they lost their businesses. They essentially could not work.

Now we're in a situation where every other day a child or someone in their class has tested positive, and the whole class comes home. It's impossible for those women to really try to get their careers back. Some of them have lost it all. I think our small business owners, our small entrepreneurs, our single mothers in Canada have disproportionately.... A number of small business owners are single mothers.

I think we can be empathetic in the knowledge industry and take care of everyone. We can understand it, but don't underestimate the burden that has fallen on many of these women and the mental health issues that are to yet come because of this burden. I think we are unfortunately going to be in a second and third wave of this before we get to a vaccine.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

That's your time.

Mr. Serré, you have six minutes.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I want to thank the three witnesses who gave presentations for working to support women's equality and the economy as a whole. Our study regarding the impact of the pandemic on women is very important.

My first question is for Ms. Wise.

Penny, thank you for the work you do with 3M. As you know, our government made a lot of investments in social sciences, engineering, and apprenticeships for women, and in the construction trades. Moreover, in 2015 we established the Department for Women and Gender Equality. We've added about $11.3 million to support projects that look at women in under-represented fields.

I want to get your feedback on the measures that you think the government should be considering to ensure that women will have an equal and fair opportunity to succeed in STEM fields and the fields I just mentioned.

[Penny Wise]

I think the best way to answer your question is to relate to you a personal experience. My daughter is 23 years old and has just graduated from university. She has a degree in biotechnology and biochemistry, and it is viewed as unusual that she has a science degree instead of a more traditional female-focused degree, which it shouldn't be. That's one aspect.

As we move forward in the world and we bring women's issues forward, I always view the opportunity to pass the baton to the next generation and to make sure that we've moved women's issues forward as absolutely critical. I am concerned at this point, given how many women have left the workforce, how so many of the jobs that have been affected are in the service industries that women have taken on, that they still aren't moving into some of these job pivots in areas affecting us and that women's issues going backwards by a generation, not forwards—which I want to be able to pass on.

As we think about pivoting, we need to help our education system, making sure that we are encouraging young women to try science, to do apprenticeships, to look at some of the opportunities in high-growth areas or different industries where they haven't traditionally looked, and how we can help people pivot to those particular industries.

At 3M Canada, we are a partner with Skills Ontario, and some of the young women who participate in Skills Ontario are a very small percentage. Our goal is how do we encourage more young women to participate and more people to get into the skills? I think that's the challenge for us, to pass the baton forward to make sure that women aren't slipping back, and also to encourage them in some of these different areas—a longer term solution. But again, as I mentioned, we need to start that now.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you, Ms. Wise.

My second question is for Vicky Smallman. Thank you for all the work you do in human rights advocacy. It's very important and we need to continue doing this, not only in Canada but across the world.

As you know, the UN referred very strongly to the shadow pandemic here of violence against women.

In early March and April we as a government provided $50 million to women's shelters and we recently provided another $50 million for shelters and sexual assault centres. I received calls dealing with my local Horizon Women's Centre's shelter in West Nipissing and in Sudbury and they're very thankful. That really helped them carry the extra workload and costs during COVID.

Ms. Smallman, in the throne speech we talked about moving forward with a national action plan. I want to know the lessons learned from your experience and what we can do to improve the action plan as we move forward.

[Vicky Smallman]

It's hugely important, and I'm glad to have an opportunity to talk about the violence as well as jobs.

The national action plan is a requirement that the UN set for all member states. We're supposed to have a national action plan to address, respond to and eliminate violence against women by 2015. We're a little behind the times in advancing on this, but we have taken many important steps toward it, including the gender-based violence strategy by the federal government as well as the funding that was rolled out in response to the COVID crisis, which is welcome and necessary.

A national action plan would be a multijurisdictional vision with targeted and specific timelines and actions to help prevent and address violence against women. It's really about nailing down the specific things that we have to do.

On the labour side of things, we have a very clear road map in the new ILO convention C190, which is the convention to eliminate violence and harassment in the world of work. It specifically requires actions to address gender-based violence at work as well as domestic violence, which we've been working very hard on in the Canadian Labour Congress for the last few years.

In most jurisdictions in Canada workers have access to paid domestic violence leave, which is a tremendous victory, but it's only the beginning, and there's a lot we can do with unions, employers and governments together to operationalize the vision put out in the convention. That's what I would like to be working on with all levels of government as we create this vision of the national action plan.