Finance committee  Based on my experience in investigating that specific issue in a number of European countries and other countries, it is very clearly established that early childhood education, when linked with child care services of the highest quality, actually increases the store of knowledge and the acceleration of development of all of the human capacities that are needed for vital economic growth.

Finance committee  Thank you for the invitation to offer my observations on the important priorities that should be addressed in this round of budget policy-making. I'm here to speak in specific reference to what has happened to women both during the recession and during the period subsequent to that.

Status of Women committee  Yes, easily. Various factors have contributed to the increasing economic gap between women and men. In my brief, in section IX, “Denial of Support for Women's Economic Equality”, there is a summary statement that I think sheds a lot of light on what's been going on in Canada. It is a bit of a bean-counting answer, but this is where the answer lies.

Status of Women committee  I can give the primary site, which is the paper I published in the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, volume 22, year 2010, issue 1. These are all Statistic Canada's studies, every one of them.

Status of Women committee  They're from various years. They were all done at different times. But they're the most recent data for every topic.

Status of Women committee  Thank you very much for the invitation to speak to you today. I consider this to be an auspicious beginning to a very important study by this committee, and I feel honoured to have an opportunity to share my own insights in this area with you. I want to speak, first of all, to the point that there is a strong relationship between women's equality and girls' economic prospects.

Status of Women committee  People draw trend lines, but there won't be any data. People will be guessing.

Status of Women committee  It does not mean that. It means that Canada is in violation of very serious international obligations. As a signatory to the optional protocol to CEDAW, one can file a complaint with the committee on the status of women in addition to going to domestic courts. It's a very serious violation.

Status of Women committee  The justice department attempted to get Statistics Canada to do exactly that. The general social survey does not do any polling in any of the territories for precisely the reasons we're talking about. People are too isolated, too vulnerable, and they simply have too low of a response rate on anything that is voluntary.

Status of Women committee  Yes. With respect to other countries, I have worked extensively with Eurostat, which is a European Union-wide database. I've worked extensively with the individual country databases for countries such as Sweden, Norway, Spain, the U.K., and so on. And not only do they have unbelievably detailed sex-disaggregated data available to anybody--even to me in Canada--for no payment whatsoever, but it's produced much more quickly, it's more comprehensive, it has more depth to it, and it is something that no one would consider dropping.

Status of Women committee  I took it directly to the national newspapers, the political parties, the major blogs, and so on, and a huge reaction unfolded.

Status of Women committee  Question 33 was never designed to cover every aspect of unpaid work. Unpaid work probably accounts for about one-half of all human work hours in Canada. But unlike paid work, which is covered in 12 questions over many, many pages in every census, unpaid work has been segregated into one single question.

Status of Women committee  Well, I think the most obvious answer is that there has been advocacy, I believe, going on within Statistics Canada to try to get rid of question 33. I think that's a very direct link. After having heard the testimony that was given two days ago in this committee, I went back and reread the “2011 Census Content Consultation Report”, in which they report on their consultation process.

Status of Women committee  Professor, not Doctor.

Status of Women committee  Both.