Status of Women committee  Yes.

Status of Women committee  Yes, I will. Thank you very much. As much as possible, I will try not to repeat what the previous speakers have said. We want to thank the committee for this opportunity to present this material today. A great deal of time and effort went into compiling reports, such as the “Women in Canada” publications, “The Wealth of Canadians” report, and Dr.

Status of Women committee  Again, these are national averages. I think what's significant is the fact that you had this massive decline from 60% to 20%, but one in five is still a fairly significant part of that population.

Status of Women committee  Stats Canada doesn't call it poverty. It's a low-income cut-off, which is defined based on family spending patterns, average spending patterns, and so on. I think if we put a word to it, it's called straitened circumstances, as opposed to poverty. Yes, go ahead.

Status of Women committee  I think “drop-off” is probably a poor word. What we really would have to do is look at how women who had arrived before 1990 had done during their recent arrival years. In that sense, we're comparing apples and oranges. The recent arrivals have not really had time to adjust. On the other hand, while we say their employment and income levels are lower, they're a very well-educated population.

Status of Women committee  It's very subjective, yes.

Status of Women committee  To simplify it, basically what Stats Canada has done in using averages is look at a family with a certain income level and evaluate what percentage of its income is spent on basics, such as housing, food, and clothing. If they spend a very significant proportion of their income on those variables, meaning that there's almost nothing left over, then that qualifies them as having a low income.

Status of Women committee  We talked a little bit earlier about this. Currently, if you look at the overall immigrant population--I'm talking about slightly different sources from some of the other data here, so bear with me--about 58% of all immigrant women are employed compared with about 64% of all women in Canada, so there's about a six percentage point difference.

Status of Women committee  Let me talk a little bit in very general terms. We talk about diversity issues, and we've had some questions about immigrants and visible minorities. As a general rule, those populations don't do quite as well as the overall population, but the differences are fairly close. There are much wider differences between the aboriginal female population and the overall population.

Status of Women committee  Again, as we said, looking into the future or trying to explain things is not within the scope of the Women in Canada publication, particularly without a statistical basis to do so. In answer to your questions, I think there was, over the course of the last decade, a lessening of the interest in gender issues.

Status of Women committee  Well, I'll answer the quick question. For the most part, in the Women in Canada report, the data is presented at a national level. We would certainly like to have more provincial data in there, but it is already a 325-page book, and at some point in time we have to cut things off.

Status of Women committee  None of us is really an expert in that. I'm sure some work has been done at Statistics Canada, and we could probably go to the actual experts in that area and provide the committee with some documentation, if there is any available. I know there are population projections, but whether or not that's included, I think, it's certainly beyond our---

Status of Women committee  No, we did not. We do know that aboriginal women are more than twice as likely to be a female lone parent as opposed to the regular population. We know that aboriginal women in general are twice as likely as other women to have low incomes, but in this particular report we didn't look at female lone parents.

Status of Women committee  I will pass that to my colleague Ms. Mihorean, who is more the expert in that area than I am.

Status of Women committee  That would be beyond the scope of certainly what we did, but the earlier part of your question is really quite interesting. I often get asked this question: how is it that you are a male doing Women in Canada?