Status of Women committee  I would like to thank you for providing me with the opportunity to present my views on the employment insurance program. I plan to address two questions here. First, and very briefly, given access to benefits, what are the effects of various EI provisions on women in terms of t

Status of Women committee  I can speak to those statistics. I'm a numbers person, and that number comes from the February 2009 labour force survey. I took a sample of all women who are currently employed part-time, and 9.3% of them said they were working part-time because of business conditions and they c

Status of Women committee  No. This is raw data from the labour force survey. They ask people questions like why they are working part-time, which is less than 30 hours per week. First they are asked if that's because they want to. If they want to, is it because they want to care for their children, or is

Status of Women committee  I realize that I probably sound very cold-hearted in my comments.

Status of Women committee  I realize this. I am very sympathetic to people who are in circumstances that make it very difficult for them to work. That is not a majority of the population. I think there are a lot of women who choose to work part-time. They like spending time at home with their kids. They l

Status of Women committee  Perhaps I could respond. I think you bring up a major point: it's not clear what the objectives of the EI program are. A lot of women, yes, are working part-time because they can't find day care. Is having a national child care program supposed to be part of EI, or is that bett

Status of Women committee  I can speak to senior women, not specifically to EI, but I have been looking at the incomes of seniors and how that's changed over the past decade. They've improved for women quite a bit over the last decade, given that the most recent cohort of women entering retirement are mu

Status of Women committee  Thank you for having me. My objective today is to provide you with some background about women's pension security, based on the research that I've been doing for several years. Specifically, I want to give you a picture of how retirement incomes have changed over the past decade

Status of Women committee  Okay, I can try to comment on that. I don't think we always have empirical evidence for some of these ideas. Generally we saw a very large increase in the educational levels of women, starting with women who were going to college in the 1960s. They were going to college for the

Status of Women committee  There are a lot of measurement issues when people are talking about this ratio, and we have to be very precise on what we are talking about. I think Mr. Ménard would be talking about the ratio of annual earnings of women to men. That does look to be around 70% right now. That is

Finance committee  Yes, I can. Can you hear me now?

Finance committee  Thank you. Thank you for having me here today. I enjoy the opportunity to speak with you. In the March 6 meeting of this committee you heard from René Morissette and Alison Hale, from Statistics Canada. They are highly respected researchers so I see no need to replicate any of

Finance committee  Thank you. I can perhaps make a quick comment. The key signal in the skills market is wages. If you let markets work, and if they seem to be working and there's a labour shortage, you will see wages rise. By bringing in such things as temporary worker programs, what we are often

Finance committee  I would start the information campaign probably in junior high in terms of what types of jobs are out there and what kinds of skills are in demand and how that might change over the next decade, because that's how far ahead they have to think. Then in high school one of the key t

Finance committee  My point is that if the student isn't willing to do it, the wage is not high enough.