Status of Women committee  Thank you very much, Madam Chair and members of the committee. You heard two excellent presentations earlier this morning detailing the positive impact of affordable child care on women's economic security. They made the case that women's economic security is enhanced by partic

Status of Women committee  First of all, we would absolutely support the need to diversify the workforce. It is more than 95% female, and obviously, it's good for kids to have a diversity of adults in their lives. One of the reasons, of course, that it's predominantly female is that it's a low-paid sector,

Status of Women committee  I think that one's for you.

Status of Women committee  I think the issue around women's economic security is to make sure they have access to the paid labour force and also have access to full pay when they're away from the paid labour force when their children are young. That's really the only way to do it. The issue of engaging m

Status of Women committee  Sure. I think in part this issue was addressed in the testimony earlier this morning. It was clearly stated by Professor Fortin that the Quebec child care system is not the ideal system. One of the reasons it isn't is that there continue to be two Quebec systems of child care.

Status of Women committee  I could probably go on and on trying to dispute the evidence you just made reference to, but instead what I'd like to do is just maybe clarify what we mean by a fully publicly funded system. For us, a publicly funded system does not mean one type of day care only. A publicly fund

Status of Women committee  There are two ways to answer that. One is to talk about a quality system, and the other is to talk about quality care. There's all kinds of evidence and research that's been done on what good quality care is in terms of the provision of care to children. We know what that eviden

Status of Women committee  First of all, we haven't given up hope. We think this project is ongoing. It would be completely unrealistic to expect any government of Canada to be able to put in place and develop a universal child care system within a few months. It's an ongoing process. We want to give the g

Status of Women committee  I'm by no means an expert in federal-provincial-territorial relations, but there are a lot of examples where the federal government has used what is known constitutionally as its spending power to be able to help direct what provincial and territorial governments do in areas that

Status of Women committee  I don't know how much to add except that it's not just an issue of pay. There's a problem of pension coverage, for example. Also, we have a huge problem, and this is recognized everywhere, related to pay, related to benefits, related to working conditions of retention. We have a

Status of Women committee  I think Martha Friendly raised this as well in her testimony. What child care advocates have always said is that child care can only be one part of a broader support system for women's equality, for the welfare of children, and for the benefit of families. It's interesting beca

Status of Women committee  I'm glad you pointed out that we should not be starting from scratch. We've been talking about this issue for too long. Actually, I think in many ways the document that is most instructive is the Katie Cooke task force report. She was appointed by prime minister Trudeau senior in

Status of Women committee  I would echo that. I think it would be really helpful for governments to contribute to or put in place systems that would allow for paid parental leave without individual employees and employers necessarily shouldering the cost. You will get that, if, as Ms. Doucet said, you

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the invitation to be here with you this afternoon. I'll try to get through this before the bell rings. There is no longer any dispute that parents in Canada with young children are in desperate need of greater gove

Finance committee  We actually consider these changes to be negative, because they will create a situation in which some parents have access to longer leave, and most will not. We cannot see how a reduction in the benefit level under EI could be a positive development. We also think that although