Status of Women committee  I can do it. Thank you for inviting me here. I'm going to talk about women whose work is unpaid or lowly paid. My focus is on women's unpaid and lowly paid work. When governments survey the economic situation of women, they discover that women have less income than men throug

Status of Women committee  Thanks. Here we go. Let's roll together a lot of these piecemeal caregiving benefits. We have the $1,200, which is very small; the child tax benefit, which is, unfortunately, not universal and is dependent on household income; and the day care amount, which is $10,000 per child

Status of Women committee  Yes.

Status of Women committee  Put it in there.

Status of Women committee  I wish I could give you a better answer. I don't know. I'm in touch with UNICA, in Rome, and they lobbied—Italian women are very feisty—and they had parades, and they got pension benefits. The government has been slow to follow through, but at least they got the theory going. I d

Status of Women committee  I think Michelle and I were talking globally. If we had a caregiving ministry—I don't want to speak for you, but we were talking about it—that focuses on it, we could actually revolutionize a bunch of stuff. And this is me talking, not her. I don't want to speak for her.

Status of Women committee  In France they have a nice formula where you count children as people you share with, and the single-income family could use that. In the United States they have head of household. You can be a single parent and you can share with your children. So a single parent can benefit fr

Status of Women committee  Do you mean for the two income-splitting things?

Status of Women committee  We had a conference in this building in January, and we had some great speakers on that, and there was also a pension-splitting conference in October. Jack Mintz was speaking there, and David Murrell, from the University of New Brunswick. They're economists. I'm not an economist.

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. However, it must be admitted that the funds were not always correctly invested because they only met a few of women's desires and needs. However, you have to meet all needs. So the analysis of the situation of women who work at home was very well done, but we didn't

Status of Women committee  Well, Canada has signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has some articles in it that say a child has the right to the care of the parents wherever possible or to those people whom the parents have chosen; that the parents are in the best position to know the b

Status of Women committee  If I correctly understand the question—

Status of Women committee  When funds are cut?

Status of Women committee  All people in life at some point are care receivers and most end up caregivers. During the care receiving, we're usually in a position of vulnerability—we can't do it for ourselves. That's a universal state from time to time in our lives. That's what they have in common. Most se

Status of Women committee  Just to whip right through some of those points, a lot of female entrepreneurs are in the home because they want to be with their children. Child care does not address their need. On the EI flexibility, have you considered having a man's contribution qualify the wife to be at h