Status of Women committee  If I may comment, it was our choice to choose the hotel, and we didn't know. If I had known, we wouldn't have gone.

Status of Women committee  We've actually just finished doing two major studies that looked directly at that issue. We were using the Canadian community health survey, which is the largest national health survey, and we were looking at using the raw data in a secret data centre at U of T that Michael Baker

Status of Women committee  Could I comment on your child care comment? Going back to your previous comment about choice, I would just say that $100 a month does not give a poor mother much choice around the quality of child care she can buy.

Status of Women committee  I have to budge in. First of all, the only thing about employment insurance that is insurance is the title. It has never been an insurance program. It has never been based on insurance principles. It has always been part of the social welfare system. We judge its acceptability b

Status of Women committee  The question didn't follow directly from the comments. One of the problems with studying welfare is that it varies so much from province to province. I'm not an expert on Quebec, but I do know that the attitudes in Quebec, in general, are much more progressive than they are in t

Status of Women committee  Somebody should be offering training so people don't wind up on welfare. EI is part of it, but I think it also has to depend on the education systems and a variety of other systems. But in the long-term, training is the only way we're going to break the cycle of people going into

Status of Women committee  Certainly training is a large part of any kind of medium-term, long-term solution. I think one of the problems is that in certain conditions people who are on social assistance are essentially prevented from participating in training programs. In Ontario, which is the province I

Status of Women committee  Thank you very much. I'd like to thank the members of the committee for inviting me here this morning to give me the opportunity to talk about one of the most important policy issues affecting Canada, affecting women particularly, today. I'm an economist by training, but for t