Status of Women committee  This is hard to do quickly.

Status of Women committee  I don't like using the words “unpaid work”. I like to talk about “non-market work”. I think the problem for our society in the past several decades, the problem that many traditional economists are now starting to understand, is that our lives have been focused on the market. Everything is driven by the market.

Status of Women committee  Even if you can catch up later in the particular circumstance, when we're going through this economic upheaval that we're facing now, the gap probably comes at a pretty bad time.

Status of Women committee  It's hard to respond to that question other than to say that things are going backwards if there's a huge range of data we're not going to be able to use anymore. I know that in my own professional life there are pieces of work that we would have done but will not now be able to do if we do not have the long-form census this time.

Status of Women committee  As an individual, not as a representative of my organization.

Status of Women committee  I wondered if somebody might ask that. When I read the transcripts, I thought, “Oh, is my memory any better than Dr. Fellegi's?” I can't definitively say that I know the answer. Based on my recollections of what was going on at the time...and it goes to Dr. Fellegi's statement too, though, that there is a role for government in deciding what we ask questions about.

Status of Women committee  From my recollection, this was one of those issues. There was a lot of testing that went on in the design of the questions. To the point that was made earlier about people understanding the question, they focus tested it a lot. They tried to get the questions as good as they could, so that people who were not used to considering these things as work would understand what they were.

Status of Women committee  Thank you. It's an interesting question, and the response was mentioned earlier. You need more than one source of information to really get a handle on these things. I'm a very visual person, and something springs to mind that Australia did when it was looking at unpaid work and time-use surveys the first time.

Status of Women committee  Okay. I think I can do it. I was struck in the census data by how much work some senior women were doing, such as almost full-time, or more, child care. I really wanted to know what these grandmothers were doing. Knowing what I know about family structure and differences across immigrant and visible minority communities, I really wanted to dig into this to find out what was going on.

Status of Women committee  Thank you very much for inviting me to this session. I believe I've been invited on the basis of some history I've had over the years in working with gender statistics in collaboration with StatsCan and with women's organizations. In particular, I have done a lot of work on unpaid work.