Status of Women committee  With regard to the differences between urban and rural, yes, I definitely think there are significant differences. I think it is more difficult in some cases in rural areas for different reasons. You have a lack of services in a lot of rural areas, a lack of social infrastructure

Status of Women committee  Thank you.

Status of Women committee  I agree. Women's organizations in particular have been working on these issues for decades and decades. The answers are here. We know what needs to be done. Women's organizations work with all sorts of women, different demographics of women. A lot of us are supported by our membe

Status of Women committee  I was going to say that Laura kind of touched on this and she could probably touch more on how other countries are dealing with this, but I do think that pension credits are important. I do think we should value this as work. I think there are two things going on here. We do ne

Status of Women committee  I think that this is—

Status of Women committee  I think the challenge is that we have to go all in. If we value this and we believe that a national, universal, publicly funded child care system is what we want, we have to go all in and put the money there. We have to create a strong foundation for this system. It's been a hodg

Status of Women committee  Yes. I think that if we are still underfunding what we know needs to be funded, it will still be a mishmash of market-based spots. Maybe there will be more subsidized care; there could be more spaces that are freed up. However, it will not be the national system that we want.

Status of Women committee  Go ahead, Laura.

Status of Women committee  I really think it needs to focus on the fact that these gaps existed before COVID. While COVID really exposed this in maybe more of a collective way, and there was a collective reckoning with COVID, there were already gaps, really awful gaps in a lot of women's lives before. I do

Status of Women committee  Thank you. I think the reason this impacts senior women is that if they have been working part time or not working in the paid workforce for a lot of those years, they do not have a sufficient pension. Even CPP with all of these things like OAS and GIS is very difficult to live

Status of Women committee  Thank you for that question. I do think it's important that we look at this using an intersectional lens, because often when we're looking at women entering the paid workforce and at that aspect, we're looking at some women. Some women can afford to pay for care, but that's on

Status of Women committee  Yes. Another one that I would say broadly speaks to some of what Laura brought up, too, is that I really think we need to have federal funds transferred to the provinces for health in addition to child care. A publicly funded child care system would actually raise the wages of so

Status of Women committee  I didn't get to my clear recommendations. One very significant thing that can be done is to implement a national, universal, publicly funded child care system. That is one huge thing that can be done, and it would help women in two ways. First, women could access child care wit

Status of Women committee  Thank you for inviting me to contribute to this committee's very important study on women's unpaid labour, on behalf of the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, CRIAW-ICREF. CRIAW-ICREF is a national not-for-profit women's organization founded in 1976. We c