EVIDENCE

Standing Committee on the Status of Women NUMBER 004 1st SESSION 43rd PARLIAMENT Tuesday, July 7, 2020 Le mardi 7 juillet 2020 Standing Committee on the Status of Women CANADA [Recorded by Electronic Apparatus] EVIDENCE July 7, 2020 Committee NUMBER 004 NUMBER 004 NUMÉRO 004 04 07 07 2020 2020/07/07 12:05:00 House Of Commons Comité permanent de la condition féminine Standing Committee on the Status of Women FEWO Chair Mrs. Karen Vecchio 1 43 PUBLIC PART ONLY -

PARTIE PUBLIQUE SEULEMENT

(1205) [ English ]

The Chair (Mrs. Karen Vecchio (Elgin—Middlesex—London, CPC)) :

I call this meeting to order. Welcome to meeting number four of the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women. To begin, I would like to thank all of the members for being here today. To ensure an orderly meeting, I would like to outline a few rules to follow. Occupational health and safety staff have requested that we limit our movement in the room and wear masks unless seated. Anyone who has their mask on right now is able to take their mask off if they wish. It's a little warm. Floor markings indicate the path of travel around the table counter-clockwise.

Individuals should respect physical distancing and remain two metres from one another, particularly when unmasked. I know for our committee that's very hard because we actually really do care about one another. Try to stay away from one another today. Seats and microphones have been placed in a manner that respects physical distancing. Therefore, I'm asking that they remain in the same location throughout this meeting. To minimize health risks, you will note that personnel attending today have been limited. Staff have received a phone number and they can listen in on the proceedings in real time.

You will note that no paper documents have been distributed. All documents have been distributed electronically to members. Should you require a copy of a document, please advise the clerk of the committee by emailing her at fewo@parl.gc.ca. Today we're going to begin on the motion from Jag Sahota to begin a study today on the effects of COVID-19 on women. I'm going to pass this over to Jag to read her motion.

Ms. Jag Sahota (Calgary Skyview, CPC) :

The motion reads as follows:

That the committee commence a study of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on women on Tuesday, July 7, 2020, for a total of six hours to begin an examination of:

a) how the COVID-19 pandemic has uniquely impacted women; (

b) what supports women need in preparation for a potential second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic; and, (

c) to consider the specific challenges that women in Canada are facing, namely: (

i) women’s physical safety and security as it relates to evident increases in domestic violence, human trafficking, and overarching health-related concerns for vulnerable demographics, such as seniors; (ii) women’s economic stability as it relates to the closure of workplaces across the country, reduced family income, and the inability for many women-owned and operated small businesses to conduct business as usual; and (iii) social pressures or obstacles due to the COVID-19 pandemic, including caregiving for children, elderly parents; or other family members; and that as a part of the study, the Minister of Women and Gender Equality and the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion, as well as other witnesses appear before the committee on July 7, 2020 to discuss the government’s response to COVID-19 and how it relates to women.

The Chair :

Thank you very much, Jag. Is there any discussion from that motion? Seeing no discussion, do we all agree with this motion? (Motion agreed to)

The Chair: That's unanimous. Thank you very much. Beginning at 12:30, the committee will commence a study of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on women for a total of six hours. We will hear from the ministers tomorrow from 10:30 a.m. till 12 p.m. Following the study, a report will be produced for the consideration of the committee. If the committee agrees, we will quickly discuss drafting instructions with the analysts before we adopt the study budget. Is it agreed to move in camera to have this discussion? (Motion agreed to)

The Chair: Fantastic. We will now move in camera. Thank you. [ Proceedings continue in camera ]

(1205) (1235)

[ Public proceedings resume ]

The Chair :

I'd like to reconvene our meeting. Good morning to everyone. Welcome to the study of the impacts of COVID-19 on women. Today we're meeting until 6 p.m. to receive the testimony on this important topic. We'll begin with opening statements of 10 minutes from the witnesses, followed by the rounds of questions. During the questioning of witnesses, there will be six minutes for the first questioner of each party, as follows: round one, Conservative Party, Liberal Party, Bloc Québécois and New Democratic Party. For the second round, we'll continue to work together on those.

I'll ask the members to raise their hands to ask any questions, if we're not able to get everything circulated appropriately. We're going to start with our first panel and I am very honoured to welcome Megan Walker, the executive director of the London Abused Women's Centre, as well as Marcie Hawranik, founder and president of Canadian Equality Consulting. We'll start off with Marcie. Marcie, you have the floor for 10 minutes.

Ms. Marcie Hawranik (Founder and President, Canadian Equality Consulting) :

Thank you. I'd like to first thank you for the invitation and the opportunity to testify before you today regarding the impact of COVID-19 on women or, as I like to reframe it, the intersectional gender impact of COVID-19. To start, I'm sure we all agree that we live in a country that isn't equal and where gender inequality persists. You can see this to be true by looking at the many barriers that women and other marginalized or under-represented populations in the workplace experience, which I see every day in my work.

You can also see gender inequality in the lack of women in leadership and in domestic violence rates in this country, by examining the ingrained biases and stereotypes that we all have and that we've all learned, and by looking at gendered sectors and the value or worth that society places on them. For instance, sectors heavily dominated by men are given greater value than those by women, and sectors dominated by women tend to still have male leadership. Also, there is the persistent gender wage gap.

You can pretty much examine any sector in Canada and find evidence of gender inequality, and this was our reality pre-COVID-19. We were also starting an economic slump pre-COVID-19, especially in Alberta where I'm based. As you typically see in economic downturns, violence against women increases, caregiving responsibilities to women increase, and many of those other gender inequality indicators skyrocket. Now, once COVID-19 hit, it accelerated and exacerbated all of these inequalities.

Then employment dropped related to social distancing measures, creating a large impact on sectors with high female employment shares. The virus itself doesn't discriminate based on gender or sex, but its systems and sectors that we have created and designed are discriminatory. COVID-19 is the flashlight illuminating all of the cracks of inequality in our system. The workers who are most affected by COVID-19, those who we rely on to keep us safe and informed are, by the very nature of their jobs, at most risk of contracting COVID-19, and they are predominantly women.

Our health care sector is dominated by women in Canada. Nurses are 92% women, lab techs are 80% women, respiratory therapists, who are very important during COVID-19, are 75% women, and home care workers and personal support workers are 90% women. These workers at the front line of fighting COVID-19 are all predominantly women, and this extends beyond the health care sector to other jobs on the front line of COVID-19. Our grocery store workers are 84% women, food service industry workers are 72% women, and janitorial staff are 71% women.

When we look at the non-profit sector that includes food banks, shelters, women's shelters, homelessness supports and support for people living with disabilities, that sector is 75% women. That sector alone employs over two million Canadians but also relies heavily on a volunteer workforce of over 13 million people with the majority of those, which is incredibly important, being unpaid labour that helps support our most vulnerable during COVID-19 and, again, they are predominantly women.

This sector in particular has also been crippled by a lack of financial relief and by having to delay or cancel fundraising activities. Then, when we look at the health workers in non-profit sectors that are predominantly women, they also require PPE to do their work and stay safe. We've seen a drastic shortage in PPE that is designed to fit women's bodies. We know that the majority of PPE, even though it is deemed unisex, was designed with only average male bodies in mind, so we are unable to adequately protect these women working on the front line. The education system is dominated by a female workforce.

Teachers are 77% women, and TAs and EAs are 96% women. They have all been drastically affected by COVID-19. When we look at the closing of schools, this results in predominantly women having to home-school their children, having to become their own day cares or care for elderly parents, neighbours or co-workers while meticulously cleaning and sanitizing their homes now in addition to the usual grocery shopping, organizing and laundry, and this is on top of working their usual day job. We know this because 75% of women caregivers in Canada are also employed full-time.

We know that women are more likely to work over 20 plus hours a week than men as a caregiver and twice as likely to provide personal care. These stats come pre-COVID-19.

(1240) When we apply an intersectional lens, we also learn that racialized women have more caregiving responsibilities than white women. Alternatively, as you know, COVID-19 has also resulted in women having to completely drop out of the workforce due to these heavy caregiving and schooling responsibilities. A study was recently conducted to verify this and found that the majority of women who were seriously considering quitting their jobs during this time due to this caregiving were single mothers, then racialized women, followed by Asian women and then white women.

We also know that in March alone labour data revealed that women accounted for two-thirds of job losses despite making up less than half of the workforce to begin with. Those who didn't lose their jobs lost 50% more work hours than men. Also in March, women between the ages of 25 and 54 years—that core working group—lost more than twice the jobs than men in that same age group. Nearly half of this decrease was among women working in part-time and often low-paying jobs in the service or care industries. In other cases, it's been reported that women are choosing to exit the workforce.

Between February and March, the number of core-age women who were not in the Canadian labour market grew substantially, by over 10%, but this isn't a choice to leave the workforce. It is a need, because, for example, in heterosexual relationships, women are typically paid less than their male partners and are expected to be more responsible for caregiving, and now someone has to do it and look after children and school them, because they're all at home together.

The CERB program may help these women in the short term, but this unfortunately will also have longer-term negative effects on their career and future earning power. That needs to be considered. The pandemic has also resulted in heightened domestic violence. Shelters, support organizations like the YWCA and organizations that provide informal support to survivors, like Sagesse in Calgary, as well as policing agencies, have all reported heightened domestic violence rates.

Several of them mentioned that the rates were lower at the beginning of the pandemic due to strict social isolation when women were trapped at home with their abusers, as an example, and then, once restrictions started to loosen, the rates just skyrocketed. We also know that women are more likely to experience poverty and have lower incomes. Women work two-thirds of minimum-wage jobs, putting them increased risk of unemployment and a greater risk of poverty. All of these impacts that have been documented thus far contribute to greater gender inequality in Canada.

In order to mitigate these disproportionate impacts and to prepare for a second wave of COVID-19, we need to ensure that all of our decisions are made with an intersectional gender lens to ensure we're not repeating these patterns of inequality and discrimination and that we can begin to make incremental and lasting change for the betterment of everyone. I'm an advocate of gender-based analysis plus, or GBA+, and it's incredibly important to ensure that this lens is being applied to all COVID-19 response, management and prevention decision-making. Now is the time to double down on GBA+.

A good GBA+ analysis doesn't examine just sex and gender but also includes race, ethnicity, culture, language, ability, age, sexual orientation and other factors such as geographic location. The government's GBA+ informed program would then be more effective and tailored to specific regions in Canada to remove barriers that specific populations may experience.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission, the G7 Gender Equality Advisory Council and the United Nations, along with a multitude of gender equality stakeholders across Canada and the world, have been advocating for countries to take a feminist approach to COVID-19. If we don't double down and ensure that an intersectional feminist lens like GBA+ is effectively applied to all of our decisions and interventions, we will fail Canadians, and women will continue to bear the brunt of the pandemic.

(1245) The Chair :

Thank you very much, Marcie. Now we're going to move over to Megan Walker, the director at the London Abused Women's Centre. Megan, you have the floor for 10 minutes.

Ms. Megan Walker (Executive Director, London Abused Women's Centre) :

Thank you so much, Madam Chair. Good afternoon to you and the members of the committee. The London Abused Women's Centre is a non-crisis, non-residential feminist agency that provides women and girls over the age of 12 who are victims of male violence with immediate access to long-term, woman-centred, trauma-informed service. This includes women and girls who are abused in their intimate partnerships; are trafficked or sexually exploited into the commercial sex trade, including pornography; are sexually assaulted by strangers or acquaintances or via date; and/or are subjected to sexual harassment and torture.

LAWC also provides support and counselling to family members of women and girls who have been trafficked or sexually exploited, who are missing or who have disappeared. Many parents have travelled from cities across this country to London, Ontario, to meet with us at LAWC to help us find their daughters. Without LAWC's support, more than 200 family members would continue every single day to check online ads to see if their daughters were still being advertised to provide violent sexual services to men. They do this because they need to know whether their daughters are alive or dead.

During the 2019-20 fiscal year, LAWC provided service to 8,100 women and girls, a 107% increase over previous years. COVID has significantly impacted the lives of women, girls and all children. Women have been forced to isolate in their homes with their abusers. Imagine, just for one moment, how your lives would be impacted if you were forced to remain in your home while knowing that you would be repeatedly assaulted, raped, tortured, debased and maybe even killed. Now imagine your young children being forced to witness or be exposed daily to the violence their mother is facing.

Some of these children may be harmed as they attempt to help their mothers. Others may be murdered along with their mothers. Older children will sometimes gather the younger siblings and take them to their bedroom, where they will pull dresser drawers or chests in front of their bedroom doors to keep their dad away. During COVID, many agencies, including LAWC, had to close their physical space and work from home, providing online groups and phone counselling. Women trapped in their homes who needed help couldn't call for phone counselling. They couldn't call for the police. They couldn't run to a friend's home.

Leaving their abuser under ideal circumstances is very, very difficult. During COVID, it was almost impossible. If they themselves were able to find a way to leave, they wouldn't do so if it meant leaving their children behind. Most women in these situations live under constant threat of being killed or having their children killed. If the police do arrive, thanks to the wonderful alertness and intervention of a neighbour who decides to take action, where will she take those children? The shelters are full. There is no place for women and children to go.

During COVID, we did connect with the London Police Service because we identified that having no place to go was a huge gap. Police need to have a place where they can take women and children immediately, so the London Abused Women’s Centre, in collaboration with the London Police Service, responded by developing a protocol whereby LAWC secured safe hotel rooms so that police could take women and their children immediately to a hotel.

LAWC negotiated with the hotel so that police could just drop in there with women day or night, at any time, and LAWC would respond any time by stepping in to provide food cards, clothing, diapers and any other identified needs. We provided counselling and safety planning immediately, and we helped women get to shelters as spaces became open. We helped them find long-term housing. This was a huge upfront cost to the London Abused Women’s Centre, but we were later supported by the United Way and recently by WAGE through the Canadian Women's Foundation to cover those costs.

It certainly was not a perfect solution, but it provided hope when sometimes it was hope that was missing. Aside from the last two weeks of April and the first two weeks of May, following the femicide in Nova Scotia when LAWC service demands increased by almost 50%, our overall service demands during COVID decreased by 18%, as did the London Police Service's. This was all attributed to the nine weeks when we worked from home. Our physical office was closed to walk-in and drop-in clients and we were not able to provide services to women and girls in youth or adult detention services.

Phone and Zoom groups were simply not accessible to women at home with their abusers. COVID kept women hostage in their homes with their abusers. How could women possibly reach out for service when they couldn't even go to the bathroom without asking for permission to do so? However, LAWC's anti-trafficking program saw a 37% increase in service requests during COVID, notwithstanding the federal government's decision to discontinue to fund our trafficking program in the very middle of COVID. The London community sustained us by providing funding to keep our program open until July 31.

Had our community not provided funding to sustain that program temporarily, 650 trafficked and sexually exploited women and girls to whom we have provided long-term service would have had no place to go except back to their traffickers, where they may have ended up in the morgue. That of course does not bode well for a government that prides itself as being feminist. The fact that the Trudeau government thought it was okay to eliminate funding to all anti-trafficking programs across Canada in the midst of a deadly pandemic is deeply concerning about this government's commitment to women and girls.

We find it devastating and appalling. Trafficking and sexual exploitation did not suddenly disappear or slow down during COVID. It increased. Men who believe they have a right to pay to rape women and girls increased their demand for underage and young women and girls. Sex purchasers fuelled the demand for young girls and women, and it is traffickers who are always at the ready to make sure they have the supply needed to meet this increased demand. COVID was no exception.

Traffickers continue to traffic vulnerable young women and underage women from city to city and from hotel to hotel along the 400-series highways. There is of course no social distancing and no PPE in the sex trade. While those precautions are mandated for health care practitioners exposed to bodily fluids, that would be contrary to the very purpose of the sex industry, which is to allow men unfettered access to rape women and girls.

(1255) Men pay more for unprotected sex, and they pay more for the money shot where they can ejaculate on a woman's face. Not only have I not heard any public health official or politician address this, we've heard that too many of them believe that the role of women is to satisfy men, their sexual fetishes and fantasies. With schools closed, with children at home and parents working from home, we saw an increase in online luring of children. Girls were pressured to strip and masturbate for traffickers. They were young and naive and thought the boy or man online was interested in them.

They never expected to be videotaped in various stages of nudity and masturbation. The videos were uploaded to foreign sites like Pornhub that is operated by MindGeek in Montreal. Horrified and devastated parents called LAWC for help in removing these videos. We have been attempting to do so, working very hard, but the reality is that, once these videos are up, they are easily downloaded and, even when removed from porn sites, they remain forever embedded in somebody's download file. It's important for you to know that the funding the Trudeau government eliminated for LAWC's anti-trafficking program on behalf....

We served on behalf of the government, and it was eliminated. It cost only $164,000 per year.

The Chair :

We only have a few seconds left, Megan.

Ms. Megan Walker :

Okay, thanks. I just want to say that we are living in extraordinarily difficult times for women and for girls. Governments make a lot of promises to vulnerable and marginalized populations, but their actions move at a snail's pace, if at all. We're asking that the government take its blinders off and invest in all Canadians, not just those with a voice and the means to make campaign donations. Thank you.

The Chair :

Thank you very much. We're now going to start our round of questions. I'm going to pass the floor over to Raquel. Raquel, you have six minutes.

Ms. Raquel Dancho (Kildonan—St. Paul, CPC) :

Thank you, Chair. Thank you to Ms. Walker and Ms. Hawranik for being here today. I greatly appreciated your testimonies. I'm a member of Parliament from Manitoba, and we know that the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted women, as you have both outlined, and in Manitoba we're facing a quite dire situation. Ms. Hawranik, as you mentioned, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we were facing some of the highest rates of domestic violence against women in the country.

We have over 12,000 children, from my last count, in child and family services, which is the most per capita in the world, and for those reasons and many others, I've been advocating to the wage officials and the minister that we get an office in Manitoba, which we don't currently have, and there have been a number of alarming things that have popped up lately in the media. We had a report from Shared Health Manitoba that there were over 90 cases reported of sexual assault involving the date-rape drug in 2018, and of course we know that very few sexual assault cases are reported.

This is clearly a rampant issue in Manitoba, and I just want to say that I really appreciate the work you're both doing. We take this very seriously as members of Parliament. I want to speak to you first, Ms. Hawranik, about the GBA+ work that you do. I want to get your take on some of the programs the government has announced over the last number of months. We know it acted very quickly to bring forward these programs.

My concern is that we're not aware of any GBA+ that was put on some of these programs, and I was wondering if you could comment on the CECRA program, the commercial emergency rental assist program for commercial properties. I may have got the acronym wrong there, but it's the program where the government will pay 50%, the tenant 25%, and then the landlord would take a 25% cut specifically. We're seeing very little uptake of this program, and anecdotally I'm hearing that women entrepreneurs are having a much more difficult time getting this program.

I'm wondering if you've had any experience with that and if you could elaborate on what a GBA+ may have shown on this program, had it been done.

(1300) Ms. Marcie Hawranik :

Sure. Thank you for sharing those stats about Manitoba. It's pretty similar out in Alberta as well. In terms of the Canada emergency commercial rent assistance program, I know that and I've been in communication with a lot of different women's support organizations, particularly organizations that work to advance female entrepreneurship in Canada. I've seen and heard very similar things from female entrepreneurs across the country. I've heard from ones in Manitoba and Alberta and even in downtown Toronto. What we know is that female entrepreneurs experience many unique barriers.

One of them is being able to access capital and financing. Women entrepreneurs already face an uphill battle in growing and scaling their businesses and in having the necessary capital and income to ride out pandemics like COVID-19. Added to the situation, what I've heard from female entrepreneurs across the country is that the Canada emergency commercial rent assistance program—on which I haven't yet seen quantitative data, and I would encourage the government to share that if they have it—has failed them in a way. For example, there's an entrepreneur in downtown Toronto named Caleigh.

She's an incredible entrepreneur who owns an amazing business that is a large-scale fitness company but that also incorporates a coffee shop and co-working spaces for other female entrepreneurs. She almost had to close her doors for good. The only thing that prevented her from having to shut down for good was that the public health restrictions had started to loosen. She was able to slowly reopen and re-engage, but definitely that program itself didn't help.

Ms. Raquel Dancho :

Thank you, Ms. Hawranik. I'll go to Ms. Walker now. I have one question regarding some of the funding the government announced, some $75 million of targeted funding, much of it related to human sex trafficking. I know that, Ms. Walker, your organization, the London Abused Women's Centre, did not receive any of that funding in this round. I do know that PACE in Vancouver, an organization that takes an approach that is different from that of your organization, to, I suppose, legitimize sex work rather than combatting human sex trafficking, which I know is the London Abused Women's Centre's approach....

I just want to get your two cents' worth on how you feel about this government's approach to sex work versus human trafficking and the priorities they are thereby putting forward.

Ms. Megan Walker :

We would never call it sex work because we don't believe exploitation of women and girls is actually work. What is really upsetting is that the Government of Canada did not advise any of the organizations that were previously funded through MAPI that they would not be receiving the funding. In fact, it took us calling repeatedly, and it was not until after our funding period ended that we were advised there would be no funding.

The government has now taken an approach in which instead of allocating funding equally across this country as it did at one time, it has issued a targeted proposal call to nine organizations whereby each of them can apply for up to $750,000 per year for four years. Three of them will be chosen. When you compare $750,000 a year for four years for three organizations to $164,000—the cost of the work the London Abused Women's Centre, an internationally recognized organization, has done nationally—none of this makes sense.

Ms. Raquel Dancho :

Thank you, Ms. Walker. Thank you, Ms. Hawranik, as well. I appreciate the comments from both of you.

(1305) The Vice-Chair (Ms. Sonia Sidhu (Brampton South, Lib.)) :

Gudie.

Ms. Gudie Hutchings (Long Range Mountains, Lib.) :

Thank you, Chair. Ladies, thank you both for being here today in these unprecedented times. Most importantly, thank you for the work you do helping Canadians, helping women and young girls and everyone. You're doing phenomenal work. Ms. Walker, I want to give you a shout-out. I believe it was early days in the pandemic that you realized and brought to attention the fact that the human trafficking hotline had ceased to work. Thank you for bringing that to the government's attention.

It was interesting that you reached out on one day and the next day, thankfully, the Minister of Public Safety had it up and relaunched. Since the relaunch, it's received more than 340 contacts. So I thank you for that. If it wasn't for that, those ladies and friends would have slipped through the cracks again. Ms. Hawranik, I really loved what you said, that COVID is the “flashlight”. We all know that a lot of these issues have been on the go for so long, and COVID did put the flashlight on them.

What are we doing, and what can we do better, to make sure that when the second wave comes, we've addressed it, and that, more importantly, we've made changes for the organizations and these women and children and young boys in the future going forward? I have just a couple of little points I want to bring up with you. Number one is that with regard to the funding that was announced in 2015, it was known that it was going to expire in 2020. We recognize the importance of human trafficking. That's why the human trafficking strategy will be launching at the end of this month, I believe. That will be great.

We know that we're investing $75 million across the government, with $10 million for WAGE; applications from the WAGE funding for that will open shortly. We know that there's an urgency of action. That's why we're rolling out some things now. We know that we need to address gender-based violence in all its forms. That's why we're supporting the national action plan with more than $200 million in additional investment. We know that women are at the core of our first-ever national housing strategy. It's our 10-year, $55-billion plan to give more Canadians a place to call home.

Of those investments, 30% has to go to projects that benefit women and girls. On top of that, we've promised to create at least 7,000 shelter spaces by 2027. We hit that number long before the pandemic of COVID-19 hit. However, since the pandemic began, we've doubled down on funding for vulnerable women and their families.

One of our first announcements was $50 million for this group, including $30 million for shelters and sexual assault centres; $10 million for indigenous shelters through Indigenous Services Canada; and a $10-million contingency fund for groups, like the London Abused Women's Centre, to provide the essential non-shelter services to help so many women. Through Women's Shelters Canada, we've provided more than $20 million to more than 420 women's shelters across Canada from coast to coast to coast. Through the Canadian Women's Foundation, we've provided more than $2 million to more than 90 sexual assault centres.

We've worked with the Province of Quebec to deliver funding there as well. We've provided that province with $6.46 million. According to the most recent report, that has gone to over 120 women's shelters and 50 sexual assault centres in the province of Quebec. As we speak, the contingency fund is flowing out the door via the Canadian Women's Foundation. We don't know exactly how many organizations have received money from that so far, but we do and can confirm that one of the recipients was yours, Ms. Walker, the London Abused Women's Centre. To touch on child care for a minute, I just want to make sure....

Again, from all the conversations, in terms of our women being ready and able to go back to work, it's the child care component that is so important. We proudly signed the first-ever multilateral agreement with the provinces and territories on early learning and child care, because we understand that investing in our children means investing in our future. We have provided $7.5 billion, between 2017 and 2028, to give the children the best possible start in life.

Since 2017 we've created more than 40,000 child care spots, providing kids who need it the most with quality, affordable and culturally appropriate child care. We have put a lot of money in the pockets of nine out of 10 families with the Canada child benefit. We're currently in the process of renewing each of the bilateral agreements with the provinces and territorial partners. We hope to announce those agreements soon. We all know that child care is basically the responsibility of the province, as many segments are, but we're jumping in to help out there. We know that there's still quite a lot more to do.

It's important to recognize how far we've come, but between 2015 and 2019, our government increased funding to women's and gender equality-seeking organizations from less than $20 million under the last year, in 2014, of the Harper government, to more than $65 million a year since then.

(1310) This year, through the Department of Women and Gender Equality, WAGE, a department that didn't exist before but was instead a subsection of another department, our government has approved total funding of over $110 million. That's more than the combined total funding in the last five years of the Conservative government, so it's wonderful that this has come to the forefront. Thanks to our investments, we are providing essential funding to more than 1,200 organizations. Ms.

Hawranik, I'd be curious to hear from you, as we talk about the COVID-19 issue, about your experiences in Alberta when you hit the downturn in the oil and gas industry, which my province is going through now too. What programs did you come up with that really helped? How can we learn from what you did in Alberta and from your experiences there? What can we learn and glean from that to take forward in what we're doing in COVID now and what we have to do coming up in the second wave of COVID?

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Sonia Sidhu) :

I'm sorry. The time is over. You have just 10 seconds. Quickly, please.

Ms. Gudie Hutchings :

I thought I had seven minutes. I'm sorry.

Ms. Marcie Hawranik :

We're still in the thick of it in Alberta and in the emergency response phase. I think it might be too soon to share anything we did that's really good and that could be replicated across the country, because Albertans are still really suffering, especially the women, but I do have some more general recommendations that I think would be applicable across the country, and that's to ensure that collection of diversity- and gender-disaggregated data in everything. I've communicated with emergency management agencies across the country.

What they've all shared with me is that they are not applying a GBA+ lens and they are not putting this intersectional lens on their work, because they feel that they're in an emergency and it is the first thing that gets left out, which I think is unacceptable. I'd love for the federal government to take leadership and push or advocate for that, especially since GBA+ should not be slowing down their work or their processes at all. It's been around since 1995. It was reinvigorated—thank you very much—in 2016.

Over the last few years, it should already have been seamlessly integrated into the way the government does business. I commend you for your investments in child care and, as well, I think a really targeted approach to fund emergency, accessible and flexible child care for everyone would be amazing, and also, even establishing permanent top-ups for professionals who work with people with disabilities, the elderly or those experiencing domestic violence and homelessness.

I also think that anything we can do to disrupt and affect the social norms that perpetuate inequality and advance gender equality, which could be some sort of campaign to disrupt these biases and social norms to prevent the—

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Sonia Sidhu) :

Thank you, Ms. Hawranik. The next speaker will be from the Bloc.

Ms. Megan Walker :

Excuse me, Madam Chair. Your former speaker, Ms. Hutchings, mentioned the London Abused Women's Centre twice. I just want to say that this opportunity for us to appear is important so that you can learn what's going on in the community.

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Sonia Sidhu) :

Ms. Walker, you can answer in the next question. Now the next turn goes to the Bloc. Go ahead.

Ms. Megan Walker :

I'm just concerned about political speeches on the floor when we are here to actually be consulted with.

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Sonia Sidhu) :

Andréanne, go ahead.

[ Translation ]

Ms. Andréanne Larouche (Shefford, BQ) :

Thank you very much. The testimony from both of you was very interesting. I hope I have time to speak to both witnesses, Ms. Walker and Ms. Hawranik. Ms. Hawranik, your group seems very helpful. For example, you provide inclusion and gender lens training. I will give you some examples of inappropriate measures introduced during the pandemic.

According to a female doctor I spoke to recently who runs a health clinic, many women in her community who work in jobs more often occupied by women, such as hairstyling or personal support in health care facilities, do not yet qualify for the emergency business account measure. These are often small businesses that do not need a business account and use a personal account. They are therefore not eligible for the $40,000 loan. Earlier, we also talked about the rent payment loan. These measures may not be tailored to women. What do you think?

Do you have any other quick clear examples of gender mainstreaming in policy measures in these times of crisis?

(1315) [ English ]

Ms. Marcie Hawranik :

I'll build off it a little bit in terms of the CERB program too. It's partially good because it helps women earn some money while bearing the caregiving load. However, the CERB program isn't advancing or supporting gender equality, which is the goal of GBA+, and it makes it easier for families to burden women and makes it easier for women to exit the workforce. Post COVID-19 it will be really important to pay attention to this and to help women to re-enter the workforce and not face pay barriers or discrimination for taking this time off.

I've also heard things very similar to what you've mentioned about how the CERB is inaccessible to women-owned smaller businesses, as well. I hope that helps.

[ Translation ]

Ms. Andréanne Larouche :

I also believe that education—raising awareness—is the most powerful tool for trying to eliminate major social issues like sexism, racism and all other forms of discrimination. You work on that with your group. At training sessions or conferences you have organized, which women's public policy stereotype have you found hardest to break? Is work-family balance still the cornerstone of women's participation in public, political and other spheres? How can we work on the education issue?

[ English ]

Ms. Marcie Hawranik :

Thank you. I think maybe one of the hardest prejudices to fight in order to advance gender equality and advance women is that of the movement in Canada that believes that this isn't a problem or that gender equality exists or that is misinformed as to what gender equality really means and thinks that it means the same treatment, exactly the same. That's not what the movement is about. I think part of it is to provide that level of awareness and education on what the goal is and how it benefits everyone. Also there are subtle biases that we all have, which are sometimes referred to as unconscious biases.

We're seeing them being raised a lot with the Black Lives Matter movement in terms of racism. The same exist with sexism, and those are often subtle and harder to detect. We do training that can help you become bias-aware, and there are specific processes similar to a GBA+ process that you can adopt and integrate seamlessly into your daily work in order to disrupt those biases.

[ Translation ]

Ms. Andréanne Larouche :

As we know, women also have to deal with a significant mental workload. In addition to the traditional role they have to play, they take on the whole invisible workload, that is, work done voluntarily that is not recognized widely enough. We must not forget all the responsibilities and social commitments at home. When they get involved, women sometimes feel they are neglecting their family. It is hard to change this perception. How can we facilitate women's participation? What can the government do to help them?

[ English ]

Ms. Marcie Hawranik :

Sure. I think the government can play a role as a catalyst in achieving gender equality. I don't think government is necessarily the best vehicle for doing all of that change. The government has limited scope too. I think the government can definitely lead by example. I like that there is a dedicated department, WAGE. Ensuring that they're adequately resourced is incredibly important. They're a very small department that's responsible for pushing out GBA+ to the entire federal government. As you can see, GBA+ isn't always being applied.

That's a big problem that I think should be addressed too; they need more support and assistance. Also, we look at regional differences across Canada and the status of women in each different province and territory and try to enact targeted solutions to support women there. One of the examples I mentioned, which I'd recommend, is also trying to disrupt those social norms and anti-equality biases through even public awareness campaigns and public education and by influencing people at a young age in early school curriculum as well.

(1320) The Vice-Chair (Ms. Sonia Sidhu) :

Thank you.

[ Translation ]

Ms. Andréanne Larouche :

Great. Do I have another minute? May I ask one last question?

[ English ]

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Sonia Sidhu) :

Your time is over. The next speaker will be Lindsay.

Ms. Lindsay Mathyssen (London—Fanshawe, NDP) :

Thank you very much to the witnesses for attending. Your testimony is extremely valuable, so thank you. I'd like to focus my time on Ms. Walker. You were very passionate and very clear in terms of the impacts on our local community due to COVID and some of the choices that have been made. The level of rhetoric that we heard I would have expected tomorrow, but we heard it today. I'd like to sort through some of that. Obviously, we know that in London human trafficking is a significant problem. Our proximity to the 401 and that major transportation route is a huge issue.

You received funding before for the duration of the MAPI program, and now the gap that you're seeing in between the delivery of new programming through the public safety department is a huge gap. I understand; I'm so grateful to the London community for coming to our community's aid to help stop this gap. However, could you talk a little bit about whether you are successful in receiving continued funding? I'd like to hear about what problems this will cause in terms of having to stop the funding.

You're all right until the end of July, but to restart a program that won't, probably, receive that funding until much later.... What are the costs of restarting that program? What gaps will you see? In addition to that, could you start to address this? I know there were some considerations that the funding you previously received versus the funding that you could potentially in the future receive, either through Public Safety or through WAGE funding, will be significantly less. What are you looking at in terms of that programming future with those gaps and with those smaller levels of funding in place?

Ms. Megan Walker :

I first of all want to say that there are significant gaps. I really have to question the integrity of any government that pulls funding to help trafficked women and girls in the middle of the largest pandemic anybody has ever experienced on this planet at this point. I want you to know that we are very lucky in London, Ontario. Londoners are appalled by what this government has done.

In fact, we routinely and regularly receive phone calls from Londoners who are expressing their support for our program and what it does for our community and this country, and they are willing to donate their dollars to us directly instead of to the coffers of the Trudeau government. I do want to say that there is another gap I'd like to mention here, which is that the London Abused Women's Centre has advocated strenuously since COVID started that some of the COVID funding announced each and every day go to women who are in prostitution, who are trafficked and exploited.

They have no history of a job, so they do not qualify. We've proposed a number of solutions, and yet still this most vulnerable population has received no funding to allow them to exit. Again, I find that devastating. As far as what we are going to do, the government has clearly turned its back on the women and girls we serve in London. It's betrayed those women and girls. We know London is a sex-trafficking hub because of its access to the 401, but also because of its proximity between Detroit, where prostitution is prohibited, and Toronto. Our community is going to continue to come forward for us.

In fact, we will not allow that program to close. Justin Trudeau may stand as a feminist, but he will not take down feminist organizations with his short-sighted decisions, just like the one he has just made. In the coming days we will be making a large announcement, supported by our community. I can assure every single one of the 650 trafficked women and girls who continue to access our service on a daily basis that they will not be left behind by London.

(1325) The Chair :

Lindsay, you have about 20 seconds for a question and an answer.

Ms. Lindsay Mathyssen :

In terms of both organizations, I suppose, I've been trying to advocate for a return from short-term project funding to core, reliable, long-term sustainable funding. Really quickly, could you talk about the importance of that for both of your organizations?

The Chair :

If you could—

Ms. Megan Walker :

Yes. One very quick thing is that the government's proposal right now is to fund $750,000 per year for four years to three organizations across Canada, with the commitment that they sustain that in the future. That is just unrealistic and will not happen.

The Chair :

Okay. Marcie, could you answer in about 10 to 15 seconds?

Ms. Marcie Hawranik :

I did see the announcement that there's also $350 million for the country's charity sector to help them, but again, this isn't for the long term, and what was actually recommended by the YWCA to be effective for that sector is $8 billion. There's a big discrepancy there.

The Chair :

We're finishing up our first round of questions with our first panel today. We've all had the opportunity to go through this. From the bottom of my heart, I would really like to thank Marcie Hawranik, the founder and president of the Canadian Equality Network, and Megan Walker, executive director of the London Abused Women's Centre. Thank you for joining us on this extremely important study. We are going to be suspending for half an hour and then we'll be back. Thank you very much.

(1325) (1400) The Chair :

I would like to reconvene this afternoon's meeting on our study on the impact of COVID-19 on women. We're going to start our second panel today. We have three excellent people coming to this one. Ann Decter is the senior director of the Canadian Women's Foundation. Morna Ballantyne is the executive director of Child Care Now. Hélène Cornellier is the communications manager of the Association féminine d’éducation et d’action sociale. You have 10 minutes each. I'm going to pass the floor over to Ann Decter. You have the floor for 10 minutes.

Ms. Ann Decter (Director, Community Initiatives, Canadian Women's Foundation) :

Good afternoon. I'm Ann Decter from the Canadian Women's Foundation, Canada's only national public foundation for women and girls and one of the 10 largest foundations in the world. Through three decades, our granting work has focused on moving women out of poverty and violence and into safety and confidence. Thank you for the invitation to appear today on this urgent question—urgent because women in Canada have been impacted by the pandemic to an extent that threatens to roll back equality gains.

Women's safety, livelihoods and well-being have all been put at risk, most severely for women from communities that are marginalized by systemic discrimination. The pandemic has shone a penetrating light on gender-based violence, women's economic security, care work and the central economic role of child care. Economic losses have fallen heavily on women, and most dramatically on women living on low incomes who experience intersecting inequalities based on race, disability, education, colonization and migration and immigration status.

A historic downturn in women's employment, compounded by uncertainty over the capacity of our fragile child care sector to fully reopen, is a potential perfect storm for women's economic security. Women in diverse and marginalized communities can be expected to have the greatest difficulty in emerging from this crisis. The scale of women's job losses is enormous. At the end of May, 1.5 million women had lost their jobs and another 1.2 million had lost the majority of their work hours, impacting more than one quarter of all women workers. The lowest wage earners have been hit the hardest.

Fifty-eight per cent of women earning $14 per hour or less were laid off or lost most of their work by April. Overall, women earning the lowest 10% of wages experienced job loss at 50 times the rate of the highest wage earners. This is the type of granular data revealed by the intersectional gender-based analysis that is needed to support decisions on next steps. Mothers are experiencing disproportionate job loss. They account for 57% of parents who had lost their jobs or most of their hours by the end of May and for only 41% of employment gains.

More than one quarter of mothers with children under 12 who were working in February were unemployed or working less than half-time by April's end. Mothers parenting on their own were more likely to lose work than those in two-parent families. Women are leaving the labour market and increasing their care responsibilities at home. The number of women in core working years outside the labour market increased 34% from February to the end of April. That includes women who stopped looking for work due to soaring unemployment or to take up care responsibilities at home.

This leaves women's economic security under threat. Access to child care underpins mothers' access to the workforce, and without government intervention child care will be scarcer and more expensive. One out of three child care centres have not confirmed that they will reopen. Physical distancing requirements are reducing spaces. Personal protective equipment and sanitization will raise costs, increasing parent fees and putting child care financially out of reach for more families.

Parents of all genders need child care to work, but for women, who still shoulder a disproportionate share of family care work, it is essential. Emergency closure of child care centres and schools placed a triple burden on mothers doing full-time jobs from home and managing both children and household tasks. Care work has been central to pandemic response. Our primary and long-term care systems are staffed largely by women. More than one in three women workers are in high-risk jobs with greater exposure to COVID-19.

Women make up more than two thirds of those who clean and disinfect buildings and almost 90% of personal support workers. After two decades of austerity in health care and community services, the most poorly paid workers—a highly racialized, women-majority workforce—form the first line of defence against catastrophic illness and economic depression. Canada's care economy is fractured, and women, largely racialized, black, migrant and undocumented women, are bearing the brunt.

Government withdrawal opened the door to the proliferation of for-profit chains in care work, which reduced quality of care, staff levels, job benefits and protections, with negative consequences for care recipients, the gendered racialized workforce and Canada's pandemic response.

(1405) Care work in Canada also has an entrenched reliance on highly skilled but low-paid migrant care workers who now fill positions in private homes and in health care facilities, yet face increasingly restricted chances of securing permanent residency and rights protections. Pandemic impacts on migrant care workers include dismissal by employers now working from home or laid off, 24-7 lockdown in employers' private homes and loss of immigration status due to government processing delays.

Stay-at-home orders increase the risk of domestic violence and decrease women's abilities to leave abusive homes for the safety of shelters—highlighting the importance of the violence prevention sector—while placing additional strain on already taxed anti-violence services. Closure of physical spaces and the shift to remote services created unique access barriers to sexual assault centres. In the best of times, gender-based violence services are underfunded and oversubscribed. Demand for access to women's shelters consistently exceeds capacity.

Significant gaps persist in shelter services for women with disabilities, deaf women, women in rural and remote areas and women in need of culture-specific services. Four out of five women's shelters across the country are accessed by first nation, Métis or Inuit women, yet only one in five can frequently provide culturally appropriate programs, and 70% of Inuit communities do not have access to a shelter. With the rise of “Me Too”, sexual assault centres experienced significant increases in calls without matching increases in funding.

As the pandemic arrived, sexual assault survivors, some at high risk of suicide, were stuck on a waiting list for counselling across Canada. One sexual assault centre executive described transitioning to remote work: “We had to invest in a phone system, as ours was a donation from 1980. We didn't have funds for PPE for staff and volunteers accompanying women to hospitals, police and doctors. ...

As much as I'm grateful for the 25k, I must be honest with you: It's not enough. … We are running out of PPE, volunteers have begun to show signs of burnout, and we are averaging 60 to 80 crisis calls a day.” As you're likely aware, the women's sector refers to non-profits and charities that provide women-specific services in order to advance women's equality through policy, advocacy and public engagement. That includes shelters for women, sexual assault centres and women's centres that provide a safety net to women and their families.

These are essential to a healthy welfare state system and to achieving gender equality. The pandemic lockdown exposed and exacerbated existing flaws in the women's sector funding model. The sector is funded partially and irregularly through an unpredictable combination of individual donations, corporate gifts and foundation and government grants. This is time-consuming and inefficient, requiring constant renewal and contact. Organizations constantly seek out, apply for and renew funding that is largely project-based and temporary. Reports from the women's sector indicate an impending future crisis.

Like the best of the pandemic emergency response from public health leaders, many of whom are women, recovery planning with women and gender equality in mind requires thorough analysis, clear evidence-supported outcome targets, methodical approaches to implementation and responsible leadership with vision and heart.

Should broad emergency measures need to be reimposed for another indefinite period, the Canadian Women's Foundation recommends the following actions, with a reminder that an inclusive gender-based analysis with an intersectional lens is essential to the design of all government recovery investments, short or long term: With regard to women's economic security, reinstate the Canada emergency response benefit throughout any economic shutdown; reinstate the Canada emergency wage supplement with a simpler administrative mechanism throughout any economic shutdown: broaden access to employment insurance so all women who pay in can access benefits; work with the provinces and territories to implement 10 paid sick days, as announced; ensure funding is in place to safely reopen the child care sector at pre-pandemic service levels and to continue to expand it until universal access is achieved.

As for women and care work, work with the provinces and territories to ensure—

(1410) The Chair :

Ann, you're right at 10 minutes now, so we'll give you about 15 more seconds just to wrap it up.

Ms. Ann Decter :

—that in long-term-care facilities, staff work in a single facility in full-time jobs at a living wage with access to sick days, refusal of unsafe work and appropriate protective equipment, care and testing; grant all migrant workers currently in Canada permanent residency—

The Chair :

Ann, hopefully we'll be able to get through there, but unfortunately we are short of time.

Ms. Ann Decter :

No problem.

The Chair :

Thank you so much. We'll now pass it over to Morna Ballantyne with Child Care Now. Morna, you have the floor.

Ms. Morna Ballantyne (Executive Director, Child Care Now) :

Thank you very much, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for inviting me to testify this afternoon. Child Care Now, also known as the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada, was founded in 1982 to act on behalf of organizations and individuals who want high-quality, affordable and inclusive early learning and child care to be available for all families and all children, regardless of where they live and regardless of their circumstances.

We commend the Standing Committee on the Status of Women for undertaking an examination of the impact of COVID-19 on women and for recognizing that such an examination would be incomplete without addressing the impact of COVID-19 on women's access to child care. I appeared before your committee three years ago, when you were carrying out a study on the economic security of women. I and many other witnesses said then that women in Canada will not and cannot achieve economic security without full access to the paid labour force and properly paid work.

This will not and cannot happen without a publicly funded and publicly managed child care system. It's taken a public health crisis to prove our argument yet again. Now, finally, the essential and multiple roles of child care are being recognized, including by our Prime Minister . COVID-19 also exposes the fragility of the provision of child care in Canada. However, what governments will do about it, if anything, remains to be seen.

Statistics Canada's labour force survey confirms the devastating impact of the pandemic on women's employment, and particularly on the employment of mothers with children under the age of 12. While the May jobs report shows some job recovery overall, women accounted for only 29% of that recovery. Getting women back into the paid labour force is critical to women's economic security, but increasing women's labour force participation is also crucial to a sustainable economic recovery for everyone.

The construction of an accessible, affordable, quality and inclusive system of child care is essential if Canada is to forge a resilient and just future and also become the best possible place for children. Child care in Canada was fragile before the pandemic hit, because it's market-based, it's fragmented, and it's seriously underfunded. Parents in Canada are forced to purchase services from a child care market, some of which is regulated and much not, and some of which is not-for-profit and some a source of profit.

It's a market that offers a confusing array of very scarce offerings, too many of which are of poor quality and almost all of which are unaffordable for most families. It contributes to and exacerbates economic and social inequity. Indigenous families, racialized families and low-income households are disproportionately shut out. The child care market is also particularly bad at meeting the needs of children with disabilities, children whose parents work non-standard or irregular hours and children who live in rural and remote communities. This market approach works no better for child care providers.

Almost all programs outside of Quebec rely primarily on parent-fee revenue to stay in operation. The predominantly female workforce earns low wages. Any raise in compensation translates into higher parent fees. Inadequate compensation has made the recruitment and retention of qualified early childhood educators a perpetually serious concern.

Leaving the provision of care to the market doesn't work for child care any better than it would work for health care, primary education or secondary education, or countless other areas where governments have intervened for the benefit of all Canadians and because it makes economic sense to do so. COVID-19 exposed all the problems with market-based child care and the absence of a fully publicly funded and publicly managed child care system.

When provinces and territories ordered child care programs to close during the emergency response phase of the pandemic, with limited services for essential workers, the sector was disrupted in a way that it was not disrupted for public education or other parts of the public sector. The level of disruption depended on the approach taken by each province and territorial government.

(1415) In places where necessary support was provided, the child care programs are in a much better position to reopen and respond to the needs of children and parents, but a survey of licensed child care centres in Canada carried out in May found that more than one-third of the centres across Canada are uncertain about reopening. It's now time for major government intervention in early learning and child care. Child Care Now has proposed a federal strategy for doing just that. Of course we recognize that the reconstruction of child care cannot be left to the federal government alone.

It's going to require the federal government to work with the provinces, territories and indigenous governments and communities, but the federal government must provide policy leadership, supported by its spending power, to respond to the immediate economic and social fallout of COVID-19 and to set the foundation for longer-term system-building. Our strategy calls for a two-phased approach. In the first phase, we want the federal government to spend $2.5 billion to support the safe and full recovery of regulated early learning and child care and to respond to the immediate care needs of school-age children.

In the second phase, we propose that the federal government boost its child care spending to $2 billion in 2021-22 and that this base be increased each year thereafter by $2 billion. These federal funds would be used to move Canada towards a fully publicly funded system in partnership with the provinces, territories and indigenous governments. Twenty per cent of this funding should be earmarked to support the indigenous early learning and child care framework.

The federal government, under our plan, would require the provinces and territories to use the federal funds to achieve measurable improvement in accessibility, affordability, quality and inclusiveness. Additionally, the federal government would establish and fund a federal early learning and child care secretariat to lead and coordinate the federal government's work. Finally, the government would propose legislation that enshrines Canada's commitment to give all children the right to high-quality early learning and child care.

Let me elaborate very briefly on what we want to see in the first phase, which would start now and continue to the end of the current fiscal year. The federal government has promised $14 billion in new federal transfers to the provinces and territories, to be rolled out over the remaining months of 2020. These transfers are to help finance the safe restart of the economy. What we propose is that the federal government allocate $2.5 billion of these promised transfers for spending on child care.

Agreements with each province and territory would ensure that the federal government funds would be used for, one, a safe restart of child care programs; two, the restoration and expansion of the number of licensed child care spaces that existed prior to the pandemic; and three, the establishment and operation of child care programs for school-age children up to age 12 through the summer months and into the fall and winter. Parents need access to quality programs before and after school hours and/or during regular school hours if schooling is not available because of public health concerns.

Additionally, we want the federal funds to be used to improve the wages of those who work in early learning and child care to ensure the return and retention of qualified staff to the sector. The federal secretariat that has been mandated by the Prime Minister of Canada would be established during this first phase. Its mandate would be to advise on, monitor and evaluate phase 1 implementation and to plan for phase 2, including the development of comprehensive workforce and expansion strategies. Again, thanks for inviting me today.

I invite you to read the full text of our strategy, which is posted on our website at timeforchildcare.ca. Of course, I am happy to answer any questions you have.

(1420) The Chair :

Thank you very much. I'm now going to pass the floor over to Hélène Cornellier, the communications manager for Association féminine d'éducation et d'action sociale. You have the floor for 10 minutes. Thank you very much.

[ Translation ]

Mrs. Hélène Cornellier (Coordinator of Action Plan and Communications, Association féminine d'éducation et d'action sociale) :

Good afternoon. Thank you for the invitation to today's hearings. The question your study seeks to answer is directly tied to one of the fundamental challenges behind achieving equality among Canadians: recognizing and valuing invisible work. The Association féminine d'éducation et d'action sociale, or AFEAS for short, is approaching today's consultation from that particular perspective. Already in 1968, during the Bird commission hearings, AFEAS stressed the importance of recognizing unpaid work by women in the family unit and society.

It argued that this work, which is seen as women's social role, impoverishes women their entire lives. The situation continues today, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown. No one, it seems, anticipated a health crisis of this magnitude. From the outset, it brought out glaring inequalities between women and men, especially for racialized and immigrant women. At the same time, the pandemic has shone a light on the work of those who remained on the job to keep society's essential services running and care for those who are ill.

In the health care sector, 80% of the workforce is female, caregivers are generally women, and the education sector also relies on many female workers. Since the pandemic hit, women have mostly been the ones on the front lines. However, the key stakeholders, women, are left out of the decision-making bodies, even though decisions made on a day-to-day basis directly concern them. To prepare for a second wave of the pandemic, as well as the recovery or the return to normalcy to be defined, AFEAS is proposing various short- and medium-term measures.

To start with, AFEAS recommends two essential benchmarks to ensure that legislation, policies, programs and measures require that women participate as key stakeholders. It means not only involving women MPs, but also women's and community organizations, as well as researchers who, year after year, work for and with women. The way out of the crisis, which will be social, economic and environmental, must include women.

AFEAS requests that the Government of Canada establish a gender parity requirement for all relevant bodies set up to manage the crisis and its aftermath, and use gender-based analysis, or GBA+, to ensure that women's needs and perspective are heard and taken into account.

To obtain true recognition for their work, and to raise awareness of the contribution made by Canadians who perform invisible work, AFEAS calls on the federal government to declare the first Tuesday in April national invisible workload day and, above all, to assess and integrate the economic value of so-called “invisible” unpaid work into the gross domestic product, or GDP. For your information, in 1992, Statistics Canada estimated that the invisible workload accounted for 34% to 54% of GDP, or $235 billion to $374 billion Canadian.

To address some particular challenges women are facing during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, AFEAS suggests implementing certain measures. With regard to women's health and safety, coping with the crisis has brought its share of stress, anxiety and distress for women who manage the daily routine, but also for the people they care for, be they children, the elderly or persons with disabilities. In addition, for many women, losing their jobs, even if that income was temporarily replaced by the CERB, has added further stress.

I should also mention the upsurge in domestic and family violence, which more women and children have suffered during the lockdown period.

(1425) To remedy this situation, in the event of a return to lockdown, the Government of Canada and the local and provincial authorities concerned must implement services for children and seniors or others in need; ensure regular follow-up with vulnerable people who may be victims of violence, women and children, to bring them out of isolation; and consolidate the network of shelters for those experiencing domestic violence.

In terms of economic impact, the Conseil du statut de la femme estimates that 120,000 women have lost their jobs, as compared with 55,100 men, and that twice as many women work part time, which has consequences for them. The data obviously relate to Quebec. In Canada, it would cost $4 billion to $10 billion to hire 1.2 million full-time professionals to cover the hours worked by family caregivers, 54% of whom are women. According to the Regroupement des aidants naturels du Québec, only 3.2% of caregivers received a tax credit in 2017, receiving an average amount of $559.

Moreover, because of the restrictive eligibility criteria, many caregivers did not qualify for the tax credit. Research shows that, in Canada, caregivers spend an average of $7,600 per year on the person they care for, regardless of their initial income level, and that 20% of caregivers are financially insecure. To support and value the contribution of parents, caregivers and all those who do invisible work, AFEAS is asking the federal government to convert existing non-refundable tax credits into refundable tax credits for parents and caregivers, and create new income tax measures truly adapted to their needs.

In addition, AFEAS is calling on the government to make changes to employment insurance caregiving benefits: the compassionate care, family caregiver for adults, and family caregiver for children benefits. Specifically, the government should eliminate the mandatory one-week waiting period, pay all three benefits for 35 weeks, and change the current definition of a critically ill child or adult to provide access to benefits in the event of a chronic medical condition.

More than anything else, AFEAS is calling for the requirement to implement pay equity programs at all levels, both in government institutions and in federally regulated businesses, as well as in companies that receive government contracts, grants or loans. Women are known to face pressures and social barriers. As the previous witnesses have all mentioned, the coronavirus pandemic has forced the government to place schoolchildren and people age 70 and older in lockdown in their homes, and to close non-essential businesses.

Overnight, women had to find different ways to run errands, keep the kids busy, home-school them, and care for family members with diminishing independence or in self-isolation, while continuing to do their paid jobs at home or in the essential service sector—if they had not lost their job as a result of the crisis. Most importantly, they also had to avoid getting infected and infecting others. Quite a heavy added burden that no one was prepared for landed on women's shoulders.

To support women in the coming months, the Government of Canada and its provincial partners must introduce measures to ensure equal sharing of family duties and responsibilities, strengthen family agencies and services, and develop agreements with employers and others to reduce productivity requirements, even for teleworkers, while maintaining full weekly pay. In closing, AFEAS has something else for the committee's suggestion box.

It recommends that the federal government create a public day care system across the country, introduce 10 days' paid vacation, and move quickly to set up affordable housing programs and ensure adequate availability of consistent, comprehensive high-quality home care.

(1430) Most of all, AFEAS is asking the federal government to resist introducing austerity measures while the economy recovers, as it would only impoverish those already in need and destroy public services and the social security system. We have been there before. Finally, AFEAS is requesting that special attention be paid to indigenous communities on and off reserve. How can you self-isolate if you are contagious, when families live in overcrowded conditions because of a lack of adequate housing? How can you follow public health measures—

[ English ]

The Chair :

We need to wrap it up, Hélène. I gave you a few extra seconds. I'll give you 10 more seconds.

[ Translation ]

Mrs. Hélène Cornellier :

I will finish up. How can you follow public health measures when no water is available? These communities and women dealing with the crisis must make the decisions and define the needs.

The Chair :

Thank you. [ English ] We're going to start our rounds of questioning with Jag Sahota. Jag, you have the floor for six minutes.

Ms. Jag Sahota :

Thank you, ladies, for your time and your presentations. I have a few questions for you, Ms. Decter. The earlier panel spoke to the deep need for support for women facing abuse, particularly in the area of human trafficking and exploitation. Recently the funding for the measures to address prostitution initiatives expired, with no interim funding to help organizations continue their programming. We know that violence against women has increased during this pandemic and that trafficked women are now at an even greater risk than normal. In light of this, do you think the government should provide some kind of immediate interim support for these organizations?

Ms. Ann Decter :

I'm sorry, but I am not specifically informed on the trafficking program. I don't know exactly the situation there. I'd be happy to check with the women at the foundation who work on anti-trafficking, but in general, we would say yes, all anti-violence work is definitely in need of increased funding. As I was saying, programs are in over-demand and are underfunded, and it's a patchwork across the country of various provincial funding schemes. I think the pandemic has clearly shown that this needs to be a national system. We need a national action plan on violence against women and girls.

We also need the national action plan on violence against indigenous women and girls to go ahead. These things need to come into place, well funded, as quickly as possible.

(1435) Ms. Jag Sahota :

Okay. Thank you for that. Ms. Decter, we know that your organization distributed funding to sexual assault centres at the beginning of the pandemic. Can you outline the criteria used to determine which sexual assault centres were provided funding?

Ms. Ann Decter :

I didn't work specifically on the criteria, but they were developed in working with the Department of Women and Gender Equality. The sexual assault centres that we forwarded government funding to were all outside of Quebec. We didn't work with any Quebec centres. That funding went straight through the Quebec government. Also, we were working with WAGE, I guess, again not directly. I did do some phone calls to sexual assault centres and made sure that we had the correct registration information, but I wasn't involved at that level.

They also had to be not in receipt of funding that was going to women's shelters, and some organizations had both. The goal there was to make sure that everybody got some money. That's what I can tell you about the sexual assault centres funding. In that sense, I believe they had to be non-residential programs, because the residential programs were considered to come under the rubric of shelters, but I would have to go back and check that for you, if you like.

Ms. Jag Sahota :

Would you be able to provide a copy of the criteria to the committee?

Ms. Ann Decter :

I think so. I will try to find it. I haven't seen it myself. I was just given a list to call.

Ms. Jag Sahota :

Okay. I have another question. Were any organizations that are not classified as sexual assault centres, such as the YWCA or other multi-functional facilities, selected for funding?

Ms. Ann Decter :

I would have to check. Did multi-service organizations receive that funding...?

Ms. Jag Sahota :

Yes, I mean multi-functional facilities like YWCAs.

Ms. Ann Decter :

Having worked for the YWCA for decades, I think we called it a multi-service association. Is it the criteria for sexual assault centre funding and who received sexual assault centre funding specifically what you're asking?

Ms. Jag Sahota :

Yes. You had organizations that.... If they were not classified as sexual assault centres, did they receive funding?

Ms. Ann Decter :

Did they receive sexual assault centre funding?

Ms. Jag Sahota: Yes.

The Chair :

Fantastic. Thank you very much. We're now going to pass it over to Sonia Sidhu. Sonia, you have six minutes.

Ms. Sonia Sidhu :

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thanks to all of you for the work you're doing in your community. It's really appreciated. My question is for Ms. Ann Decter, and I just want to state that I'm really proud of the work the government has done to support women, including how GBA informs every department. Each department is responsible for doing its own GBA, which is a huge stride. I'm really proud of that. My question is on the response to COVID-19. The federal government created the Canada emergency response benefit. That has supported over eight million Canadians who lost their jobs during COVID-19.

More than 60% of early job losses were women's jobs. In your opinion, how has this program supported women facing many unique challenges during COVID-19? Can you explain that?

(1440) Ms. Ann Decter :

Well, I don't have data on the uptake of women who lost jobs, on how many of them went onto the CERB, but I did think that the CERB was very effective. I thought it was very smart to bring it up really quickly. We talk about a recession, but it wasn't so much a recession as an economic shutdown. The underlying factors of the economy didn't cause people to lose jobs. What caused people to lose jobs was a choice we made on how to fight the pandemic. I have no problem with it. It was a smart choice. To continue to have income through that period was very important for those who were pushed out of work.

As we know, the job losses for women, especially in that first month, were about two times the rate for men. We also know that women are working more precariously. They have lower incomes. More of them are in part-time jobs, with little or no benefits such as sick leave and all those kinds of things, so to be able to move onto a benefit that exceeded the minimal amount they'd get paid on EI was probably very helpful.

Ms. Sonia Sidhu :

Thank you. I had a meeting with some women's organizations and heard that domestic violence is on the rise as a result of COVID-19. Your organization has launched the Signal for Help campaign to support women who are stuck with their abuser during COVID-19 and are finding it difficult to seek help. Could you explain how this campaign is working and how other organizations can make similar steps so they can help other women in the community?

Ms. Ann Decter :

Signal for Help was actually brought to us by an advertising firm that wanted to do something to help out. They had an idea that we could create some kind of sign that a women could use, on a call like this one, that would indicate that she was in distress. They wanted to give an extra tool to a woman who was trapped in a home and didn't have a way to communicate that or to leave. We worked with them to create a hand signal, called Signal for Help, that indicates that the person needs help.

We educated them around telling people that calling the police and sending them over to the house was not necessarily the best step. We worked through that process. They created it in English, French and Spanish, and have really pushed it out worldwide. We've seen people posting it from Brazil and different countries around the world. Obviously, it doesn't work for everyone, but a lot of people are at home and are working on calls like this.

If you get the signal that someone is in distress, the Signal for Help poster that's out there says how to contact resources and the steps you can take to help out instead of just calling the police right away in an emergency. It's free for anyone to use and for any agency to adapt and forward as they want.

Ms. Sonia Sidhu :

The other question I want to ask concerns long-term care homes. They have been hit hard by COVID-19 across Canada. In my region of Peel, there are a lot of cases. Women have been hit hard by COVID-19. In your opinion, what specific issues do the women who work in and reside in the LTC homes face during COVID-19? How can we protect them? We know that long-term care comes under provincial jurisdiction, the same as child care, but how can the federal government help there? How can the provinces step up and protect them? What needs to be done there?

Ms. Ann Decter :

First, I'm not an expert in long-term care by any stretch, but we do see really big differences in how some provinces have approached it and have had success compared with others. One of the big factors is how much of it is privatized. The privatization shapes the kinds of jobs. Staff working in multiple care homes was really a problem. British Columbia fared the best in Canada in long-term care. They immediately stopped that back in March. They also brought in pay to make sure everyone working the same position in a long-term care home was making the same amount of money. I think those were really strong steps.

I think the federal government can step into a leadership role in the same way that they are working to do in child care and work with all the provinces to bring their standards up. Canada actually has the worst record for long-term care deaths in COVID in the developed world. We really missed the boat there.

(1445) The Chair :

Excellent. Thank you very much for that. Andréanne, you have the floor.

[ Translation ]

Ms. Andréanne Larouche :

Thank you, Madam Chair. My questions are for Mrs. Cornellier. First of all, I want to thank you for attending our meeting today. In your presentation, you propose a number of solutions, especially in terms of compensating the invisible work done by women and doing more to recognize it. As we know, it is not adequately recognized. In particular, you suggest increasing Quebec Pension Plan and old age security benefits and support for women with children, giving caregivers refundable tax credits, and establishing family insurance.

So we are talking about a number of solutions to ensure that women receive compensation for their invisible work. I would like to know how this invisible workload can have an impact. Please tell us about women's quality of life in economic terms.

Mrs. Hélène Cornellier :

AFEAS is an education and social action group dedicated to promoting equality between women and men in Quebec and Canada. It does not work directly with clienteles such as day care providers and abused women. It is somewhat more generalist in nature. For over 50 years, since it was founded in 1966, its core issue has really been women's unpaid workload. Beginning then, women realized that they and their daughters would remain poor all their lives if that workload was not recognized, offset and, on occasion, paid. You mentioned the Quebec Pension Plan.

I did not bring it up in my presentation because I didn't have enough time. For AFEAS, it's inappropriate that Quebec subtracts the years that women stayed home with the children, unpaid, from the total number of years worked. A percentage of the average Canadian wage should be used to offset those years. I do not have the exact formula.

Whether it's mothers with children, family caregivers with seniors, people with disabilities, minors or adults, or people who are sick, with cancer, for example, all the time during which they had to withdraw from the labour market must be offset so their retirement income reflects the work they did in society, not just their work in the labour market, for an employer, in exchange for remuneration. That's one type of measure. Tax credits are another. When they are non-refundable, who is entitled to them? You have seen the numbers from the Regroupement des aidants naturels du Québec.

Some people make very good incomes. Those with low incomes have no chance at it. If a senior has any sort of substantial income, say, around $20,000 or more, they lose the entire tax credit. It has to be refundable, so that even caregivers or parents without income are entitled to it, just as people are entitled to the GST credit or the Quebec solidarity tax credit. The same thing goes for caregiver benefits. In the case of the compassionate care benefit, for example, you are entitled to a certain number of weeks—I think it's five or six—if a family member has a high risk of dying within 26 weeks.

The first person to receive the benefit is subject to a mandatory one-week waiting period. They can share the benefits with their sister, for example, and the second person will not be subject to the one-week waiting period. So someone always loses at least one week of income, representing 55% of their pay, which is not a lot. You cannot perform miracles with that. However, these individuals devote themselves entirely to the person at the end of their life. These are necessary and essential measures for women to achieve some equality. Without them, we will never have equality.

If we started talking about pay equity, we could spend hours on the issue.

(1450) Ms. Andréanne Larouche :

So this legislation is very important for you. I am going to ask you a number of questions all at the same time, given that the clock is ticking. You talked about older women. Do you believe that the problem is generational and that their generation is really less financially independent than new generations? You could also tell us how initiatives designed to assist women must be embedded in a coherent system of healthcare and social services. What more would that do during a crisis like the one we have recently experienced?

To what extent could austerity measures established in the name of an economic principle harm the healthcare system? Could improving women's access to employment insurance be a positive measure? Finally, GBA+ is a way of measuring the gender-specific impact in departments and in each aspect of the recovery. In what respect would that all be important for you?

[ English ]

The Chair :

You have 30 seconds.

[ Translation ]

Mrs. Hélène Cornellier :

So let me focus on what is most important for us. GBA+ is essential, such as parity on all the committees that have already been set up and those that will have to be set up for the end of the pandemic, the second wave, and so on. Without it, we will never know the real situation. At the moment, women are victimized because they have more work than men. They have jobs that pay less, if they have not lost them. Those women will not make it if they are taking care of the elderly. We must not forget all the stress that the current situation is generating and that women are experiencing as they take care of the house, the children and those—

The Chair :

Thank you. [ English ] Our time has run out, and we must pass on to Lindsay. Lindsay, you have the floor for six minutes.

Ms. Lindsay Mathyssen :

Thank you. I think all of you touched on the fact that there is no recovery of Canada's economy without women, and they cannot recover without child care. I know that I hear from so many women in my community in London, or parents in general, who are overwhelmed by the high cost of that child care. I want to ask the witnesses if they could talk about the importance of that affordability piece and what the difference is between the idea of publicly funded child care and what we currently have in terms of the national child care plan that the government has put forward.

I'm also going to throw in there, in case I run out of time, returning to Ms. Ballantyne's point on the establishment of legislation enshrining the right of high-quality child care, affordable child care into our system, what that would mean overall and link it to something like the Canada Health Act where there's equality and accessibility across Canada.

[ Translation ]

Mrs. Hélène Cornellier :

I will be quick, because that is not one of the areas we specialize in. For women to be at work—as is the case for men too—it is essential to have quality and educational childcare, rather than services where the children are left to play in a corner. That is what was established in Quebec, in the form of early childhood centres, the CPEs. We ourselves are asking the Government of Quebec for more of them, in order to meet the demand from all women and all families. We wish the same for all Canadian women. It also means that the government must subsidize those services so that the cost to families is minimal.

If it is not, they will not be able to access them. If need be, private daycares can also be subsidized; however, the same criteria as in the public network must apply in terms of education, service quality, and the wages of the educators.

(1455) [ English ]

Ms. Lindsay Mathyssen :

Thank you. Could we hear from the other two, as well?

Ms. Ann Decter :

Sure, I'll be quick. We endorse the work that Morna's organization does, and she's really the expert in this field. I'd just say in response that we do believe that all parents should have access to child care and that it is key to women's economic security, independence and protection against violence. All of these things require access to child care. The rest of the country should have something similar to what Quebec has, which is low-cost, broad-based, affordable child care. At this point, I'll hand over to Morna on the details, and consider us supportive of everything she says.

Ms. Morna Ballantyne :

Thanks. I think you were specifically asking what the difference is between what we have now and publicly funded child care. Essentially what we have now is that we don't have a system. What I tried to explain in my presentation is that essentially governments have handed over responsibility for child care to the markets. The only exception is in the province of Quebec. That would be a long answer just to talk about Quebec, and Hélène spoke a little bit about that. For most parents, responsibility for getting child care rests with them, not with the government.

Providing child care also rests with individuals, so for the most part the child care that exists outside of Quebec exists because a bunch of people decided to provide it. It could be non-profit organizations or it could be for-profit organizations but it is not really a public system. What we saw through COVID is that when you leave things to the market, something as essential as the safety and provision of care for children ends up collapsing. A lot of parents, for example, have to turn to unregulated, informal care including relatives. That just fell apart with COVID.

I think that's why it took COVID for everybody to understand that we really have a problem here, because there really was nowhere to turn for the care of children. We think this health crisis creates a real opportunity to allow some rethinking to go on, to stop relying on individual solutions for the provision of child care and to look at collective solutions, and that means government solutions.

Only government is actually in a place to properly fund the service or organize the service so that we don't end up in a situation where you might have child care that is provided where it's not as needed or in other places where we don't have it at all, what we call child care deserts. The only way to do that is for governments to step in. Yes, it's under the jurisdiction constitutionally of provinces and territories. However, as we saw through COVID, when the federal government wants to step in and get things done, it can do that. It just needs to do it.

The way it does that is by putting money on the table and then saying to the provinces and territories, “Let's sit down. We're willing to help you out with money, but let's also look at what makes sense. Let's draw on the evidence of what makes for a good program and let's stop replicating mistakes and let's start replicating success stories.” That's what we want to see.

Ms. Lindsay Mathyssen :

Thank you.

The Chair :

On behalf of the committee, I would like to thank Ann, Morna and Hélène for taking

part in today's panel. We're going to suspend to do a sound check for our next panel and reconvene as soon as possible.

(1500) (1510) The Chair :

Welcome back, everybody. We are now on our third hour of today's study. I would like to welcome Sara Wolfe, director, indigenous innovation initiatives, Grand Challenges Canada; Vicki Saunders, the founder of SheEO; and Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich, communications and development manager, Women's Shelters Canada. We'll pass the floor over to Sara for 10 minutes.

Ms. Sara Wolfe (Director, Indigenous Innovation Initiatives, Grand Challenges Canada) :

Thank you.

Aaniin , bonjour and good afternoon, Madam Chair, committee members and everyone. My name is Sara Wolfe. I am the director of the indigenous innovation initiative at Grand Challenges Canada. Thank you for inviting us to speak today on the gendered impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. This is my first time addressing the standing committee. I hope to be invited back again one day, perhaps in person. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the long history and enduring presence of indigenous peoples, including first nations, Métis and Inuit peoples, across Turtle Island.

As an anishinaabekwe with strong connections to Brunswick House First Nation in northern Ontario, I would like to acknowledge.... I can hear two soundtracks speaking to me.

The Chair :

Okay. I will have them check on that. Sara, I hate to do this to you, but while they check on that, I will go to the next person. We'll come back to you for your 10 minutes. I will ask Vicki Saunders, the founder of SheEO, to take the floor for the next 10 minutes.

Ms. Vicki Saunders (Founder, SheEO) :

Thank you very much. I'm Vicki Saunders, founder of SheEO. Good afternoon. Bonjour . I started SheEO. I'm just going to give a quick overview of SheEO, how we're dealing with what's happening with COVID and the opportunity going forward afterward. For those of you who may not be familiar with our organization, we started in Canada five years ago, and we are a complete redo of venture capital. If you were starting all over again and it was designed by women, it would look 100% different from what it looks like currently in the world.

We designed and started this organization to solve the major challenge on the planet that 51% of the population gets 2.2% of the capital out there in the world. It is a global challenge, and it leaves us in a world that's designed mostly by men for men. There are just so many things missing from the existing world that we're living in. Structures and systems are so deeply biased, and that's not a future I want to live in, and so we're tackling this big challenge with SheEO. We are women who come together in a pretty unique way. We have this model of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing.

Hundreds of women in each country come together and each contribute $1,100 as a gift. That money is pooled together and it's loaned out at 0% interest to women entrepreneurs who are working on the sustainable development goals with their businesses. Every business that we fund is majority woman-owned and woman-led, is working on the SDGs and has export potential in its business and revenue generating. So far, we are in five countries with this model.

We have exported it from Canada to the U.S., New Zealand, Australia and the U.K., and we have 70 countries around the world that have reached out to replicate this model. We provide 0%-interest loans to women entrepreneurs, who pay it back over five years, and then we loan that money out again.

Instead of the economic model that we have in the world right now, under which people invest to get a 10X return, a huge return, and then hold onto that capital and accumulate it so that we have more and more inequality in the world, we have a model whereby women actually gift their capital forward and then they bring all of their other capital—their social capital, their buying power, their networks, their expertise and their influence—to help these businesses grow. It's a pretty fun model to be part of.

If you're an activator in our network, which is what we call you when you contribute capital, you vote for the ventures that you care about, so we have a 100% democratic selection process. We don't have some expert panel with all of the biases that come with it, some investment committee deciding on what's the hottest and latest; we have the intuition of hundreds of women deciding which ventures are creating incredible innovations to solve major challenges we're facing. Then we get behind them with everything we've got to help them grow.

This ecosystem-based approach has created unbelievable resilience in our network during COVID. We have not had a single business go down. We have funded 68 ventures; we have $5 million loaned out, and we have a 97% payback rate. As soon as COVID hit, one of the first things we did was to gather all of our ventures together globally, to get them all on a call and do a quick triage of red, yellow and green—how they were doing—and we put our resources into the ones that were in the red bucket right away, to help them.

These are things like the venture in Calgary that hires homeless people to do laundry for restaurants all across the city and pays them a living wage, an amazing model called Common Good. With the pandemic, 95% of their revenue was lost in the first day because all of the restaurants closed. She got onto the call—a bucket of tears, I have to say, and it was a really emotional moment—and said, “What am I going to do? I can't actually lay off homeless people during this moment. It's terrible,” and ventures in our network came together and said, “What do you need?

How much is your payroll for this month?” and they loaned her money, so that she could get through and figure out how to pivot her business. We have story after story like that across our network, of women coming together because—we call this whole thing radical generosity—we are here to support each other, and that day it was to figure out how we could make sure no one lost jobs and no businesses went down. It's a community commitment we made to do this, so I'm probably a bit of a good-news story of what's going on here. Part of the challenge, however, is that….

(1515) I've been thinking, I did a presentation to the Standing Committee on Finance a few weeks ago. I just found myself trying to find what was the simplest, easiest.... I know you have a million things on your plate. I'm so grateful that you're all in these rooms and not sleeping like the rest of the government officials that I know. I think you've done an unbelievable job during COVID.

If you just look at all the different possible things you can do, I would love to encourage all of you there today to please do whatever you can to solve this child care nightmare that we continue to live with every single year. This is one of the easiest things on the planet to solve. If women and men were at the table when we designed our structures, we would have solved this right up front because it's not a hard thing to solve. Women who have children and are at home are in a world of pain. Women entrepreneurs are in a world of pain with this.

What is happening during COVID is going to adversely affect women in so many different ways because people are having to decide whether they are going to keep their business or take care of their kids. How do you deal with these issues? The demand for these services is massive. We've noticed that our ventures are really struggling with this. With the number of relief mechanisms that the government has put forth.... For example, we have an amazing agricultural innovator out on the east coast.

She's able to get a wage subsidy to hire somebody or to keep someone on her staff, but what she really needs is to be able to use that money for child care. She's not allowed to do that. She can hire someone to do the job that she wants to do, but she can't actually hire someone to do child care. There are a lot of these biases built into these relief structures because we don't value unpaid care. We've monetized all of these different elements of our markets. I think this is the one thing that I would love to really focus on.

I also, on a go-forward basis, would love to see more focus, from a government perspective, on innovation being outside the tech space. This process innovation that we've created with SheEO of not just using financial capital to create jobs and economic prosperity, but also actually bringing all the other resources that we have in play—our influences, our networks and our expertise—leads to unbelievable outcomes. I just want to share something very quickly. In the last year we have received women's entrepreneurship funding from Minister Ng 's department to help us get this model scaled.

In the last year, we created 276.4 jobs in Canada across our 27 ventures and through SheEO. We got $750,000 from the federal government. That is the equivalent of $2,164 per job that's being created. I'd love to see anyone try to match that in what we're doing. Women are amazingly capital efficient. It's unbelievable. What we can do with a small amount of money is insane. When you are looking at other models and process innovations as you are out there looking at new economic models, I hope you will pay attention to SheEO going forward.

I have a little deck that I'm going to forward after it's translated into French. Thank you very much.

(1520) The Chair :

Excellent. Thank you very much. Sara Wolfe, we are going to come back to you. Let's try this again. You have the floor for 10 minutes.

Ms. Sara Wolfe :

Thank you. I figured out what the problem was, so we should be good now. I'm Sara Wolfe and I'm the director of indigenous innovative initiatives at Grand Challenges Canada. I do really want to thank you for inviting us to speak today on the gendered impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. As I said, this is my first time addressing a standing committee, so I hope to get invited back again one day in person. I want to acknowledge the long history and enduring presence of indigenous peoples, including first nations, Métis and Inuit peoples across Turtle Island.

As an anishinaabekwe with strong connections to Brunswick House First Nation in northern Ontario, I also want to acknowledge the territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin people of Shabot Obaadjiwan where I'm currently a visitor. We're experiencing a very warm raspberry moon right now. The raspberry moon in the Anishinabe teaching is the moon when great change begins, so I am particularly looking forward to any questions you might have regarding my statement. For the last 10 years, Grand Challenges Canada has been dedicated to supporting bold ideas with big impacts.

We're funded by the Government of Canada and other partners, and we support innovators who are closest to some of the most pressing challenges in the world. The bold ideas that Grand Challenges Canada invests in integrate science and technology as well as social and business ideas and also, now, indigenous knowledge, to save and improve lives of people in Canada and in low- and middle-income countries. Our organization has supported over 1,300 innovations in 106 countries and we estimate that these innovations have the potential to save up to 1.8 million lives and improve up to 64 million lives by 2030.

We've been listening to our innovators, our partners and our community members for the past four months to hear how COVID-19 has impacted their lives. Around the world, the pandemic is deepening pre-existing inequalities, particularly for poor and racialized people, and exposing vulnerabilities in social, political and economic systems, which are in turn intensifying the impacts of the pandemic with disheartening evidence of even deeper impacts for those at the intersection of multiple vulnerabilities, such as women living in poverty, and this is also emerging.

An intersectional understanding then is what we need if we're to recover from COVID-19 in a good way in Canada and around the world. The United Nations policy brief on April 9 titled, “The Impact of COVID-19 on Women”, across every sphere from health to the economy and from security to social protection, noted that the impacts of COVID-19 are worsened for women and girls simply because of their gender. Increases in unpaid work we have already heard about. There has been a reallocation of resources and even blunt attacks on sexual and reproductive health services, and increases in gender-based violence.

The poorer you were when you started out, the worse the outcomes have likely been. At home in Canada we have a tendency to think that things are worse in the outside world, but the situation here for many is not actually much different. So today, as I appear before the committee to discuss the gendered impacts of the pandemic on indigenous peoples in Canada, I also want to talk about what the indigenous innovation initiative is doing about them and how there's so much more that we could be doing.

My sisters have historically experienced higher burdens of poverty, discrimination, criminalization and violence, and there is a plethora of reports on the gendered impacts of being an indigenous women, girl or gender-diverse person in Canada, including the pivotal findings from from the final report on the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, “Reclaiming Power and Place”.

The final report confirmed that domestic violence, human trafficking and health-related concerns were already among other significant issues for them, even before COVID-19, and I sincerely hope that everyone on the committee is already very familiar with the report and its corresponding calls for justice. The indigenous communities are awaiting the government's action plan on that, but there are also new reports that have recently surfaced about the gendered impacts of COVID-19 for indigenous peoples.

Last month, the Native Women's Association of Canada published an online survey of 750 indigenous women and gender-diverse people, and they noted a deeply concerning spike in the number of indigenous women facing violence during this time of sheltering in place. Almost one in five have reported a violent incident in the past three months.

(1525) In fact, of the indigenous women surveyed, more were concerned about violence than about the virus itself. Another key finding was that the financial impacts of COVID-19 are strongly correlated to violence against indigenous women. Also, in June, Pam Palmater, the chair in indigenous governance at Ryerson University, wrote an

article entitled “Gendered Pandemic Response Needed to Address Specific Needs of Indigenous Women”. In it, she wrote:

Canada’s failure to use a gender lens on its pandemic measures ignores the many ways in which the covid-19 pandemic is disproportionately impacting women in general.

and

Now consider the dual disadvantage of Indigenous women who are also forced to navigate an “infrastructure of violence”...

The

article goes on to give evidence of the several ways in which indigenous women and gender-diverse people have been disproportionately impacted and where there's an urgent need for dedicated pandemic planning for this demographic. In a previous life, I worked as a midwife with urban indigenous families. That was for about two decades.

My friends and former health care colleagues are reporting that at the street level, the impacts of opioid overdoses, untreated sexually transmitted infections, assaults, trafficking, street work, homelessness, mental health issues and unplanned pregnancies are all increasing, particularly for indigenous people. To maintain the status quo means that the gaps will continue to widen and that indigenous women, girls and gender-diverse people will continue to fall deeper, but it doesn't have to be this way.

The root causes of the gendered and racialized pandemic inequities that we are seeing are ingrained much deeper than extra masks and hand sanitizer. We need attention to be focused on creating sustainable, long-term solutions. This is an opportunity for Canada to commit to a gendered response, one that includes a specifically tailored approach for indigenous women and gender-diverse people and their needs and which takes into account the context of racialized violence and poverty. Small and medium-sized enterprises play a key role in the Canadian economy, as well all know.

Women—indigenous and non-indigenous—are also the foundation of families and communities. Between 2013 and 2017, small and medium-sized enterprises made up 85% of the net job creation in the private sector, and in 2017, small and medium-sized enterprises employed almost 90% of the private sector workforce in Canada. However, only 1.4% were indigenous-owned, despite indigenous people being 5% of the national population, and of those, only 25% were majority indigenous women-owned. There's a lot of work to do. For indigenous women and gender-diverse people, economic reconciliation is critical to their emergence.

That will require sustainable investments in dedicated economic recovery efforts. Imagine what would happen if, as part of the COVID-19 economic recovery plan, we invested in indigenous women and gender-diverse individuals, so that they could position themselves to thrive when the Canadian and global economies re-emerge. Seeded with $10 million in matching funds from the Government of Canada's Department for Women and Gender Equality, we've already started this work at Grand Challenges Canada.

We were overwhelmed by the results of our recent call for proposals to accelerate gender equality through indigenous innovation and social entrepreneurship. We've received 238 applications across business, health, social, tech, environmental and cultural innovation. Unfortunately, we will only be able to fund the top 3% in this round, about five to seven projects. Think about the impact for indigenous women and girls once the best ones are operational. Think about what the potential impact for indigenous women and girls could be if we were able to fund even, say, the top 10%.

What if we invested even more in indigenous innovation using a gender lens to give them and the next generation an even better chance to reach their fullest potential? After all, this is helping them to also take care of their families.

(1530) What if we started off by offsetting emergency relief funds and longer-term unemployment expenses for indigenous folks who have lost their jobs because of the falling economy? I happen to know a group of indigenous innovators who have some awesome ideas, lots of support from their communities and tons of grit. It's crucial that any COVID-19 recovery plan, globally and within Canada, places women, girls and gender-diverse individuals, as well as their inclusion, representation, rights, social and economic outcomes, equality and protections, at the centre if it's to have the necessary impact.

This recovery plan is also an opportunity to invest in equality from a gender and an anti-oppression lens, so let's give the world more of what Canada and all of us aspire to, where everyone has the opportunity to reach their fullest potential.

Meegwetch .

The Chair :

Excellent, and thank you very much, Sara. We're now going to move over to Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich who is with Women's Shelters Canada. You have the floor for 10 minutes, Kaitlin.

Ms. Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich (Communications and Development Manager, Women's Shelters Canada) :

Good afternoon and thank you for this invitation. My name is Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich, and I am the communications and development manager at Women's Shelters Canada, or WSC. WSC is a national organization representing over 550 shelters and transition houses serving women and children affected by violence against women and intimate partner violence. We were created by the provincial and territorial shelter associations that wanted a voice on the national stage. Today, these 14 associations are our full members and make up our advisory council.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we held weekly Zoom meetings with our advisory council, both to support them in learning from each other's contexts and to provide us with a sense of what was happening across the country. These remarks are informed by their experiences. I would like to begin by prefacing that while WSC's overall goal is to see an end to all violence against women, my remarks will focus on domestic violence, which includes family violence and intimate partner violence.

I'm sure you will hear from other witnesses who will speak to other effects the COVID-19 pandemic has had on women, such as limits to reproductive choices and freedom, disproportionate job loss, increased child care responsibilities, and police violence against indigenous and racialized people. Before the COVID pandemic arrived in Canada, things were already bleak for women fleeing violence. In fact, many have called violence against women, or VAW, the pandemic within the pandemic. The stats are indicative: Every six days a women is killed by her current or former intimate partner.

Indigenous women are 2.7 times more likely to be victims of violence than non-indigenous women. However, femicide rates for indigenous women are six times higher than for non-indigenous