INDY Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON INDUSTRY

COMITÉ PERMANENT DE L'INDUSTRIE

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Thursday, December 3, 1998

• 0914

[English]

The Chair (Ms. Susan Whelan (Essex, Lib.)): I call the meeting to order. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), this is a study on gender equity—Industry Canada.

We're very pleased to have with us today the Honourable Hedy Fry, Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and the Status of Women. We're going to begin with the minister's opening statement. After that we'll proceed to questions.

So I'll turn it over to the Honourable Hedy Fry, please.

[Translation]

The Hon. Hedy Fry (Secretary of State (Multiculturalism) (Status of Women), Lib.): Good morning, Madam Chair.

[English]

I would like to introduce my two officials, Florence Ievers, who heads up the department, and Scheherzade Rana, who is one of the policy analysts with the department.

• 0905

I want to thank everybody for allowing me to come and present to you. I think it's very important that we begin to look at the way we develop our human resource potential in this country, recognizing that 51% of our human resource potential are women, and that if we are ever going to be a competitive country, we need to start looking at the specific barriers that gender presents. This includes not only those barriers that gender presents, but also those presented by linguistic and cultural differences—again, because we need to develop our whole human resource potential.

The issue of looking across and horizontally at issues that don't seem to lend themselves to gender or diversity issues, such as Industry Canada is doing, is a new one. The ability to analyse everything that every department does with a lens that looks at the barriers created by diversity and gender is going to become very important as we move into a global, technological, and knowledge-based economy. We know there are very specific barriers that will leave behind large percentages of our population.

As I said before, women make up 51%, but in fact 47% of Canadians in Canada today have neither French nor English origins. So we are also looking at another cohort of Canadians that we need to be able to talk about developing.

The other thing I'm going to try to do when we bring about our presentation today is to talk about the link between economic and social issues. Traditionally there have always been two linear silos, going up vertically, and they are that economic issues are here and social issues are there. We know now that economic and social issues are so interrelated as to be almost inseparable, and unless we link them very well and develop strong policies on both and recognize those linkages, we will fail at both of them.

For instance, I know in the past that gender issues, women's equality, have always been put into a nice little ghetto where we look after women because they're poor dear little things who are not very equal, and we look at them as a social issue and try to pat them on the head a little bit and make sure some of the social things are looked after. If women comprise 51% of our population, then I think we have to ask ourselves, do you know, do I know, any corporation at all that will only develop 49% of its human resource potential—or its resource potential of any kind—and expect, in any way, to be competitive, to progress, and to grow?

When women are able to contribute to the economy, when women have the choices, the skills available to have good, sustainable, full-time, long-term jobs, when women have the ability through these jobs and through a good infrastructure to be able to have retirement income, then women in turn are not a “burden on the state”, because they are able to be self-sufficient. The very self-sufficiency of women to be able to have a solid economic base also diminishes the risk of a whole lot of other power imbalances, such as violence against women.

So the linkages are pretty clear about how social and economic issues feed each other. In Status of Women Canada we believe it's important that we do not just do things based on anecdotes, that we think very seriously about how the data are collected, about what evidence we have to show why women have specific barriers and what things we need to do, and link those with good policy.

Since you, as a committee, are the ones who are going to advise on policy-making, I hope you will give me a hearing on some of these things.

Let's look, for instance, at something as simple as productivity and a skilled labour force. We know globalization and economic restructuring have brought about a technology-based and knowledge-based economy. We know we have to look at our productivity as a country based on our ability to compete with other countries of the world.

We need to look at the changing nature of work, and the changing nature of work means skill is extremely important. People are going to move into six or seven jobs during the course of their lifetimes. Creativity is important. We also know that many entrepreneurs are finding new ways of growing and of being able to support themselves and to create part of that economy we're talking about.

• 0910

How do we factor women into that? We know that women are the highest number of people in the non-standard, insecure, part-time, and low paying jobs. How do we change that? Obviously, one of the key ways in which we change that is to look at the issue of productivity and how women are able to develop their human resource potential. We need to look at issues such as training, access to the Internet, and women's ability to trade and to expand their markets. We know that the change in family structure has created a major problem and a demand on the things that impact a woman's ability to get into the workforce, and one of those things is time.

We know there are an increased number of single-parent families in this country today, and 80% of them are headed by women. A study done by Statistics Canada on behalf of the provinces as well as the federal government called Economic Gender Equality Indicators looked at the fact that because they bear children and have to take care of children, women move in and out of the workforce. When a woman becomes pregnant, she leaves work and looks after her child for a short period of time. How do we ensure that the fact that a woman goes in and out of the workforce does not affect not only her immediate earnings but also her lifetime earnings? If those lifetime earnings are linked to benefits such as the Canada Pension Plan or retirement benefits, how do we ensure that we have people who at the end of their work lives have a good retirement plan so that they are able to sustain themselves without having to depend solely on old age security?

We know that the majority of women who have not been in the workforce are dependent solely on old age security, which is insufficient. No matter how hard we try in a civilized society, it's going to be insufficient to keep women moving and living reasonable lives. In turn, the burden on the health system is going to be greater, because women are going to have chronic debilitative diseases, and they're going to need to be cared for if they don't eat well, if they don't have good nutrition. We know that conditions such as osteoporosis and depression will affect them.

I'm building the linkages again so that an issue such as the inability of women to have a straight connection to the workforce is understood.

The Canada Pension Plan is very important to women, because it is the only pension plan, private or public, that recognizes a child-rearing dropout, that doesn't penalize a women for going in and out of the workforce to have children and to take care of her children over short periods of time, so that she doesn't lose her basic retirement income.

Because of the change in family structure, I think we need to understand that we do not want to talk only about two-income families or single-income families where one person can stay home. We know that, for instance, in a lone-parent family there is no choice to stay home. That person has to go out and work. We know that about 65% of single-parent families live in poverty. How do we ensure that the women in those families get access to good and sustainable jobs and, especially in the technological age, jobs that they can do perhaps at home?

We know too that women are moving more and more into small and medium-sized enterprises, and that is one of your files. Women move more and more into small and medium-sized enterprises because it gives them the ability to be flexible. It gives them the ability to work out of the home. We know that a large percentage of women in small and medium-sized businesses tend to be in very small businesses, in micro-businesses, in which they begin their businesses with about only $10,000 or even less. These businesses tend not to expand. They tend to remain small. The overall earnings of these women are very small as well. They do not tend to go on the Internet. They don't tend to access the technology links we have, so they cannot expand their networks of work.

The question is, what do we do to ensure that women in small and medium-sized enterprises have a level playing field? The Business Development Bank of Canada, as you well know, has a special section in which they assist women to set up small and medium-sized enterprises. They assist them with business plans, loans, and networking. But it is the only bank that does that.

• 0915

For women, not only in Canada but around the world, their biggest problem in starting businesses is access to credit. I know you are discussing issues such as small and medium-sized businesses and an act to look at that issue. I hope that when you do so you will factor in that women who start their businesses with an amount as small as $5,000 to $10,000 sometimes cannot start them unless they borrow the money from a family member, because the access to it at the traditional banks and trust companies is very limited.

Women do not expand their businesses because of their inability to get involved with technology. You have VolNet, SchoolNet, and CAIP. CAIP, as you know, looks at the difference between urban and rural access to the Internet. I wanted to flag for you that there are disparities not only between rural and urban but also between genders in terms of access to the Internet.

Women do not access the Internet for a few reasons. The key one is money. They tend to earn half the amount of money men earn in the same business. On average, a woman in a small enterprise is taking home at the end of the year about $19,000. That makes it very difficult for her to be able to get on the Internet and to use the Internet properly. It's not that women lack the skills; it's that they lack the money to get on the Internet. Many of them also lack the time to learn how to use the Internet better. So when you think about CAIP, and I know you're thinking about moving CAIP into urban areas, perhaps you would also look at developing some disaggregated information to see how gender will factor in, in terms of use of the Internet.

One of the key things we also know is that women do not advertise their businesses in the same way men do. This comes from a series of studies we have done. Women do not go out and advertise in a broad-based way. They tend to depend on networking for the development of their business. They know people who they tell they have a business. Now, if women could access the Internet, they could learn how to broaden their advertising so that they can broaden the base and scope of their business. Again, this is where I think you have two areas in which you can perhaps look at the issue.

With regard to women and banking and access to credit, the Canadian Bankers Association did a study that showed that in fact the largest number of requests for loans that were denied were from women. It wasn't because they were women that they were denied the loans; it was because the criteria for a loan are “gender neutral”. But sometimes gender neutrality is not good enough, and you need to look at the specific barriers. The specific barriers are that women don't have the kinds of collateral and chattel and stuff you can use to borrow money. Also, women are often asked to have co-signers and to have a husband, a spouse, or someone support their going out for a loan. That doesn't work, because some single women who want to start businesses don't qualify for these loans. So it's really important that you look at gender.

The banks have also promised that they will do a set of disaggregated data and some ongoing gender analysis to see how women are faring with regard to access to loans. This has not yet been done, apart from that single study that was done by the banks originally. Again, these are areas in which I think you can have influence as a committee.

The issue of unpaid work is extremely important. In Canada we know that when we look at the earnings of a full-time, full-term man versus a full-time, full-term woman, women earn 73¢ to every $1 men earn. Now, there are probably lots of reasons for that. But we're talking about full time, full pay. So we're not talking about women who are working fewer hours; we're talking about the same number of hours. The reason for this is probably because women tend to work in the lower-paying sectors. They tend to work in the service industry and in many of the health care industries, in which they do very menial work. In fact, in the 1996 census we found that for the first time nannies and housekeepers were included in the top 10 jobs for women in this country. So we're talking about women working in very low-paying jobs, and that is probably one of the reasons their percentage of earnings versus men's is low.

• 0920

When you look at comparing all earnings, full time and part time, earners and non-earners, women in fact are still at a 52% income. So we're really talking about a catch-up here.

One of the things that—and I'm going to be very careful how I say this, because if this issue is not understood clearly, then the things we need to do to have women have access to work are going to be invalid or are not going to work at all. Women having children—and I mean bearing children, having them, carrying them through a pregnancy—as well as women being the primary caregiver for children has created a real disparity and a discrepancy for women. We know the stress on women...again, this gender economic indicators project that we did with the provinces and Statistics Canada tells us that a woman who works full time, full pay, with a child under six, compared with a man who works full time, full pay, with a child under six, does five weeks a year more work for which she doesn't get any pay, because it's called the unpaid work she does at home.

There are many things that this impacts on. As we said earlier on, it impacts on her ability to have a consistent attachment to the workforce because she goes in and out, but it also impacts on the training. We found that in fact women who work in the private sector who have children do not have access to on-the-job training because of the time crunch. There tend to be high levels of stress. There tends to be little time for them to access the training, especially when training is given in places outside of where they live, and they can't go, or after work hours, or on the weekend. It presents a real problem for women, especially single women or women with children. The point is that if the women don't get access to the training, then they're not able to move up the ladder and get the better jobs and be able to have a lifetime of promotion within a system so that they can eventually get a better-paying job.

So I think these are the major things you need to think about. Because of children, women do have a higher stress rate and they do not have access to good training. There are many things you can talk about that will in fact remedy that. If you looked at using distance learning for training, this would be very beneficial to women in that many of them can have access to the training, and even to upgrading their skills and even to getting a degree, by doing distance learning at home.

How do you in fact accommodate this given that the technology and the whole information highway is part of what you look at? How do we get women onto that so they can have access to learning?

Secondly, how do we treat it as real learning, even though it's done at home, so that there are the benefits of the tax deductions, etc., for doing this kind of learning? There are, again, a whole set of issues tied up with access to learning, which is more than simply providing the ability or the program and saying, come and get it, because we know women cannot have access to it.

One of the things we know is that women are a growing economic force. I told you that women are growing more and more into small businesses, but there are some figures I don't know if you know. Three quarters of all of our jobs today, 75%, are self-employed. Women are starting their own businesses at twice the rate of men, and in fact they are creating four times the number of jobs. So in this role, not only do they have access to stable incomes because they have their own businesses and the flexibility of that, but they're in fact contributing to employment in a very major way. In fact, the Bank of Montreal study, Myths and Realities, showed that women created, last year, more jobs than the top 100 companies in Canada. They created 1.7 million jobs in Canada.

This, again, is another argument for why we need to ensure that women have the ability to have access to work and to have access to training. And yet, if we look at science and technology, which you are also interested in and responsible for, we know that women are entering university today at a much higher rate than they did in the past. We have 55% of women graduating from law school, from medical school, becoming secondary school teachers, but we still find that only 18% of women are going into the long-term sustainable jobs of the next century, and those are the computer skills and the science and engineering skills. Only 18% of women are represented in those jobs. The question is why? Again, under Industry Canada there are the new centres of excellence—which, as many of you know are headed by Monique Frize—to assist women to move into those jobs.

• 0925

But I think the important thing to remember is that one of the things we can do is look at why women are not getting into those sustainable jobs and what we do to get them into those sustainable jobs.

We also know that the self-employed women tend to be in micro-businesses. As we start to talk about expanding trade in Canada, we need to really think about how we help women go into expanding into trade outside of Canada so that they can help us be competitive in the global markets. It's not as easy to do. We also know that many of the women who do go on trade missions right now tend to be the few women entrepreneurs who are in medium-sized businesses. But the majority of women are in very small micro-businesses. So there is an issue here that perhaps you can look at as well.

One of the things I wanted to quickly touch on is that we went to the Asia-Pacific economies' meeting recently in Manila. It was the first time that ministers for women's equality met at an Asia-Pacific conference. Canada pushed for this to happen and so did the Philippines.

We discussed issues under four headings at that conference. One was, how do we ensure that the social and economic issues begin to be interrelated within the Asia-Pacific economies? How do we ensure that economies know that if they build their human resource potential of the 51% that isn't being built now, it will in fact help economies be competitive and increase their capacity and productivity? How do we ensure that countries and economies know that if they do not enhance and empower women, the 51%, to get into work—especially in crises we're seeing now in Asia-Pacific economies—they continue to present a burden for resources of the state because of the fact that they tend to be the poorest in most societies? How do we encourage women to get involved in science and technology, not only from the point of view of engineering and computer sciences, but how do we help women get into export markets, since within the Asia-Pacific economies it's all about a trading bloc and moving together to expand trade? Thirdly, how do we assist women to be able to have a say in decision-making processes and to develop their small and medium-sized businesses in a way in which they have influence within the Asia-Pacific economies.

There was an agreement to do four things, which again is something that I would like you to think about.

To be able to understand the issues that face women and men in having access to work, and in having access to technology and to trade expansion, you need to have the information. Information is key. The information can only come if in everything you do you have disaggregated information by sex. In other words, you look at how it affects men and women, what percentages of men and what percentages of women are there.

I would also ask you to look at the diversity too, because we know that in the world of work, aboriginal people have the highest unemployment. But we also know that black youth have the second highest unemployment. Immigrants, because of linguistic barriers, also tend to have a problem having access to this new world of the Internet that we talk about.

So when we talk about SchoolNet and VolNet and CAIP, we have to also factor in the fact that language is an issue we must take into consideration when we deal with expanding these. But I think if you have this disaggregated information and data, you will be able then to analyse your policies. So you will suggest policies and make recommendations that will not be one size fits all, that will recognize where there are disparities. Then you will be able to ask yourself why.

In Status of Women Canada we do a great deal of work, a great deal of research, not only with Statistics Canada but with our colleagues. We are on quite a few working groups right now with Industry Canada in which we are looking at some of the issues I talked about to try to get this information and analyse the data, so that we can in fact turn this whole issue around.

But I think it's important that when you look at your recommendations for policy, the acts you're looking at in terms of small business, you get that disaggregated information and look at it.

• 0930

We would be pleased to share with you any information we have, but perhaps it would also be very important for you to ensure that when you do meet with people in small and medium-sized businesses, you ensure that you also bring into consideration the micro-businesses that women tend to do in this country, so that you can get a perspective from them about what the other things are.

Those are some of the issues I want to bring to you. I want to help you to help us, to understand how we can harness all our human resource potential. When women are working, when women have economic autonomy, when women are able to contribute, then in fact they become positive contributors to our society in every single way, and we begin to move forward and we begin to be competitive.

Other countries in the world are beginning to do that. The Asia-Pacific economies are beginning to do that, and I am hoping that perhaps this committee, in all its deliberations in the future, will realize that you deal with about four key issues in which women need to have very specific changes that will allow them to participate.

Thanks very much. I'll be glad to answer questions.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms. Fry.

We have a number of questions. I'll begin with Mr. Pankiw.

Mr. Jim Pankiw (Saskatoon—Humboldt, Ref.): Thanks.

You talk about looking at disaggregated information and not having one-size-fits-all policies. I have a serious problem with that, because if you don't treat everybody equally, you are, by definition, discriminating against people.

Ms. Hedy Fry: Would you like me to answer that?

Mr. Jim Pankiw: Yes.

Ms. Hedy Fry: I think equality is not about sameness. Equality is recognizing that we face different barriers in society to achieving economic, social, political, or cultural participation.

I'll give you a very simplistic example. You're on the fifth floor here, and if you were giving away solid gold bars, one to each person who came up here between the hours of 5 p.m. and 6 p.m., and I were in a wheelchair and you had not taken specific provisions to ensure that I had an elevator, that the doors were wide enough for me to get my wheelchair through, or there was a ramp for me to get in, I would not be able to participate, no matter what you say, even if you say you've thrown the doors open to whoever is willing to come.

So I think it's very important to understand that we do live in a society where, for instance, if someone has a linguistic barrier, if they don't speak the language, if they're new immigrants who come in and don't speak the language very well, then they need to be able to have assistance to get language skills, because we bring in immigrants not only because of their language skills but because of other skills. We're finding in Canada that we need to have certain skilled workers because we do not have workers skilled in technology, and so we're looking at South Asia now because that's where there are a lot of technological workers that we need to bring in. We don't have them in Canada.

If we bring in immigrants from countries like South Asia, where English and French may or may not be the first language, then we need to look at that. Here we have people with the skills we need to make us competitive, but we also have to attach one component to that, and that is to assist them to achieve language, which is not something you're going to say to everyone who speaks English and French, that they have the ability to do this; they already speak English or French.

If you live in rural areas, you're looking at access to the Internet. Those people who live in the rural areas in this country live at distances that are so far that they probably don't have any access to computers, and they don't have access to the net as easily as you would in an urban area, where, even if you don't own a computer, you can go down to the nearest bar or computer library and have access.

You're already recognizing that in some of the things that are happening in Industry Canada. You're recognizing rural-urban differences; you're recognizing all kinds of differences, in everything you do.

What I'm suggesting is that you must continue to do that a little more so that you can level that playing field so that everyone can then have the ability and the opportunity to in fact achieve their potential, whatever that is.

Mr. Jim Pankiw: Fair enough, if you want to use your wheelchair example, but that's about providing equality of opportunity. But it seems to me you're focused on equality of outcomes. In most of your dissertation here, you talked about comparing where women work and their incomes. You're not talking about equality of access or allowing people equal opportunity to participate as you talked about here; you're focusing on the outcomes. I think that has no value.

• 0935

If you want to use your example of the Internet, allowing people in rural Canada to have equal access or opportunity to the Internet is fine. But why would you then do a study to see if black or white people, or women or men.... If everybody has the same opportunity, that should be the end of it. Any resources that are expended beyond that are a waste, as far as I'm concerned. Do you not see it that way?

Ms. Hedy Fry: No, I don't. As a physician, I will tell you outcomes are very important. If I have 25 people who have a particular disease, and I find a certain percentage do better than others, I look at those outcomes. I say some people have done better than others in this group of people, and I would want to know why, because that would help me to treat them in a different way, and any time I see this disease again I would know what to do. So I would then take those 25 people and go backwards and check to see what it is that influenced the outcome, positively or negatively, in that case. It's very simple epidemiological data that most people collect if they want to be able to make good policy, good clinical judgments. A whole lot of things are fed by this.

If you find that you notice in a particular region that you have 20% blacks and 10% aboriginal people, that's 30% of your population. If you don't see them in any of the places you deal with, where you go to shop, in the banks, in the police force—nowhere—wouldn't it occur to you to find out why? Why aren't they there? Is there a problem?

It's just like the person in a wheelchair. If you gave those gold bars out and then went downstairs, and as you were walking out you saw seven people in wheelchairs outside on the pavement and they asked, “Are the gold bars gone?”, and you said “Yes; why didn't you come on up, there were lots of them?”, they would say “Well, I couldn't get there; I wasn't able to.” Then you understand that the next time you have to do your process differently to allow them access, because there is a reason they didn't have access.

We know there are many reasons people do not have access. It's not only because of distances, in this country that is so vast because of geography. We know that language, race, stereotyping, and discrimination are also barriers to access. This is important. You won't know how it works unless you look at the outcomes. The outcomes tell you whether the thing is working or not, and whether it's working for all people or only for some, so you can go backwards, track it, and find out how to ensure everyone has equal opportunity.

Mr. Jim Pankiw: Well, okay. We'll just end up going in circles on that, so I'll ask you a different question.

I just read in your handout—I didn't really hear you talk much about it, although you might have referred to it briefly—about unpaid work.

Ms. Hedy Fry: Yes.

Mr. Jim Pankiw: I think you will know what I'm talking about when I talk about discrimination in the tax system against parents who choose to have one parent stay at home to raise their children, as opposed to two working parents. I don't need to explain those to you. Do you know what I'm referring to?

Ms. Hedy Fry: I certainly know, because what you're really saying is there may be a group of parents who don't have the same access to their incomes as other parents, and I think you're absolutely right. We have to look at those differences, because discrimination does occur, whether we know we're doing it on purpose or whether we're not doing it on purpose. Discrimination occurs because people and their situations are different. You're absolutely right. That's one of the reasons we're pointing out that unpaid work is a major issue.

Canada is leading the world on information on unpaid work. We know in fact that there is $17 trillion of unpaid work done in the world today. That's a United Nations statistic. We know the majority of it is done by women. If we looked at unpaid work as a percentage of the gross domestic product of this country, it's roughly 42%. The significance of that is that as people find, in order to feed their families, that both parents are going out to work...we're finding that all of the unpaid work women did when they were at home, looking after the elderly person, the children, the chronically ill...that they are leaving those fields with a vacuum, which is putting a major strain on our health care resources, and it means government has to find the money to fund those resources.

• 0940

So the point of valuing the work that we used to get for free from people for a long time is a very important one. I'm glad you brought it up. I'm glad you realize that in fact certain stereotyping and discrimination can create different access for different people.

Mr. Jim Pankiw: You say the government has to find money to fund those resources. Well, I would suggest to you that no, in fact, all they need to do is stop discriminating.

To me, it's not relevant whether it's women or men who are choosing not to go to work to care for their kids. But what is relevant is that the government discriminates against them in their tax policies. I would suggest that rather than finding money to fund the problems this creates, they should just end the problem by ending the discrimination against single-income families.

Ms. Hedy Fry: Given that you think there's discrimination against single-income families—we could go into some statistics that show that there may or may not be discrimination—I think your argument is a very valid one. You're basically saying we should go back and take measures and make good policy to stop the discriminatory practice. I'm in total agreement with you.

But when I said the government has to fund resources, I wasn't referring to stay-at-home persons. I was saying that as women go out to work and stop doing the caregiving they used to do at home, that affects the health care system. Government has to fund the health care system, because in this country, we have medicare. So it's left to all levels of government to pick up the slack, the vacuum, and to bring in health care workers to fulfil all of those requirements that women used to fulfil before.

This is not a simple, linear thing. Everything we do impacts on everything else we do. We can look at many issues. Consider a woman who stays at home to look after her child for her whole life. Whether she chooses to do this or not, or whether she wants to but can't because she doesn't have the skills, is neither here nor there.

The point is that this creates a particular person who, when she reaches 65 or 70 and is a senior, has had, if she didn't come from a very wealthy family, no ability to put aside anything for her retirement. She's a completely dependent person when she retires because she didn't work. She didn't have money to buy RRSPs because she didn't work. She didn't get CPP benefits because she didn't work. She didn't have anything. What if her husband divorces her when he's 50 and they didn't have many resources? She's left destitute at 65 or older with no pension.

You're absolutely right that we need to do some things to assist that woman to be treated equally. We have to look for very specific issues that will address a particular problem and policies that will in fact address her problem so she can be treated equally in the end.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Pankiw.

Mr. Peric.

Mr. Janko Peric (Cambridge, Lib.): Thank you, Madam Chair.

Minister, you mentioned that 45% of Canadians are of neither English nor French background. I'm one of them. I'm proud of my background and culture. But I have a problem at the same time.

My community is composed of different—I hate to say “ethnic”—multicultural communities. I encourage them to preserve their culture, traditions, and even their religion. But at the same time, I like them to share it with the rest of us.

But as you know, as in many other communities in Canada, the multicultural communities are enclosed within their own ghettos. There's a problem with new Canadians. There's that language barrier. It used to be a barrier. But the first generation is very different.

Now, as you know, immigration policies are different today from what they used to be four or five years ago. One of the requirements of coming to Canada is having knowledge of either official language. How would you encourage immigrants from different cultures to integrate totally into Canadian society without using their values?

Ms. Hedy Fry: You've asked exactly what multiculturalism programs strive to do.

• 0945

One of the three objectives of the multiculturalism programs is civic participation, recognizing that to be a citizen means that you have rights but you also have responsibilities. One of the major responsibilities of a citizen is to participate fully in the social, economic, political, and cultural life of the country. We know there are barriers to people doing that. So multiculturalism deals with some of the barriers you talked about—linguistic and other barriers. We assist communities, institutions, police forces, schools, etc., to be able to facilitate that integration in community development projects that we do. That's one of the ways we do it.

Your point is very clear, that keeping your culture is very important. This is what multiculturalism is about: it's about integration, not assimilation.

The model in the United States is about an assimilative model. In other words, in order to be American you must give up everything and just be American.

What Canada is saying is that you can be Canadian and you can be other things. You can have linguistic, cultural, all sorts of other differences, and still be part of what it is to be Canadian, which is to espouse a certain set of values, to believe in a certain rule of law, etc. So that's what multiculturalism programs do.

One of the things that is really important and we're beginning to find out now when we look at trade, which brings us back to the things you do in this committee, is that the Conference Board did a study about two and a half years ago in which they looked at the barriers to trade in a global economy, and they found that the biggest barriers to trade were understanding the language, the culture, and the marketplace of the countries with whom one expects to trade.

They also found that Canada's multiculturalism policy has created Canadians who have been here for five generations, two generations, one generation, however many, who are Canadians, who follow Canadian rule of law, Canadian values, all of those things, and know Canadian practices and business practices, but who still have, even if their parents came here five generations ago, an understanding of the language and the culture and the marketplace of the original countries. That is an advantage Canada does not yet make full use of.

We're the only country in the world, apart from Australia, that possibly has those very specific advantages. It not only creates great trade advantages for us, but it creates building of internal markets for us. Our internal markets are not a homogenized market any more. There is a whole broad range of cultural products, foods, etc., that we can develop here within Canada, and even look, ironically enough, at exporting to other countries of the world. We need to build those and to build that advantage up. That is very important.

Finally, when we went to UNESCO fairly recently, one of the concerns that many countries in the world have right now is that as globalization occurs and as we are all trading and our borders are going down and people are trading back and forth, global villages, most countries are becoming very afraid that they will have to assimilate into a new homogenized world culture. Most countries want to keep their identities intact. They want to make sure they are...whatever.

I mean, you take Hungary. They are celebrating their millennium this year, just of being the Hungarian Magyar state. I mean, they are Hungarian; they know what it means to be Hungarian. But they also want to be part of the global village. They want to be ensured that they don't lose the essence of what they are and what makes them and their children get a sense of who they are as well. They're turning to Canada, because we have been doing this. They feel we've created a global nation, and in that global nation people have still been able to keep their cultural differences in a way that benefits the country and allows for that kind of personal identity.

Mr. Janko Peric: Minister, I didn't get a clear answer.

I hate to mention that specific group that if you go to their church the females are sitting on one side and the males on the other side, and men are walking three steps ahead of females. How do you deal with that? Multiculturalism is not working up to that full potential.

• 0950

We can spend millions and millions of dollars, but we will not change the mentality, the culture. And I would hate to see that. We're trying to change and to integrate them, and at the same time they are closing that gate. Do you have any solution to that—and considering them equal members of our society? They're not. You can see we're promoting equality abroad, but we have the problem right here, and the problem is they brought those problems with cultural differences.

Ms. Hedy Fry: Janko, I don't understand your question, I really don't. You're asking how do we ensure that people integrate and still maintain their cultural identity—is that your question?

Mr. Janko Peric: Yes. You said we are encouraging—

Ms. Hedy Fry: But we're doing that—

Mr. Janko Peric: But it's not working.

Ms. Hedy Fry: Oh, I think it's working. If you look at Will Kymlicka, who is a professor at the University of Ottawa who has just finished doing a series of indicators—

Mr. Janko Peric: Why do we have problems in Vancouver, then, with people killing each other, if it's working?

Ms. Hedy Fry: Because we have not achieved the perfect society yet. We have to keep doing it until we ensure that the things we want to achieve are achieved. We are in the process of changing it. For instance, if you want to talk about integration into the decision-making parts of our country, 18% of persons in the House of Commons today, who were voted on by the general Canadian public, are first-generation immigrants. In the demographics of the society itself, they are only represented by 12%. So we have achieved integration into the highest level of government more than the demographic numbers out there in Canada.

We are making some difference and we are making some changes, but what I'm here to talk to you about is ensuring that we continue to do that. It's not only for multiculturalism programs to do; it's to ensure that all policies do the information, the disaggregated data, and get the policies to ensure that we recognize diversity.

The Chair: Thanks, Mr. Peric.

Mr. Janko Peric: I'll come back.

The Chair: Madame Lalonde, please.

[Translation]

Ms. Francine Lalonde (Mercier, BQ): Good morning, Ms. Fry. I wish to congratulate you but, at the same time, I want to express my concern in relation to your policy priorities.

First, I found it interesting to hear you describe the status of women and the extremely slow pace of progress, when there is any, along with the new environment which is being termed “the new economy” and the new challenges facing women in that environment.

However, I am wondering whether you feel sorry for the elimination of the Advisory Council on the Status of Women. You are telling us, in this committee, that things have to change. But you know how difficult it is to act within a government and it is no less difficult in a committee.

Let us consider for example the greatest problem that women face, which is access to credit. Banks say that there is no problem, they deny it. I am basing my comments on the survey conducted by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. They say there is no problem, that women face no discrimination in their access to credit.

This brings me back to my basic principle: if women want things to change, they have to get organized. All over Canada, women's organizations have been regrouping in order to obtain more funds. They are the ones who should denounce unfair situations and thus help you and other women in power to make things happen. This is why I profoundly regret the elimination of the Advisory Council on the Status of Women. It was another voice in favour of women, a voice that sometimes tried to make things move in the right direction.

• 0955

Everyone knows that bureaucracy is important. I do not know whether you mentioned any figures, but I am sure our bureaucracy is not different from all others in the world, which means that, in it, women are a minority or even a small minority. The same is true within political parties, government and Cabinet. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to change things. First, I would like to hear your comments on this matter.

Second, I have to admit that I cannot understand your priorities. I cannot even agree on the wording of some of these priorities. I will get back to this issue later if I have time but for now, I would like you to comment on my first concern.

[English]

Ms. Hedy Fry: You asked about two issues.

On the abolishing of the Advisory Council on the Status of Women, that was a decision that was made because of times when we were looking at how government became smaller, at how we were able to cut a $42 billion deficit. We looked at a lot of structures that were duplicating.

It was felt that in fact the most important component of what the advisory council did was the research component. So we took on the research component and we have created an arm's-length body very similar to the advisory council's research component. In other words, the board or the peer group of persons who do the research or who accept the research is created by women within the community who were named by women in the community in research. These women are there and they look at the applications or the research projects and they make a decision based on the merit of the project and then they fund it. We have nothing to say or nothing to do with that. But at the same time, the overall cost of keeping another structure alive was not...we didn't have to do that.

The issue of total funding for women's groups and women's programs is a very important one. That's a different issue. Canada is one of the few countries in the world actually that funds NGOs in the way we do. Many countries look to the way we develop the NGO participation. They consider it to be a good model to follow and many of them are looking at it.

But I agree with you, you can't do very much when you don't have enough funds. And as you know, there is a group of women calling themselves the Fair Share Campaign, made up of leaders from a lot of different organizations, non-governmental organizations. Of course I support their efforts to seek more funding within the Status of Women Canada program funding so that we can empower non-governmental organizations to do the community development that is needed to do the support systems, to do the research, to do the empowerment of women across the country that is necessary. I support it.

The Chair: Madame Lalonde, I'm going to have to move on to Mr. Lastewka.

I'm going to ask people to try to keep their questions shorter and their answers shorter. The House is starting, and we're anticipating a vote. When the vote starts we're going to have to finish.

Mr. Lastewka, please.

Mr. Walt Lastewka (St. Catharines, Lib.): Thank you, Madam Chair. I'll get right to the point.

The area on which I'd like to have some discussion with you, Minister, is the area on page 7 concerning “Women account for only 28% of university students in mathematics and physical sciences, and 18% of those in engineering and applied sciences.”

In my previous work, this is the area I had done a lot of work on: setting up advisory groups in large corporations to try to help do outreach programs to high school and college and university areas in order to improve that. Unfortunately, over the last 10 years that 18% hasn't moved up much. If I remember correctly, back five years ago that was around 14%. So it's moved up 4% in five years.

What are we doing wrong, and what should we be doing to try to improve that? I have two daughters, and both are in the engineering field. I'm failing to understand what we need to do to make those figures higher.

• 1000

Ms. Hedy Fry: That's a very difficult question. We believe that much of the reason for why women aren't going into these particular fields is that, first and foremost, during their high school years, they're not really looking at going into those particular fields. There's that old stereotyping, that traditional idea that girls don't do science and don't do math very well. People also believe girls learn differently from boys, and that we need to take that into consideration when we set up teaching models.

There's also a second component. We believe girls need strong role-model women in those fields, but you're into the catch-22 situation obviously. As more and more women get into the field, more and more women will look at that and say, “I want to be....” I remember the time when 10% of doctors in this country were female. This was in 1970. Girls always said, “I want to go into health care. I'll be a nurse.” Then, as they started to see more and more women in medicine, they thought, “Hey, I could be a doctor, too.” So I think role modelling, access to different ways of learning, and looking at how universities have a welcoming environment for women in some of these areas, are some of the things we will do.

I know Industry Canada has some policy by which they have developed the networks of centres of excellence for women in science and technology, as I said, headed by Monique Frize. They are looking at and are working with universities to find out why it is that women aren't entering these areas; what it is that can be done; how the faculties can work to make these areas more accessible; and how they can outreach into the high schools to let girls know these are very good, obvious career choices for them, etc.

I think we're again back to the whole ability even of younger women to access technology itself, which is a costly thing today. Many women starting up businesses, including the younger women, don't have the money to have access to that kind of technology and the time to learn it.

Mr. Walt Lastewka: But I know that—

The Chair: Mr. Lastewka, I apologize. I have to suspend until we get another opposition member to return. Unfortunately, Madame Lalonde didn't think I gave her adequate time, so she left the table while knowing full well that would mean I'd have to suspend.

Just for the record, Mr. Pankiw, you had about eleven or twelve minutes; Mr. Peric had about eight minutes; and Madame Lalonde had about eight minutes. I was trying to get things back on track.

I apologize to the minister. The Reform Party is doing its best to get us a member to come as quickly as possible.

The bell is a 30-minute bell. We could continue until about 10.15 a.m. Unfortunately, however, until I have an opposition member, technically—

Mr. Walt Lastewka: Let's have some discussion off the record, then. I want to take advantage of the discussion.

The Chair: Sure, we can continue it off the record for a few minutes if you'd like.

[Editor's Note: Proceedings continue in camera]

• 1012

[Editor's Note: Public proceedings resume]

The Chair: Minister Fry, we're now resuming our hearings, and you can continue to answer that question now.

I want to thank Mr. Duncan for joining us.

Ms. Hedy Fry: There are equal credit guidelines, and this is again why equal criteria don't always promote equality.

In spite of the fact that there are equal credit guidelines, a study by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business entitled Double Standard: Financing Problems Faced by Women Business Owners found that women business owners seeking loans are 24% more likely to have their loan application refused than their male counterpart, and when the loan is accepted, business women could be charged an interest rate almost a percentage point higher than men. These were two important things that were found out by the Canadian independent business owners.

Secondly, the Canadian Bankers Association did a study themselves, and as a result of that study, they found certain things. It was a 1996 report by the Canadian Bankers Association, which found that small businesses solely owned by a woman are more likely to have their applications turned down, and so on, that the gender of the business applicant is not a factor in itself in the loan turndown, since the loan application is evaluated on business merit, just as you said—differences in turndown rates of female- and male-owned businesses are due to business characteristics, not the gender of the owner—and that businesses owned exclusively by women were less likely to ask for financing than those owned by men or owned jointly by men and women.

As a result of that, they decided they would continue to do that kind of work, looking at why it is that given the same criteria, women aren't applying, and why is it that what the independent business association found was so. They have not done it. That is it. The Canadian Bankers Association did the one study, and they haven't followed up on continuing to do the ongoing information-gathering that would help them make the kinds of changes that would assist women.

So I think with the federal government's mandate for jobs and growth, it is important that we look at that issue.

The Chair: Ms. Jennings.

Ms. Marlene Jennings (Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, Lib.): I have a short question. You've talked about part of the mandate of the Status of Women Canada being to undertake gender-based analysis on future government policy or legislation. I'd like to know if you have some concrete examples of actual gender-based analysis that has been done in the past on what was being proposed as a government policy or piece of legislation. And if so, what were the results of that analysis and what impact did it have on that proposed policy or legislation?

• 1015

Ms. Hedy Fry: One example is the Canada Pension Plan. When the Canada Pension Plan was being analysed with regard to looking at changes by the federal government and the provinces about two years ago, the work we did basically showed that because of children, the woman drops in and out and has an inconsistent attachment, and it affects her retirement income. The CPP was the only one that did not discriminate and gave the woman the ability to have a consistent payment into her pension plan.

They kept that. They kept the child drop-out provision. That was one of the things the gender-based analysis showed.

Secondly, the whole issue of survivor benefits, etc., helped to keep some of those items within CPP. Now there is a second tranche of CPP that's coming and is going to be looking even further to developing them better, or seeing whether they still fulfil the requirements that are necessary. We will be doing analysis there.

Employment insurance is another example of such influence, although it's not as good an example as we would like to see because it didn't happen at the beginning of the decision-making, but came about around the middle somewhere. We know the majority of women are part-time workers and never made the required amount of weeks of work to be able to get CPP, maternity benefits, and EI, or parental benefits.

So by changing it to hours, even though you have to get 800 hours, at the end of 800 hours you have the ability to get those benefits, which you would never have done before, even if you had worked 50,000 hours over the course of your lifetime. So simple changes like that make a difference.

Just quickly, my last example is the recognition of the number of single-parent families out there, the recognition that 80% of them are headed by women, and that children are a real barrier in terms of the time crunch—just the ability to go out to work, to access day care, training, and those kinds of things. The last budget gave grants of up to $5,000 a year, for instance, to low-income persons with dependants to get extra training or to go to school. That benefited the 80% of those single-parent families headed by women. Also, there was the whole issue of looking at deduction of child care when you go to school. It used to be only for full-time school; it now includes part-time and high school. It has taken into consideration that gender problem and is correcting it.

So there are lots of ways where, by having the information, you can factor it into your policy and make good policy.

The Chair: Thank you.

Mr. Duncan has some questions.

Mr. John Duncan (Vancouver Island North, Ref.): I haven't been here for the whole presentation, as you know, but I do have some perceptions about what's going on.

I have an 8-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son, for example, and I see what's happening in the school system. I live in a community that is in many ways a resource-based community, and it seems to me a lot of what's occurring in today's society is basically going to make it in many respects easier for my daughter to succeed, in terms of these sorts of traditional measures, simply because society is moving that way. The things that seem to be very attractive to women entrepreneurs—the smaller businesses, new businesses, the new entrepreneurial things, working in a cooperative fashion rather than in a highly competitive environment—represent the way the world is moving in many respects. So I think we need to recognize that.

• 1020

We shouldn't always be so concerned about the fact that, in some of our corporate environments, women maybe don't succeed at specific places on the ladder. I think those places are rapidly disappearing anyway, so the success of females in business is actually in all the areas that are most important. In many respects, we can be very pleased with the way things are headed.

I was interested in one of your statements. You said women are less likely to seek financing than men are, or are less likely to do so than businesses, enterprises, run by a combination of a man and a woman. Once again, has there been an analysis done on that? Maybe the reason they're less likely to ask for financing is that they're better business people. There's a tendency, I think, for the male to be a high risk-taker. As a consequence, financing and borrowing involve risk, but risk is not necessarily a measure of success. My concern is that you can introduce bias into your analysis by making an assumption that the fact that you're less likely to seek financing is somehow a negative connotation. It may indeed be a positive connotation.

Ms. Hedy Fry: Thank you for those comments.

The first thing you mentioned was that there is a better environment for your daughter today than there is for your son. And yes, I think we should be pleased with the fact that we have made steps. Many women were not allowed to vote until fairly late in the century. Women were not allowed to own land, and some women still have a difficult time—especially if they own farms—in being able to have access to what is a family-owned business. In some provinces, if there is a divorce, many women sometimes don't get half of the business because it is a business and not a family asset.

There is still a long way to go. Women have only come a short way in a short time, and I think we're glad for those advancements and should celebrate those gains that we've made. But there are some other fairly real things. Before you came in, we were saying that the world of the 21st century is one that is going to be based on jobs in science, in technology, and in computer sciences. Only 18% of women are represented in university and are learning those particular skills. We also know that, as you say, women are going into businesses now twice as much as men; however, the earnings of those women are half those of men in the same business. As you rightly pointed out, one of the reasons is that women don't tend to take as much risk.

The quotations that I read were not from me. They came from the Canadian Bankers Association and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. Those groups did these studies, and they found certain things that were there and need to be changed.

Just before you asked your question, Ms. Jennings was saying that one of the reasons that could be suggested for why women have a difficult time gaining access to capital from banks is that the work they were doing was considered to be high-risk because much of it had to do with science that we do not recognize. There are women who have science that we don't recognize because it's not written down in a book—the knowledge, for instance, of how to make certain foods, how to make certain healing products, or how to heal. Some of those things women have known about for generations, but they're not written down in a book. Some of the small businesses women want to open involve things such as a spa; a little bed and breakfast; helping you to get healthy; making cookies; or making a new diaper that stays up beyond such and such a time, because they've experimented with their own kids and found an easy way to do it. These are business concepts banks tend not to fund. I think a reason women have not been seeking funding from banks is possibly because they have been told no too often.

• 1025

We find that when women wish to open a business, they save their money, and so they're not starting businesses when they really would like to. They're also having to borrow from family. That's where they get some of their capital, because they cannot get it elsewhere.

Since the Women's Enterprise Centres have started up under the economic development portfolio of the federal government, we have found that more and more women are finding they can go somewhere where they can get help with their business plan, they can get a little loan, and they can develop networks. The Business Development Bank of Canada has also been working more and more to assist these women.

I think the most important thing is that recently the Bank of Montreal announced they were going to start providing microcredit loans for women, because women begin tiny businesses. They don't go to the bank to ask for $40,000; they ask for $5,000 or $10,000, and that is often not seen as a borrowable amount.

Mr. John Duncan: I have a special request for the minister. You mentioned the federal business bank. This is the industry committee, which has a mandate for the federal bank. Is that correct?

In St. John's, Newfoundland, there's a federal business bank, which has been there a long time. It's relocating to the storefront of the main building on Water Street. The storefront is in Atlantic Place. It's the prime storefront location in St. John's. In order for the federal bank to locate in that storefront, they have to dislocate people who have been there for some time. There are at least three shops that I know of. I think there's a Tip-Top Tailors, a travel agency, and an optical shop.

The optical shop is owned by a woman. She had a successful business. She has been there a long time. She was not consulted. She is basically being evicted so that the federal business bank, which is supposed to be there to help small business, can occupy her space. She cannot break her lease, she can only move to another part of the building. She would just as soon go to a storefront in another part of the city, but she is not allowed to break her lease. So she's going to be in the back of the building without a storefront. All of this is complements of our federal business bank.

If you could be an advocate for that woman, I think it would be a very good thing indeed. The small business community in St. John's is upset, and this is just not right.

Ms. Hedy Fry: I can't comment on the individual case because I don't know anything about it, and I think it would be really presumptuous of me even to try to do that. However, if you wanted to look at what the Business Development Bank of Canada does, for instance in 1995 the Business Development Bank of Canada assisted specifically 25% of women to help them with counselling for starting up their business and with loans. They have organized seminars specifically for women to help them to be able to set up good business plans and to understand how to....

• 1030

In 1994, for instance, there were a large number of women who attended these seminars. That's the last piece of data we have, and we know that amount has been increasing.

In many places in Canada...I know in British Columbia, for instance, there are many women who cannot—because of the guidelines for accessing financing from traditional banks—get the little bit of money they need to start up a small business. They can go to the Women's Enterprise Centres, which are part of the economic development portfolios, and get that little bit of loan and that business assistance they need to start their businesses. So they're doing good work.

The issue you're talking about is obviously something I can't comment on. I don't know what both sides of the story are—I have no idea—and I think the thing for you to do obviously would be to discuss this with the minister in charge. If you like, I will mention to him that you told me this story, but I don't know all the details of it at all. But I can flag it for his attention.

The Chair: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Duncan.

Mr. Lastewka.

Mr. Walt Lastewka: Thank you.

Further to what the minister was saying, I know that the banks have been more and more receptive to the micro loans for women in business as a result of the report. I was following up on that report only a month ago. Some of the banks—not all—have taken the cue also in doing seminars and special seminars for women in business, not getting into the businesses the women are getting into but having to do better work as far as the business planning process is concerned and how to work with the banks to get loans.

I've done a number of these seminars. In fact, in January I have some more, one in Moncton in fact. It came out of a session where in effect the minister and I were almost like the bankers, because we were asking some basic questions on the business planning process, and then we decided to fix it by having these seminars going on in the various communities we had toured.

So I know there's been a lot of progress from that report. It would be interesting to find out from the CBA what they've accomplished since that report—I'm going back to what Ms. Jennings said earlier—and what they plan to do in the future. It might be something to ask when we have the banks here.

The question I wanted to refer to is your slide 8, on expansion export readiness. I know I've seen many women in attendance at the export programs we have conducted at border crossing areas, the WIN programs, and the various programs. I know it's just open to people who want to export. So I'm trying to find out from you what are the barriers specifically for women entrepreneurs in export readiness.

Ms. Hedy Fry: I think some of them are basically that they're not able.... Before we talk about export, even internally in terms of expansion within the country they have barriers. One of them is, first, the way they advertise and do business, as I said before. Women have traditionally been seen to do business by contacts only, by talking to friends who told everybody about the business. That's how they get their clientele, rather than going out and advertising or using methods of advertising. That's a catch-22 situation, because if they don't have money to spend on that, it's one of the problems. So we have a problem there.

Secondly, you can get figures showing that as few as 10% to 40% of women are actually linked to the Internet and using the Internet to expand their businesses. That's one of the problems.

Thirdly, it's only very recently with all of the studies coming out, including the Bank of Montreal's Myths and Realities study, which showed that women are becoming very successful entrepreneurs and play a major role in employment, that people are beginning to pay attention to the fact that women can become involved in trade. They're going on trade missions now. Women aren't in the very large businesses. We used to take large businesses on trade missions. Even in medium-sized businesses, there aren't very many women there. So when we take medium-sized businesses on trade missions to expand the market, women are not involved in that.

• 1035

We have to start looking at trade missions with small and micro businesses. We're getting to a critical mass now. I think 33% of these women are involved in small and medium-sized business in Canada. In some countries, that's as much as 55%, like in the Philippines.

So the little trade missions that Sergio Marchi is beginning to move forward with and that women are getting more and more interested in are actually helping women to make those contacts outside of Canada and to start to develop links. But the key to that, I think, is the connectedness of women who are left behind on the information sidewalk. They don't have the connectedness through the information medium that we now have, which is chiefly the information highway.

One of my hopes is that you would factor that in when you look at access to the information highway. There's a very good program for the schools in SchoolNet. VolNet is looking at volunteer organizations. But to simply look only at urban and rural splits when you're looking at access to the information highway doesn't factor in the women at all.

Even in rural communities, women are starting small businesses as add-on businesses in the farming and fishing industries, etc. They don't have that kind of access. In the urban areas, women get lost in the shuffle, as I said before, because they're in tiny businesses. They're only making $19,000 or $20,000. They can't afford to get on the Internet.

Mr. Walt Lastewka: Here's where I'm coming from. I opened up many Canada service centres across the country with the minister. The Internet is available there. We have people there. We tried to have one-stop shopping in smaller communities. So men or women can go to the same place and get all the data they need from Strategis, ExportSource, or whatever. Those areas are available. They don't discriminate between men or women. Many of the people who are running them are women, because we wanted to make it more friendly for women entrepreneurs to drop in and get that information.

Ms. Hedy Fry: That's very good in terms of the availability. But it's like the gold bars you would have given out in this room earlier this morning. A person in a wheelchair couldn't get up to get it if he didn't have access.

One of the things we're finding is that women are limited in terms of accessing that kind of thing. These are some really ordinary, common sense, simple things. One is that many women work out of their homes. They have kids, so that helps them to make a little money without having to deal with daycare. They work out of their homes. They don't have the time or ability to go off and use that kind of access thing outside.

Really, it sounds like it's a simple thing. But it's a major thing for many women. There are the family responsibilities, the money, and the relevance of going out there when they don't have much time because they're in a time crunch. These are really major issues for them.

We find that women in small businesses don't have employees as often as men do in small businesses. So they don't have somebody to leave there while they go out to do these things. You might say they can do it in the evenings. But many of them are responsible for looking after the kids in the evenings, especially the single parents. Saturday is when they do the laundry and other things, because they're working in their offices or little businesses during the week.

These are the little common sense things that don't come up in any major Statistics Canada statistics. They don't get talked about in huge boardrooms. These are the simple things that are preventing women from having access to all the good stuff that's out there.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Lastewka. We'll go on to Ms. Jennings.

Ms. Marlene Jennings: What I have is not really a question, but more of a comment. It's a follow-up on a point Walt raised. A lot of the time, even in government, as good as our policy is, we tend to still have a bureaucratic way of looking at things.

So the office, the exposition, or whatever it is—the centre—is open from Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

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You raised the point that a lot of women who get into business get in at the micro micro level. They are operating out of their homes and don't have the resources to get out and go to that centre between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. When we talk about gender-based analysis and are looking at policies and services government provides, the unions have a responsibility there as well to open up in order to allow for those government services to be available in non-traditional hours and on non-traditional days. I think that's a really important issue.

I've seen an advertisement on TV for one of the two major banks—either Royal Bank or Bank of Montreal, I don't remember which one—that makes a big deal about an employee who says “I got a call from someone and they needed to open up an account and they couldn't come in. I asked where they lived and said it was on my way home so I'd stop by.” That's really good, but I don't think it's general practice. There may be one or two employees who have actually gone to a customer's home as a teller to open up an account or deliver some new cheques to a senior citizen, outside of their work hours. I'm being a little bit partisan, but that's not what I get in my riding.

The Chair: Thank you, Madam Jennings.

Minister Fry, do you have any comments?

Ms. Hedy Fry: I just want to comment on what Marlene said. Walt asked the question earlier on, and I think a simple thing like opening in non-traditional hours is important. But another important thing would be to have a place where you could put your kids while you're spending your two hours doing your thing on the Internet. Just a simple thing like that in these access centres would be really wonderful because it would recognize that difference. It's a reality that women have to look after the kids quite often, and single-parent families, men or women, have to park the kids somewhere while they do this. If they don't have the money to pay for it, there it is. It's like going to Ikea, or whatever, where you have a place to put your kids—to play in the balls—while you do your shopping. Good businesses are doing that now; they're recognizing that. That's a good one.

Just for your information, there is a trade research coalition in place now specifically to assist women. It's a public-private sector initiative and it's looking at how to improve trade activities of women. In spring 1999 there will be the very first Canada-U.S. trade summit for women only at York University. It's going to be very interesting, because when you go to these trade summits or business consortiums women sit at, you don't hear them talking about the DOW point average; you hear things like “What am I going to do with my kids if I have to do this?” and “How do I get this?” The real practical stuff is discussed. So it's going to be very interesting.

The Chair: Minister Fry, I want to thank you for being here. I just want to add one final comment to this, and maybe you have some comments on it. You and Mr. Lastewka were talking earlier about women not going into science or math roles, and I sit here and listen and shake my head. I come from a small community, and I recall my high school years very vividly. I know in my high school year, the five people who received the top marks in math and science were women. They went on to scientific or accounting type roles, and again were tops in their classes in university.

Here we are, 15 or 20 years later, still saying women aren't entering those fields. More women didn't go into those fields because of the guidance system in the high school system. We may do all these wonderful things as a federal government to encourage people to go into science and engineering—which we used to do with the former programs we no longer fund—but we're missing them at a more elementary level. It's not that women don't have those abilities or capabilities. One of my strongest points in high school was math, and it still is today.

It's not that women don't have that natural ability. You could go to Chrysler Canada, for example, in Windsor and ask them at their new research centre, where they have a number of engineers, and they would tell you women engineers are different from the men in good ways, not in bad ways, because they bring a different efficiency level to the field of engineering.

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I'm not sure where we're missing meeting the gap, and I don't think it's a fact that women don't have the abilities in math and science. I think they're there and they've shown for years they do. We're missing them at a more junior level, when they decide which career path they want to enter. All the studies in the world aren't going to—when you talk about the results, we know the results. Twenty years later we're still talking about them, and I think it's sad.

I gave you my high school class as an example, and you already have the studies and the facts, yet here we're still talking about it and somehow we're missing it.

Ms. Hedy Fry: I agree with you completely that it has nothing to do with ability. But I think role modelling is very important. Again, going back to when I went into medicine, girls went into nursing and guys went into medicine. We were just 10%, and now 55% are women.

As more and more women do it and are seen to be doing it, girls will get the sense that they can too. So I think role modelling is an important one, but the second one is to create a welcoming environment in places where girls can follow those careers. I don't want to be morbid, but when you think of École Polytechnique and how in fact women who were in engineering were murdered on that day because they were women in a male-dominated field, engineering, you tend to feel that a lot of women are saying to themselves “We're not welcome in these areas. It's obviously going to be something we don't want to think about for a while.”

So you need to have welcoming climates within universities, colleges, and faculties that say to women “You can do it; we know you can. Come, be welcome.” Move women into positions. Get them positions in academia. Let them be the deans. Let them be people others can see as having authority in some of those faculties.

I'm confident it will happen if we become more and more aware of it and create the right environments, because it happened in medicine and dentistry and law, which were really, in the old days, male bastions where you couldn't enter. It should happen, but I think role modelling and a welcoming environment are key.

The Chair: Again, speaking from my own personal space—we have bells ringing now for the vote that will take place at 11.15 a.m.—when I grew up I knew no challenges I couldn't have. If you look at the family you grew up in.... I came here as one of those first generation Canadians you were speaking of earlier. I chair this committee, which is a non-traditional role for a woman to be in. Let's say you have to move along, but government also has to make those same changes. If you look at the positions in our government and where women have positions in our cabinet, they haven't moved into non-traditional roles either.

I say that with all respect, but I think we have to set the example. Until I came here, I didn't think there was a challenge a woman couldn't prove herself on and move forward on merit. I came to Ottawa and found this was a place that set examples and this was a place that needed a lot of changing.

So I know you have numerous challenges at the cabinet table, and I don't want to be political as chair, but we talk about role modelling, and it has to be more than talk. It has to be, and continue to be, examples.

I want to thank you for being here today. I look forward to our next meeting with you. We appreciate your input.

Ms. Hedy Fry: Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you.

The meeting is adjourned.