Thank you to the committee for inviting me to discuss the 2015-16 main estimates for Status of Women Canada.
[Translation]
I am joined today by Meena Ballantyne, head of agency for Status of Women Canada, and Anik Lapointe, the chief financial officer and director of Corporate Services.
[English]
I want to take a moment to commend all of you in the committee for the important studies on economic leadership and prosperity of Canadian women and on eating disorders among girls and women.
I look forward to the committee's reports on two additional areas of study: the promising practices to prevent violence against women; and women in skilled trades, science and technology, engineering, and mathematical careers. Your work on these studies is making a valuable contribution to advancing our collective knowledge of what works, what doesn't, and more importantly, how we should be moving forward.
[Translation]
All of these issues are also important because they reflect something I think all Canadians agree on — the need to support women, young women and girls in reaching their full potential. Our government is certainly committed to doing its part to help make this happen. As a result of my outreach with Canadians over the past year, I believe our government and Status of Women Canada are on the right track.
[English]
To continue making progress, Status of Women Canada will keep its focus on three clear priorities in 2015-16: ending violence against women and girls, promoting women in leadership and decision-making roles, and creating economic opportunities for women.
In terms of the first priority, we believe that ending all forms of gender-based violence is an important building block for helping women and girls reach their full potential. That's why I'm pleased that the implementation of the Government of Canada's action plan to address family violence and violent crimes against aboriginal women and girls began on April 1 with Status of Women Canada in the lead.
The action plan includes actions to prevent violence, support victims and their families, and protect aboriginal women and girls. Investments outlined in the action plan total approximately $200 million over five years.
Collaboration is a significant part of this action plan, and throughout its implementation federal organizations will continue to make a concerted effort to engage with aboriginal organizations, communities, and key stakeholders, as well as with provinces and territories, to ensure that our actions are meeting the needs of first nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples.
[Translation]
For example, in order to increase awareness about funding available under the action plan and related programs and resources, a single window website has been created through Status of Women Canada's website.
[English]
We also have a secretariat led by Status of Women Canada in which all the departments involved, including Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, Justice, and Public Safety, come together to discuss funding projects to ensure that there is no duplication of efforts and that projects build upon each other.
We are also working on the steps agreed to by the participants of the round table on murdered and missing indigenous women and girls this past February. At the round table, all participants endorsed a framework for action that outlined three priorities: preventing violence, increasing community safety, and improving justice and policing measures. All of these are addressed in the government's existing plan of action. In addition, participants agreed to meet again in 2016 and to report on the progress made.
[Translation]
With respect to our second priority — promoting women in leadership and decision-making roles — our government continues taking action and seeing progress made.
This June will mark the one-year anniversary of the release of the report by the federal government's Advisory Council for Promoting Women on Boards.
[English]
One of its key recommendations was that the public and private sectors in Canada should aspire to seeing women hold 30% of board positions within five years, or by 2019. The feedback I have received so far from companies and CEOs has been extremely positive. I believe there is now real momentum on the issue in Canada, which will lead to more leadership opportunities for women.
We've committed to amending the Canada Business Corporations Act to promote gender diversity on public company boards using the widely recognized “comply or explain” model. Our government is also committed to giving girls a strong foundation for success so they can be the leaders of today and tomorrow. That's why we were early supporters of the United Nations declaring October 11 to be the International Day of the Girl.
I was also pleased to host the Strong Girls, Strong World event in Toronto last October, an event that brought girls together with high-profile Canadians to allow them to talk about their issues and what's important to them, their friends, and their families.
I was also pleased to launch a new project with Plan Canada, the YWCA, and the YMCA on March 8 this year in Toronto to support leadership opportunities for young women and girls in ten communities across Canada. These ten grassroots projects will support the creation of girls committees, which will help young women and girls gain skills in decision-making and leadership by leading special events, community outreach, advocacy, and media initiatives.
We've also established a girls advisory council, which will engage girls 15 to 24 years of age on their priorities and areas of interest and inform the ongoing work of the Government of Canada and of mine at Status of Women Canada.
Finally, with respect to our third priority, over the past year our government has continued to support the economic advancement of women in Canada in a number of ways. We put in place an expert panel on championing and mentorship for women entrepreneurs, which has provided us great feedback. In March we hosted a forum at which over 300 women entrepreneurs were here in Ottawa, with inspiring role models, practical workshops, and valuable networking opportunities and mentorship for those starting or growing their businesses.
In April I was proud to launch a new campaign, It Starts with One—Be her Champion. This campaign is reaching out to leaders in all fields, to men and women, asking them to make a difference by championing a woman in her career and challenging their colleagues and peers to do the same.
As we look to the next fiscal year, economic action plan 2015 builds on our government's track record of support for women's economic empowerment. lt provides for the creation of an action plan for women entrepreneurs, which will be put in place to help connect women with the tools and resources they need to grow their businesses, create jobs, and employ more Canadians. These initiatives under economic action plan 2015 reflect the strong leadership we are showing through a balanced budget and a low-tax plan for jobs, growth, and security.
Finally, as members of the committee know, our government believes in giving communities the tools to help meet the needs of women, young women, and girls through the women's program. Since 2007 this has resulted in investments in over 780 new projects that are improving the lives of women and girls across the country. We intend to continue this support for Status of Women Canada, with funding of approximately $29 million allocated in the main estimates, as you would have seen, for fiscal year 2015-16. The majority of these funds are for grants and contributions under the women's program.
Madam Chair, the actions I've described today add to our government's growing list of promising initiatives and significant accomplishments, which are creating positive and concrete change for women and girls in every region of the country.
I want to thank you and the committee members for the opportunity to appear here today, and would be pleased to answer any of your questions.
:
Thank you very much for the question.
This is a challenge that I'll put out to the entire committee. On April 16 of this year, I launched a campaign through Status of Women Canada called, It Starts with One—Be Her Champion.
I want to challenge all of you to take the pledge. This program is very different from most mentorship programs. In doing the research we have found, particularly for women entrepreneurs, but we see it in other fields, that when young women have a mentor, have a champion, they are more likely to succeed. We know for women entrepreneurs, as outlined on this card, that if a young woman is an entrepreneur and has a champion, a mentor, at the three-year mark, 88% of those businesses are thriving, but if she doesn't have a mentor almost 50% of them are failing at the three-year mark. So this program really puts mentorship on its head.
We're used to young people looking for mentors and signing up for a cup of coffee and wanting to chat, sometimes with us as parliamentarians and those who want to run for office. But what I think is very important, as my sister brought to my attention as a young professional engineer, is that she didn't need to have coffee with someone again; she needed someone to champion her career and be the advocate for her.
This program is asking prominent Canadians, including us as parliamentarians, to choose that one woman under the age of 35 whom you will invest a year of your time in and champion her in her chosen career. As I said, we launched the campaign in Toronto on April 16. We've done a series of other events to encourage Canadians across the country to step up and invest in young Canadians, but particularly young women under the age of 35.
I'd like to encourage all of you parliamentarians to take the pledge and participate in making sure that a young Canadian woman has an opportunity. We know when they are successful, when they see their career path realized, particularly those who are entrepreneurs, they may be in the legal field.... The person I am championing is a young lady named Leah Hillier, who has an undergraduate degree in business, but is now graduating from family practice and will become a physician with a brilliant career. We know they will contribute to the economy and will be able to help grow our country.
So I would like to ask all of you to step up, take the pledge—we'll give out our cards here—and also visit the website we have. It's at women.gc.ca/startwithone. I would encourage all parliamentarians from all parties to participate in this because it's only good for Canadian women. It's particularly great for these young women.
I know that I feel really good about it when I'm investing time with the young Canadian I'm working with, Leah Hillier, and I'm sure you will feel the same, but it's also good for the country.
Thanks for asking, and I encourage everyone to take the pledge.
:
Thank you very much for the question.
As I had mentioned at the outset, Status of Women Canada has, since 2007, supported well over 780 programs across the country. Our focus is on the community project. Canada is an extremely large country. We know that the needs and focuses in St. John's, Newfoundland, are very from those than in Collingwood, Ontario, and from what they would be for an individual in Whitehorse in Yukon.
Because of that, our focus has been on a series of calls for proposals that focus on the three main pillars of Status of Women Canada: ending violence against women and girls, economic empowerment, and a focus on leadership opportunities and participation in democracy.
I can give you some examples of what we have been focusing on. With respect to Status of Women Canada's ending of violence against women and girls initiative, one excellent example would be the Shield of Athena project, with just over $340,000 for a 36-month project developed to educate women in the Montreal area on issues of gender-based violence. This project was completed in March of this year. The intent of the project was to network women's groups and workers with six different ethnocultural communities to inform them about violence in the name of so-called honour and about their rights and legal protections, making sure that individual women were trained and equipped through the community liaison workers to detect these situations, to make sure that they were supporting victims of these crimes, and to allow them in their local communities to allocate resources appropriately to protect these women.
The initiative has been outstanding. The dialogue has been on a sensitive issue. I think the Shield of Athena has worked very well with the ethnocultural media to disseminate this information into communities and provide greater assistance to a wider range of women in the Montreal area in those targeted communities.
The group launched their three multilingual tools as part of the tenth National Victims of Crime Awareness Week held in April of this year. It's an example of something that we're doing on ending violence against women and girls, as a specific focus. We also have projects that are focused on economic empowerment for women, as well as on leadership skills for women across the country.
:
Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Minister, for being here today.
This is my first time on the committee and I want to commend my colleagues. I've really enjoyed the time in the committee. The issues that we've been addressing have been extremely interesting and quite timely.
Cyberbullying is a great example. My daughter was a victim of cyberbullying in high school, so to see us take steps on that is something I'm very proud of.
What I've learned in the time that I've been here is how we respond to some of the challenges and about those three pillars you talked about— violence, economic security, and democratic participation.
I understand that Status of Women's calls for proposals have provided some opportunities for organizations to improve some of the things that we've talked about here this year: improving economic security for women in rural communities, obviously very important for me, being in rural Alberta; increasing the participation of girls and young women in leadership roles; and something that was very prominent this year in one of studies, the importance of engaging men and boys in gender-based violence education.
How many of these calls for proposals have been approved for funding since 2011? As a secondary question, how many of these projects have been funded on a continuous intake?
:
I will answer your question in two parts.
With respect to the Government of Canada in general, this has been a recognized need. More than 500,000 Canadians have taken part in apprenticeship loans through our investment in that loan program in Economic Action Plan 2014. There is also the Canada job grant to create opportunities for Canadians to have skills for jobs that are available today. These are two signature programs that address the skilled professional trades issues.
With respect to Status of Women Canada, I completely agree with you: these are fabulous jobs. Our agency two years ago would have called these non-traditional jobs for women. My dad just says, these are good jobs. Having grown up in Fort McMurray, Alberta, where there were only a few skilled professional tradespeople, I can recognize how that six-figure income is easily attainable.
Status of Women Canada over the last number of years has undertaken a number of initiatives. One is that we've had a call for proposals in this area and have funded just over 45 ongoing projects to support women in skilled trades and technical professions. These projects focus on construction, some on shipbuilding, manufacturing, some on agriculture.
Our focus, then, is not only to recruit women into these roles, but also to retain them; that has been a substantive focal point for us. As the minister, though, I also have had a high-level round table, and we're moving forward on a number of initiatives to encourage young women to enter these professional fields.
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
To pick up on where we just were, we were talking about women on boards, about women in STEM, about creating an environment where women can take on jobs in which they're higher paid and have more leadership. According to our latest numbers—although they're five years old, as we don't have any more recent data—women spend an average of 50 hours a week on unpaid child care, which is double that of men.
Why are we not taking the time to address this issue of unpaid work, the fact that women still bear a disproportionate amount of the burden when it comes to child care, and the fact that we're not giving them the option of being able to use public child care to be able to access child care throughout the country?
We do know, for instance, that in Ottawa one child in child care can cost as much as $1,500 or $2,000 a month.
Certainly, programs such as income splitting that aren't accessible for 85% of women are not directly giving them options, and the child benefit goes nowhere near to being able to make the difference for many women trying to afford child care every month.
Why are we not addressing this important difference in unpaid work?
:
I would say that we are very much addressing it on a few fronts.
First, as I outlined before—and I'm happy to go through it again—the universal child care benefit focuses on allowing parents, mom and dad, to make the choices about their child care. We have augmented that for children under the age of six, as well as expanded it to provide parents that have children aged six to seventeen a full new benefit.
Those together, as well as the remaining family tax cut and the children's fitness tax credit augmentation, provide for most families, on average for a family of four, $6,600 more in their pockets this year, in order to allow mom and dad to make the choices about their child care as they deem fit.
We know, and as Minister of Status of Women I hear this all over the country, that not every mom works nine to five; many moms work outside that time frame and want to be able to have a choice in their child care. That goes hand in glove, though, with what Status of Women Canada is doing to support projects to make sure that we allow women to get great jobs. So by way of example, in STEM, or in skilled professional trades, there's a fabulous program called women building futures. It's based in Edmonton—
:
Thank you for the question.
As I said, Status of Women Canada is focused on providing opportunities for women to take on these great jobs. In addition to the support we will have for programming, which I'll come back to, we've developed a plan to address this. First and foremost, we have a group of leaders who are advising Status of Women Canada, including me and Meena Ballantyne, my agency head, on what we should be focused on. This is a group of individuals who represent everyone who would be in this field, whether it be Bob Blakely of the Building Trades, or Jerry Dias from Unifor, or Lorraine Mitchelmore, the president of Shell Canada. It is a group of individuals who cover the span so they can provide us great advice.
From their advice what have we done? We've moved forward on a number of initiatives. First, we're developing a business case. What is the business case for making sure that women should be part of your workforce? We know on the Women On Boards initiative and Women Entrepreneurs that it is only good for business. We believe this is the case with regard to women in skilled professional trades, but we're going to make sure we have that business case, and launch it to make the case.
We're supporting an invitation or call for proposals not only to encourage women to enter skilled professional trades, but also to retain them, because we know that so many of them enter into this or into apprenticeships and then don't complete them or don't stay in their trade. We want to know the answer to that so we can address it.
Finally, I've made this a priority at our federal-provincial-territorial meeting that we'll be having in June. We need to make sure this is on the national stage, that as a group of leaders at the provincial, territorial, and federal levels we take this very seriously and that we know we need to move the numbers to provide those opportunities to women.
We've taken a comprehensive approach to this, and Meena and her team are doing an outstanding job of implementing it. Our goal is similar to Women on Boards and Women Entrepreneurs, where we've moved the numbers, to do the same in this area as well.
:
Thank you very much for the question.
I think everybody knows that the women's program is our grants and contributions funding, which is the majority of the funding for Status of Women Canada. Approximately $19 million has been spent over the past few years, and this is the plan for the coming year as well.
Usually we fund about 300 projects. If you calculate since 2007, we've funded more than $162 million in the areas of violence, economic security, and democratic participation. I think that amounts to about 300 projects.
What we are trying to do is make it easier for applicants. We have an online system, for example, which people can go to and put their submission into. We also provide support so that people can call somebody in the women's program to be walked through the application process; we're trying to make it easier for applicants.
We're also doing targeted calls, as we mentioned earlier, in terms of having priorities. If the priority one year is more on the economic side, as you saw, rather than the violence side, we try to find that balance.
We also have the continuous intake, whereby at any time, should an organization wish to access funding, they can call us, they can work with us, and we can work with them on the project to see whether it's possible to fund it.