Government reneges on promises to women

(February 10, 2005) Women are usually the primary caregivers and decision makers in the family unit when it comes to spending and investment decisions. Despite this, federal fiscal policies have done little to improve most women’s economic security in the last 10 years.

A new report, Canada’s Commitment to Equality: A Gender Analysis of the Last Ten Federal Budgets (1995 — 2004), assesses if women, on the whole, are better or worse off than they were a decade ago. It tracks 10 years of federal budgets and studies public account expenditures, as well as changes to program spending, revenue and taxation policy.

The effort, by the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action (CFAIA) and economist Armine Yalnizyan, is part of a government agreement to undertake gender analysis of all its macro-economic policies and budgets and measure the government’s performance against commitments it made to gender equality at the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing back in 1995.

In the report, Yalnizyan examines how assistance and social programs play a central role in women’s lives. She says strong social programs can shift some of the burden of care-giving and give women more opportunities to be involved in paid work, higher education and public life. But, she writes, “these income-security programs, and a host of vital social supports, have been eroded over the past decade.”

The study focuses on areas such as affordable housing that might not directly affect people who can afford financial planners, but it also addresses a wide array of resources that can stabilize people facing economic or employment precariousness. It should be of interest to financial advisors, because clients are generally unprepared for sudden changes in their lives — personal disability, the birth of a disabled child, or finding themselves with a dependent parent.

When people do need community supports, if those are not available, the retirement fund may be the first item on the family’s balance sheet to take a hit.

Even the birth of a healthy child can add stress to the family. Assante Capital Management advisors, Dolores Hallett and Maria Mateyk, say unless clients are especially diligent and save a lot of money when planning for the birth of their children, RRSP contributions predictably drop off until the kids are old enough to go to school.

Yalnizyan writes that the rapid rate of change in social supports, such as employment insurance, legal aid and community health services, over the last 10 years “meant the economic security of families rested increasingly on the degree to which women in households were willing to increase or engage in paid work.” Meanwhile, “the central economic fact of life for most women in Canada has been that incomes have not kept pace with rising costs.”

Hallett agrees. Many times clients need to go back to work, but find themselves working simply to pay for childcare while they’re away. “They’re caught between the amount they’re paying for daycare and what they’re actually earning. A lot of times there’s not much difference; most of the salary that they’re earning ends up going towards daycare,” she says. “The woman typically is forced to go back, but it’s not really financially beneficial to do that. It’s not a huge increase in the family’s income in having her go back into the workforce, but they have to.”

According to the report, this trend of mothers with young children going back to work is one of the most dramatic changes in Canadian society in the last decade. In 1990, 53% of mothers with children under the age of three were in paid employment. The number rose to 63% by 2003. For mothers with children under six, the number jumps to 70%, up from 60% ten years ago.

Salaries aren’t keeping pace either. In StatsCan data, Yalnizyan found significant gender differences in average salaries. In 2000, full-year, full-time female workers earned $34,892 on average, while their male counterparts earned $49,224. Moreover, fully half of all women with paid work earned less than $20,000, while basic costs for housing, child care, transit, utility costs, tuition fees and pharmaceuticals increased.

“A lot of times they say these great social services or these great programs are out there, but we don’t see then actually benefiting the clients. Even clients who are disabled themselves say the hoops they need to jump through are too horrendous to get into any of them,” says Hallett. “They say you almost need to be dead to qualify.”

“The social infrastructure that governments have said they would provide in Canada is not being provided at a level that allows women to be equal players, both in the work field and the family sphere,” says CFAIA’s program director, Nancy Peckford. “It’s a new area because women don’t often talk about money. This is a first attempt on our part to give women some tools they can use.”

In talking about the report, Peckford also raises the issue and spectre of accountability, not just to commitments as the Beijing Declaration, but to how money is spent once it reaches the federal trust funds.

She says government speeches will commit to funding initiatives, and the money will go into a trust fund, but the actual spending is very difficult to track. “Our economist found she could only find what had been reported in public accounts. In many cases, once the money is put into a trust fund, it is very difficult to know or see if that money was actually used for the purposes which the government says it was intended. We expect to be extremely dogmatic going forward with federal bureaucrats in finance and other MPs who have an interest in making sure budgets are made equitably.”

Filed by Kate McCaffery Advisor.ca, kate.mccaffery@advisor.rogers.com

(02/10/05)