Severe Neglect: Women's Rights in Canada

Following on the heels of International Women's Day on Thursday (which I wrote about here - read the accompanying comments as well), I found 3 news stories today that illustrate just how much still needs to be done for women in Canada.

The first:

GENEVA (Reuters) - Canada needs to improve social services for its aboriginal population, particularly native women who face persistent and marked inequalities, a United Nations panel said on Friday.

The U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination found there was a "lack of substantial progress" in addressing discrimination against native communities within the officially multicultural country.
[...]
Stressing that native women make up "a disproportionate number of victims of violent death, rape and domestic violence," it recommended Ottawa improve services, including shelters and counseling, for victims of gender-based violence.

And, here's the predictable response from the Conservative government which, btw, scrapped the Kelowna Accord:

"For 13 years the Liberals paid lip service to aboriginals ... this (report reflects) an accumulation of years and years of blatant disregard for aboriginal issues," said Deirdra McCracken, a spokeswoman for Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice.

There is no doubt that previous governments - Conservative and Liberal - severely neglected the plight of aboriginal people in our country however, the Liberals under Paul Martin had finally pledged to commit to change and were supported in Kelowna by First Nations leaders when the Kelowna accord was agreed to. The tories threw that away and decided to come up with their own plan. Where is it?

Secondly:

The Alberta Council of Women's Shelters says more and more abused women are being turned away in the province, a trend being called the dark side of the economic boom.

According to the council, more than 13,000 women and children used shelters in 2006, but another 14,000 had to be turned away because the shelters were full — a 16 per cent increase over the year before.

Meanwhile, Alberta's shelters received nearly 100,000 crisis calls in 2006, a nearly 50 per cent increase over the last two years.
[...]
Also, Alberta has one of the lowest rates of social assistance in Canada, putting abused women at a further disadvantage, she said.

This really isn't new at all. Alberta has always had a lack of shelter spaces for abused women. The Klein government admitted last year that it had made no plans for dealing with another oil boom. As a result, the new (Conservative) Stelmach government is responsible for playing catch up and, trust me, the situation for women here isn't going to change any time soon because the tory governments here have always had only one priority: making money. Spending money on social programs doesn't fit with that agenda.

Thanks to oil revenues, Alberta has a $7 billion surplus. The last I heard a single person on social assistance was alloted $401/month to live on. Rental housing is extremely expensive and the social services infrastructure has always been lacking. Those who can't "make it" in the boom are simply tossed aside. It's survival of the richest - always has been here and always will be.

Thirdly, and directly related to the first two stories:

OTTAWA–Politicians and advocacy groups lined up on International Women's Day to blast Conservative cabinet minister Bev Oda for cuts and mandate changes at Status of Women Canada.

Oda's constituency office in Bowmanville was occupied for several hours yesterday by members of the Public Service Alliance of Canada protesting the moves.

A day earlier, Oda had announced a $5 million increase in grants the agency distributes for women's projects. The money amounts to a redirection of a $5 million cut to Status of Women's administrative budget last September, resulting in the closing of 12 of 16 regional offices on April 1.

The government has also changed the criteria for what projects receive funding. Advocacy and research projects will no longer be eligible for grants, in favour of groups providing direct services to women.

And perhaps most controversially, the word equality has been removed from literature related to the agency.
[...]
Paulette Senior, chief executive officer of YWCA Canada, said her organization has been doing both service delivery and research/advocacy work for decades. She pointed to the organization's major study on women's shelters, conducted with the help of Status of Women funding, as an example of how research can help make services more effective.

The third phase of that study, on how to implement the findings, will likely not be funded under the new guidelines.

"All these things are inextricably linked," Senior said in an interview. "How do we know the services we're providing are effective if we don't do any research?"

Exactly. Women in need are being undermined by the very federal minister charged with looking after our interests. There is nothing more illustrative of that fact than the scrubbing of the word "equality" from the government's website - as if the idea of equality is nothing but a quaint relic from the past that has no relevance to the situations women find themselves in today in this country. Of all of the proverbial slaps in the face to women in this country, that one stung and bled while women were sent the message that the abuse of our rights will continue under this tory regime. Why is the equality of women such a threat to these Conservatives? Perhaps the answer is to be found in their very moniker: conservative.

There is no doubt that societal and governmental policy changes take time. There is absolutely no excuse however for the fact that women's rights have not progressed more swiftly in our country. We are a wealthy country with progressive social values overall - no matter how much the regressive conservatives among us would prefer to reverse that fact - yet we cannot even provide the most basic security, prosperity and equality rights to over half of our population. And I don't even need to mention how that impacts the children of this country as well. That's been well-documented.

Why are we stil being held back from achieving our full potential in society? And why are so many people - male and female - afraid to allow that to happen?

And last, but certainly not least, what can we do about it?
 

I'm a woman. I should blog about that...

Today is International Women's Day. Unfortunately, I didn't get out to any of the celebrations or events that are happening locally and all around the world.

I'm 47 and there's no doubt that the feminist movement has had a great impact on my life, from the time at age 16 when I decided to leave the Catholic Church because I had lived next door to a United Church deaconess (who later became that church's moderator) and couldn't figure out why women in my Catholic setup weren't allowed such positions of authority - to the many times I've accessed women's organizations where I found camaraderie, help and a sense of purpose that hadn't even existed (much, if at all) for women who had come before me.

(And no, I didn't join the United Church. I was a free-range agnostic for many years and am now an equally free-range atheist buddhist because those philosophies suit what I believe about life.)

After all of these years, I still very much lament that women are still so extremely oppressed around the world. We in western societies certainly have "come a long way, baby" but even in our so-called enlightened societies, too many women struggle in their second-class citizen situations and too many people (male and female) seem to think that the amount of progress we have made is good enough. It's not.

So, in my regularly melancholy way of looking at the glass as still being half-empty, that's what's been on my mind today. I should also add that I echo some the overall sentiment of what Zoe Williams wrote in The Guardian on Wednesday in her editorial, 'This is Idiocy, not feminism'. I'm not a complete party-pooper but the serious message she imparts is definitely one I agree with.

She's terse. Me? Not so much.

What is not relevant is fun-packed dancing from around the world, spice workshops and fashion shows. Fashion is to international women's rights as Agassi kitchen utensils are to gay rights. Yes, some women are interested in fashion; some gay men own more than one brightly coloured fish slice. But it is an outrage against people who take liberties seriously - who embody the core of feminism by interpreting it as a war that hasn't been won until it's been won for all women - to trivialise these matters.

It could not matter less if yoga is good for you, or women have a connection with the moon, or there's some very interesting storytelling going on in Ayr. What matters enormously is the impact on the enterprise as a whole when it expands to cover animals in art. It's this kind of hijacking of meaningful collective action that did for the women's movement in the first place, that made today's young women think you could believe in equal pay as a regular person, but as soon as you called yourself a feminist you had to stop shaving your legs and start eating pulses. Tell stories and dance as much as you will - but not on International Women's Day. Make your own day of celebrations. Call it Gullible Idiots Unite. Have it in April.

I don't think that women who choose to celebrate these things in those ways are "gullible idiots", but I do see her point. The idea is to celebrate being a woman by hopefully balancing that with the fact that there still really is a war on feminism going on - a war on equal rights for women. And we still need to rally our energies to fight back - hard. We've only just begun to see the promise of progress on that front and we have so many sisters who suffer so much in such dire circumstances around the world who need our help. We have a duty to do what we can for all of them too.

Related: I recently made a list of some of Canada's "smart" female bloggers. Take some time to visit some of them today if you can. "Smartness" is measured in many different ways. An update as well - I'm still working on putting The Eggroll together - a blogroll for Canadian female bloggers. I haven't forgotten about it. I'm just a bit slow at getting things done sometimes. Thanks for being patient with me.

Also related: 5 Things Feminism Has Done For Me