Alternate Formats

In this issue:

Working Together for Women on Parliament Hill

NAWL Charitable Trust Essay Competition: Congratulations!

Canada's Commitment to Equality: A Gender Analysis of the Last 10 Federal Budgets.

Balancing Budgets on the backs of women: Pay Equity-Post NAPE

At the Heart of Human Rights: A campaign for a pay equity law

Marriage, Homophobia, and Substantive Equality

An Open Letter Opposing the Use of Arbitration and Family-Based Tribunals in Family Law in Ontario.

JURISFEMME

Working Together for Women on Parliament Hill

By Bonnie Diamond

Bonnie Diamond is NAWL’s Executive Director

NAWL Charitable Trust Essay Competition: Congratulations!

Reproduction of articles from this site is permitted, provided that the source is cited.

Canada's Commitment to Equality: A Gender Analysis of the Last 10 Federal Budgets

Canadian Feminist Alliance For International Action (FAFIA)

The Beijing Commitments

In 1995, 188 countries, including Canada, adopted the Beijing Platform for Action, setting out a detailed plan for addressing women’s poverty, economic security and health. A decade later, the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action is asking: are women in Canada better off?

In 1995, the Government of Canada agreed to undertake a gender analysis of all its macro-economic policies and its budgets. To date, no federal Minister of Finance has begun this process. A commitment to greater equality cannot occur without a commitment of resources for programs that make change possible. Fiscal policy is the way resources get raised and allocated, the way commitments become realities.

Canada’s Commitment to Equality: A Gender Analysis of the Last Ten Federal Budgets (1995- 2004) is the first gender budget analysis of its kind in Canada. It tracks a decade of federal fiscal policy, looking at what the Government of Canada said it was going to do (budgets) and what it did do (public accounts).

Analyzing the patterns of federal decision-making during the deficit era (1995 to 1997) and during the surplus era (1998 to 2004), it has become clear that, in good times and in bad, federal priorities actually ran counter to the promises made 10 years ago to improve economic security for women.

Though the economy grew by 62% between 1994 and 2004 – meaning almost $480 billion more a year in market value was being produced by Canadians – a growing number of women over the same decade were finding their pay rates virtually stagnant while the costs of basics like housing, tuition, child care, transit and utilities continue to soar. Paying more for less has become the norm for many households over the last decade. Women working in low-wage and part-time jobs continue to be hardest hit.

Yalnizyan’s analysis of the federal spending cuts made between 1995 and 1997 demonstrates that they disproportionately hurt women, particularly those already most vulnerable. Billions of dollars in reduced funding translated into significantly less support for women just at a time when the burdens they faced were increasing.

Since the beginning of the surplus era in 1998, the federal government has not redressed the damage done during the deficit era, let alone advanced the agenda for action promised to the women of Canada in Beijing in 1995. The way the surplus was allocated between 1998 and 2004 ruled out any serious response to the systemic problems faced by women and the most vulnerable and marginalized people in Canada. Instead, initiatives were selected that essentially redistribute resources towards those already more advantaged.

Between 1998 and 2004, the federal government allocated $152 billion to tax cuts and $61 billion to pay down the debt. In comparison, only $34 billion in net new resources were transferred to the provinces for health care and child care over that seven year period. Departmental spending expanded by $42 billion in new spending initiatives over the seven years, but much of it went to defence and “innovation” programs such as public investments in Research and Development under the Canadian Opportunities Strategy.

Remarkably little of the increase in new funds actually spent in this seven year period was devoted specifically to enhancing the security of Canada’s most vulnerable individuals.

The single largest initiative to alleviate the effects of poverty was the increase in the Canada Child Tax Benefit, representing an additional $15 billion over the 7 years since 1998. These amounts are counted by the federal government as a tax measure, and represent only 10% of the total costs of the federal tax reform agenda. Despite this infusion of funds, Canada’s poorest families have not benefited, because the program permits provinces and territories to “claw back” funds from those on social assistance.

A small number of tax measures introduced since 1998 have addressed women’s realities – for example, tax credits for care-givers and increased tax deductions for expenses on child care – but these measures do not help women who have no taxable income. Tax measures also do little to fund and regulate services, in order to ensure that reliable social supports are available in the first place. But a focus on tax measures instead of spending initiatives allows the Government of Canada to maintain its new commitment to “small government”.

The federal budget of 1995 set out to “right-size” government, and shrank federal program spending as a share of the economy from 16% to 12% of GDP in three short years. It has remained at less than 11.6% of the economy since 2000-01, and is projected to stay at roughly that level for the foreseeable future. The rate of contraction, and the holding constant of this transformation, is unmatched in any other advanced industrialized nation.

But the commitment to small government may be antithetical to the interests of women, since women need the systems that governments put into place to protect basic economic security, address violence and injustice, and ensure quality and accountability in the provision of public goods, such as childcare and health care.

The economic strength that Canada has demonstrated in recent years—and the fiscal capacity that flows from it—means that there are more than enough resources for the federal government to honour the commitments it has made to women’s equality in domestic law, and under international human rights treaties and agreements. It is simply a question of priorities.

For a full copy of this report, please see FAFIA’s website at www.fafia-afai.org

Reproduction of articles from this site is permitted, provided that the source is cited.

Balancing Budgets on the backs of women: Pay Equity Post-NAPE

By Suzanne Bouclin

“It is unacceptable that governments are now authorized to balance their budgets on the backs of women”

On December 10th, 2004, International Human Rights Day, women’s organizations, labour unions and other community groups publicly expressed their disappointment and sense of betrayal following the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in NAPE v. Newfoundland .

The Court in NAPE ruled that the government of Newfoundland and Labrador was justified in canceling pay adjustments that would have eliminated discrimination in the wages of women health care workers. The provincial government had signed a pay equity agreement in 1988 acknowledging historical discrimination against women working in the health care sector, yet, by 1991 the government had cancelled payments and imposed a three-year delay on the implementation of pay equity adjustments. Its justification: a reduction in federal transfer payments, an impending budget deficit, and a potential loss of credit rating within international financial markets. While the Court found that this amounted to discrimination against women, it determined that it was justifiable under section 1 of the Charter . That is, it accepted the province’s claim that it faced a “severe fiscal crisis” and decided that it was constitutionally permissible for it to override women’s human rights in the name of fiscal restraint. As Fiona Sampson, counsel for one of the intervenors, Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), commented;

...[women’s groups are] pleased that the Court recognized the egregious sex discrimination caused by unequal wages, and rejected the Newfoundland government’s position that there was no discrimination. However, LEAF is extremely disturbed by the court’s ruling that this oppressive treatment of women was justifiable....

At its core, the NAPE decision reflects the broader societal reality that women are not worth as much as men: women’s salaries continue to be 72% of men’s, which in turn impacts their pensions and disability benefits and contributes to the increasing feminization of poverty. Women along varying axis of disadvantage face additional barriers: Aboriginal women, younger and older women, new Canadians, and women with disabilities are often segregated into the lowest paid and more precarious jobs. This is compounded by the fact that women make up the majority of single parents and continue to take on the lion’s share of unpaid child and elder care.

In response to the NAPE decision, NAWL, in collaboration with the Newfoundland Advisory Council on the Status of Women, the Feminist Alliance for International Action (FAFIA) and the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW) initiated a pan-Canadian campaign urging the Federal and Provincial governments to show a concrete commitment to promoting women’s human rights. Over 100 groups throughout Québec and Canada endorsed letters to Prime Minister Paul Martin and Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams decrying their governments’ contravention of Canada’s commitment to promoting women’s substantive equality. Specifically, we asked Prime Minister Martin:

… to demonstrate the commitment of the Government of Canada to women’s human rights, …. to show leadership on the issue of women’s entitlement to equality by assisting the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador to repay the $80 million debt to women health care workers … and to direct officials and lawyers acting for the Government of Canada not to endorse, support or promote the notion that women’s human rights can be ignored because of ‘fiscal crisis.’

In a concurrent letter to Premier Williams, NAWL and others urged him to uphold his commitment to women’s human rights in Newfoundland and Labrador as he expressed in the 2004 Speech from the Throne:

… to demonstrate this renewed commitment, we request today that you repay to women health care workers the $80 million that was discriminatorily deducted from their pay as a result of the Public Sector Wage Restraint Act.

The mobilization around the NAPE decision coincides with another NAWL initiative around pay equity: A call to Action for a new federal pay equity law. NAWL and other members of the Pay Equity Network are mobilizing to pressure the federal government to take immediate steps towards implementing the recommendations of the Pay Equity Task Force report (May 2004), namely: adopting a new, stand-alone pay equity law that will cover women, as well as workers of colour, Aboriginal workers and workers with disabilities. NAWL and partners are organizing a press conference on Parliament Hill and in other regions decrying the government’s lack of action on this issue. It remains to be seen however whether pay equity law reform will make it on the federal government’s agenda in the months ahead.

Suzeanne Bouclin is a lawyer and works part-time at NAWL as a Researcher and Communications Coordinator.

Reproduction of articles from this site is permitted, provided that the source is cited.

At The Heart of Human Rights: A campaign for a pay equity law

By Patricia Harewood

“The time for pay equity is now!” That’s the message of the Pay Equity Network (PEN), which includes NAWL, as it launches its campaign for the adoption of a pay equity law. This cross-country campaign aims to pressure the federal government to adopt the recommendations of the Pay Equity Task Force.

The PEN is a coalition of dynamic organizations that have worked for pay equity and employment equity for decades, through agitation, briefs or research addressed to the Canadian Human Rights Commission. The network includes feminist organizations, trade unions, research councils and social justice agencies. All of these organizations have a common goal and strategy. By working together, NAWL and its partners will successfully consolidate their resources and draw on the outstanding experience of the network’s member groups in an effort to achieve an objective with implications that in fact go far beyond national borders. For example, in January 2003, a United Nations review committee noted that Canada had enacted a number of policies, such as cuts to funding of legal aid clinics and social programs, that violated women’s right to equality under the Convention to Eliminate all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The Feminist Alliance for International Action (FAFIA) reacted by launching a public education campaign to step up Canada’s enforcement of its obligations under the CEDAW, particularly in regard to aboriginal women, refugee women and domestic workers.

A Feminist Valentine’s Day?

Conscious of the power of solidarity, the network has initiated its campaign with a substantial mobilization of progressive organizations. Already, in an impressive display of solidarity, more than 125 social justice and feminist organizations from one end of the country to the other, from British Columbia to Newfoundland, have endorsed the campaign by signing the call to action. The call proposes that the federal government adopt all of the recommendations of the Task Force on Pay Equity, and in particular urges the adoption of pro-active legislation that is distinct from the Canadian Human Rights Act.

On February 14, Valentine’s Day, the network launched its official public campaign in a number of cities: Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto, Montréal, St. John’s and Moncton. The call to action and Valentine’s Day cards encouraging equity was sent to MPs and Senators. These “love letters” have a simple message: women are deeply attached to pay equity. This is especially true for women living in poverty, for aboriginal women, for disabled women, women of colour and elderly women. The government is urged to comply with its constitutional and international obligations by adopting the recommendations of the Pay Equity Task Force without delay.

But the campaign is not confined to mass actions; it also includes a popular legal education component. In the spring of 2005, NAWL will provide free workshops on behalf of the network to women’s groups and activists. These groups and individuals can then educate the members of their own networks, thus spreading the influence of the campaign to other organizations and members in a ripple effect. This will no doubt help to create an environment of shared action We hope that women and disadvantaged groups will gain greater access to the resources and information that will enable them to defend and demand their fundamental right to pay equity in an effective way.

Patricia Harewood is a graduate in civil law from the University of Ottawa (LL.L). She is currently in the national program (LL.B.) and works part-time at NAWL.

Reproduction of articles from this site is permitted, provided that the source is cited.

Marriage, Homophobia, and Substantive Equality

By Margaret Denike

The unanimous decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Reference re Same-Sex Marriage came as no surprise to anybody – or at least to those familiar with the Court’s obligations in interpreting and applying Charter rights and freedoms, and the relative ease that it has in assessing formal equality claims between similarly situated groups. In a decision that was in keeping with what 18 other judges had already ruled in seven provinces and one territory, the Supreme Court affirmed that extending civil marriage to same-sex couples was consistent with the equality guarantees of the Charter; and that the Charter’s provisions for religious freedom protected religious officials against having to perform marriages that were not in keeping with their religious doctrine.

Considering that Court’s succinct answers to questions of both equality rights and religious freedoms, one would be hard-pressed to decry the ruling, unless, of course, one felt, as the Vatican has put it, that the recognition of such rights amounts to “the approval or legalization of evil,” that gay and lesbian unions are not worthy of the legal recognition enjoyed by heterosexual couples, or that the rights of minorities should be subjected to the will of a majority that has a long history of finding the former abhorrent. But the very point of the Charter and other human rights legislation, as we well know, is to protect despised groups against such systemic discrimination, exclusion and degradation in the first place.

The fact that, across the border, the overwhelming majority of states began scrambling to introduce constitutional amendments to restrict marriage to heterosexual couples, exactly at the moment that the Supreme Court of Hawaii ruled it unconstitutional to exclude gay and lesbian unions, is rather telling of the pervasive fears that equality guarantees might mean the guarantee of equality to despised sexual minorities, as it is about what many people know and expect constitutional rights to mean for courts and citizens. It is also rather revealing of the extent to which it takes the drastic and historically regressive step of explicitly incorporating discriminatory provisions back into constitutions to circumvent the possibility that courts might affirm the equality rights of gays and lesbians who wish to marry.

Despite all that has been said to suggest the contrary, the issue before the Supreme Court of Canada was quite basic: it was not whether or not ‘marriage’ --as a socially, economically, and politically favoured form of recognizing adult relationships-- is an institution or religious tradition worth preserving or defending, but that, to the extent that it is legally administered by the state, whether it can exclude the sexual minorities that are already recognized as being protected by constitutional equality guarantees. As a clear-cut question of formal equality, it steers clear of the substantive equality claims that the Court is for more reluctant to endorse: it does not challenge fundamental social and legal norms, nor does it seek the redistribution of economic resources and benefits to other relationships of care and dependency that deviate from this model.

In the wake of the marriage reference, we have witnessed a proliferation of right-wing media campaigns decrying “activist judges” for their alleged lack of deference to the elected officials, accusing the Court of usurping the role of parliament, and ignoring the ‘will of the people.’ This recent outburst of expressed homophobia, dressed in the rhetoric of questions about appropriate deference, is parallel only to that which occurred in 1998 in the wake of Vriend , where the majority of the Supreme Court found that the exclusion of sexual orientation as a protected ground under provincial human rights legislation violated s. 15 of the Charter. Witness Ted Morton’s renewed allegations of a “court party” swayed by the “special interests” of feminist and other equality-seeking groups ; Preston Manning’s recent criticism of the Court’s decision, based on his complaint that judges are, “by vocation” more removed from the public than “democratic politicians” ; and Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic’s open letter to the Prime Minister, demanding consideration that something as significant as “tampering with marriage” should be left not to judges who are “not elected and ultimately not accountable for their decisions.”

But for all of the outrage against constitutions, courts and queers, empirical outcomes of court-case decisions clearly establish that the Supreme Court is not prone to accepting the arguments of equality-seeking organizations. As different commentators, such as Bruce Ryder , Patrick Monahan and Nadine Blum, have noted, not only is the success rate of s. 15 claims significantly lower than that of all other Charter claims, but the two sex equality claims that have been successful (Benner and Trociuk ) in the past decade, were claims brought by men. Nor is there any evidence that the Court is lacking in deference to Parliament, especially when it comes to questions concerning the allocation and distribution of material resources, such as would challenge the social and economic status quo. The negative decisions in Gosselin , Newfoundland Association of Public Employees , and Auton , all of which address ways in which governments might be called upon to redistribute economic resources such as social assistance, pay equity settlements and health benefits to disadvantaged groups, are a testament to this. Despite the Court’s stated commitment to substantive equality, and to remedying the historical disadvantage of subordinated groups, its practice remains to favour only formal equality claims for recognition, and to leave intact the the government policies that sustain substantive inequalities in the discriminatory provision and allocation of benefits.

Since the simple question of whether to extend civil marriage to a historically disadvantaged and similarly situated group has been met with such public outrage and treated as a re-ordering of the world as we know it, it is disturbing to imagine what responses there would be to the possibility of challenging the privileged status accorded to marriage and to consider recognition and state obligations to diverse relationships of interdependency and care, restructuring institutions and redistributing resources to other relations of interpersonal and economic dependency and interdependency. For those committed to advancing substantive equality, the task remains to move beyond mere recognition and inclusion into existing conjugal models, and to challenge the economic arrangements in and through which the state confers economic benefits only to those members of society who fit this model, to the exclusion of others. We need to aim for more than assimilation into existing institutions and more than solidifying the hierarchies of relations already acknowledged and sustained by the state, to demand consideration of the myriad of financial and material relations of care and dependency, such as those involving the care of persons with disabilities and those with extended illnesses, and generally those who currently lack the access or support reserved for those in conjugal unions. Among other things, substantive equality demands changes to the social and economic conditions that make it so important for gay men and lesbians to seek marriage in the first instance.

Margaret Denike is a law professor at the University of Nipissing and a member of NAWL’s working groups.

Reproduction of articles from this site is permitted, provided that the source is cited.

An Open Letter Opposing the Use of Arbitration & Faith-Based Tribunals in Family Law in Ontario

Reproduction of articles from this site is permitted, provided that the source is cited.

JURISFEMME

JURISFEMME Volume 23, No. 3 Spring 2005

Jurisfemme is a publication of the
National Association of Women and the Law (NAWL),
1066 Somerset West,
suite 303,
Ottawa, ON, K1Y 4T3
Telephone: (613) 241-7570,
Fax: (613) 241-4657
E-mail: info@nawl.ca
Website: http://www.nawl.ca

NAWL is a national non-profit women's organization which promotes the equality rights of women through legal education, research and law reform advocacy. We recognize that each woman's experience of inequality is unique due to systemic discrimination related to race, class, sexual orientation, disability, age, language and other factors. In our view, a just and equal society is one which values diversity and is inclusive of it. We are committed to working collectively and in coalition with other groups to dismantle barriers to all women's equality.

Editors
Marlène Dubuisson-Balthazar, Kecia Podetz, Ros Salvador, Josée Bouchard

Jurisfemme Co-ordinator
Pamela Cross

Publication Co-ordinator
Sharmila Biswas-Mistry

Contributions of articles, notices and resource information are encouraged. We reserve the right to edit submissions.
NAWL gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Women's Program, Status of Women Canada.
ISSN 0835-0892

NAWL Staff and National Steering Committee
Executive Director Bonnie Diamond
Director of Legislation & Law Reform Andrée Côté
Administrative Officer Pam Mayhew
Communications Officer Sharmila Biswas-Mistry

National Steering Committee
Kim Lewis (Ottawa)
Kim Brooks (Kingston)
Catherine Meade (Toronto)
Kecia Podetz (Ottawa)
Patricia Doyle Bedwell (Halifax)

Regional Representatives
Ontario Ruth Magenda Goba, Toronto, ON
West/NWT Yvonne Peters, Winnipeg, MB
Quebec Marlène Dubuisson-Balthazar, Montreal, QC
Atlantic Janice Brown, Halifax, NS
BC/Yukon Ros Salvador, Victoria