Canada Drops in Index Ranking Women’s Rights
Author(s): Phoebe Davies-Owen and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Assorted In-Sights (In-Sight Publishing)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/11/17
International women’s rights apply to every nation including Canada. Female Canadian citizens, in general, have difficulties faced throughout life not seen, or not experienced to the same degree, on average, by Canadian men. Recently, a United Nations committee examined and analyzed the status of women and women’s rights in Canada. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) described the situation in Canada for women’s rights as not much being done to improve the state for women within the country.
CEDAW was founded in 1982 and based in the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which was adopted in 1979. Member states of the UN become party of CEDAW through “ratifying or acceding to the Convention,” which necessitates review by the committee on fulfillment of the obligations implied by being a member of the committee. In review of the obligations by the CEDAW, the committee, Canada has fallen since 1995 “from 1st to 25th place on the UN Gender Equality Index,” Canadian Civil Society Organizations reports.
The National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) Secretary-Treasurer, Elisabeth Ballermann, said, “How much more evidence does our government need to prove that women continue to face inequality and discrimination?” In fact, the over two-decade decline in the status of Canada on the international stage for women’s rights implementation occurred throughout the Prime Ministerial leadership of The Right Honourable Justin Trudeau, Stephen Harper, Paul Edgar Philippe Martin, and Joseph Jacques Jean Chrétien, which have been through long periods of both Liberal Party of Canada and Conservative Party of Canada leadership.
No one Canadian federal political party to lay blame on for this. It amounts to a societal issue. A problem in how Canadian citizens, to some degree and in many domains, relate to one another day-to-day in public and private life. “We need a government that will not just talk about improving equality but one that will actually act,” Ballermann said. Another portion of the report relates to the gender wage gap. The report notes that the gender wage gap in Canada is double the amount of the global average. Indeed, the executive director of West Coast LEAF, Kasari Govender, described the ‘motherhood tax’, which is the pay gap for mothers in general compared to women without children. “Canadian mothers earn 12 per cent less than women without children,” Govender said, “The gap increases as the number of children goes up.”
According to Kate McInturff, a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives who specializes in gender inequity and public policy, no improvements have been made regarding the gender wage gap in Canada. In her piece “Budget 2016: not enough real change for women,” she found that 43,000 new jobs were promised in 2016 and 100,000 for 2017/18, the majority of which would actually be created for the construction industry. This industry, which is 88.5% male, is continuously prioritised over female orientated industries like health care. The consequence of this is that women currently comprise 36% of beneficiaries of new budget measures intended to create jobs.
Trudeau himself, who has repeatedly made grand public gestures about being a feminist, is part of the larger problem. Many remember the political and gender equality maneuver for a 50/50 gender split Cabinet with the meme-quote that spread afterwards: “…because it’s 2015.” There is no right way to be a Feminist, but it is a problem when people think the Prime Minister is a great feminist, when in reality, he and his government are failing to address and actually change the injustices faced by Canadian women, in particular, those women who are considered to be on the margins of society.
Dr. Pam Palmater, the chair of Ryerson University has said that Indigenous Canadian women “suffer some of the world’s highest suicide rates, overrepresentation in prison and high rates of sexualized violence” and it seems to be a trend which has continued for years. During the year of the release of Amnesty International’s “Stolen Sisters,” the organisation said that women between the ages of 25 and 44 were five times more likely to die as a result of violence, and a report by the RCMP (Royal Canadian mounted police) calculated that more than a thousand indigenous women had been murdered since 1980, and another 152 had gone missing since 1982.
An inquiry was launched by the Canadian government in August to investigate the situation, but it remains to be seen whether the inquiry can be conducted in a way that satisfies public opinion and actually secures justice for women within indigenous communities. The final key point made in the report was on austerity and women’s rights in Canada. It was termed a “double-whammy for women” because the global financial crisis create restriction in wages, i.e. that stagnation of
wages if not decline, and the cuts to the benefits for women. “These austerity decisions ensure that women who are already economically disadvantaged bear even more of the consequences,” Ballermann said. An associated list of other problems within Canada for every single woman included lack of protection of women’s social and economic rights, support systems, violence against women, and access to abortions, among others.
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