"There's nothing in the report that isn't readily available from Statistics Canada," said McInturff, director of Making It Count, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternative's gender equality and policy initiative.
Established in 1971, Status of Women is a government organization dedicated to promoting women's participation in society, the economy, and political life. Its report was "prepared by public servants for a committee of public servants" in February and not intended for the general public, according to a government spokesperson.
The report revealed a stubbornly consistent rate of violence against women in Canada, despite dropping rates of violence against men; a greater vulnerability of aboriginal women to that violence than non-aboriginal women; increasing poverty rates of single moms and senior women; and a 20 per cent income gap between men and women -- two percentage points higher than the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development average.
For advocates, the report also serves as a reminder of how the government has impeded the "status" of both its own agency and Canadian women themselves for over a decade through budget cuts and underfunding.
Nothing changed?
Canada's gender inequality has also been well-documented by the United Nations. In July, the UN human rights committee issued the country's first report card on the issue in 10 years.
It criticized Canada's lack of a national domestic violence strategy (Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. all have one); the small percentage of women in political power; the gender pay gap; and the federal government's refusal to conduct an inquiry into the almost 1,200 missing and murdered indigenous women and girls.
Margot Young, a University of British Columbia law professor, contributes to reports on Canada's adherence to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
Looking at the first UN report from 2003 and this latest Status of Women report, she said it's as though nothing has changed for women: "Numbers change slightly, dates change slightly, things get kind of worse, but they really don't get fixed."
Things weren't ideal for women under the Liberal governments of the 1990s and early 2000s, either. But advocates The Tyee spoke to maintain that equality for women has worsened since the Conservatives came to power in 2006, starting with the cancellation of the nascent national childcare program and restrictions on already paltry government funding for advocacy and research on women's issues.
Life under the Liberals
The World Economic Forum's 2006 Global Gender Gap report ranked Canada 14th out of 142 countries on gender equality. Canada was 10th in women's economic opportunities, but a disappointing 33rd in women's political empowerment, and a frightening 51st in health and survival, which measures the ratio of boys to girls born and women's life expectancy versus men's.
The report came just as the Liberals were turfed from power, and the scores reflected where a decade-plus of Liberal rule had left women in comparison to men.
According to the Feminist Alliance For International Action, a gender equality umbrella group, tax-cutting policies under the Liberals had a more negative impact on women than men. This included a one per cent personal income tax cut, which benefitted men more because of their higher average incomes.
Still, human rights activist Shelagh Day said there was a sense under the Liberals that Status of Women Canada employees, whose job was to liaise with women's organizations on funding opportunities and exchange information, were working with advocates to improve women's equality.
Organizations receiving operational funds from government worked on issues ranging from improving women's political participation to pay equity. Not that it was a lot of money. Day said that funds went as high as $200,000, depending on the organization.
"The amount of money that's actually available to women's organizations through Status of Women Canada has always been a pittance," Day said. "But it's amazing what women's organizations have been able to do with small amounts."
'Status' gutted
The Liberals later changed the funding that women's organizations could get via Status of Women Canada from operational to project-based. That made it harder for organizations to keep the lights on, but groups such as the National Association of Women and the Law, Justice for Girls, and the Feminist Alliance for International Action survived.
It was a bigger blow to their bottom lines when the newly elected Conservative government decided in September 2006 to cut $5 million in Status of Women funding over two years. Two months later, the government said it would shut 12 of the 16 regional Status of Women offices.
"What these offices don't necessarily provide is the help directly to women. There was a lot of lobbying groups, there was a lot of advocacy," said Bev Oda, then-heritage minister and responsible for Status of Women Canada.
After outcries from women's organizations and the Official Opposition, the $5 million was restored in 2007. But Status of Women is still an "extremely underfunded agency," said McInturff, adding that its budget is less than one-third of one per cent of Canada's federal program spending.
She said that's not enough funding to address its mandate, which is to promote "promotes equality for women and their full participation in the economic, social and democratic life of Canada."
The office placed restrictions on funding women's organizations, too. Organizations could only spend money on training and direct services to women, not advocacy or research on women's issues, such as probing why the government spends $100 more per person on anti-smoking programs than it does on preventing domestic violence.
Research funding was key to ensuring organizations could represent women's issues to government, for example at federal budget consultation hearings, Day said. With few female MPs to raise the issues in the House of Commons, government funding was important for the organizations that advocate for "groups of women who don't otherwise have a voice," she said.
Fourteen organizations had their Status of Women Canada funding cut again in 2010 -- the Official Opposition at the time linked the cut to advocates' backlash over the government's refusal to fund a G8 maternal health plan that included funds for abortion.
Today, women's advocacy groups that depended on Status of Women funding are either gone or hanging by a thread, Young said. "The Feminist Alliance for International Action... they have virtually no funding. The National Association for Women and the Law has no office, they have only a website existence. Justice For Girls, which is a local group, has zero budget."
No one policy to blame
Beyond cutting funds to women's organizations, other changes made by the Conservatives over the last nine years have had a direct impact on Canadian women:
• Cutting the roughly $2 million annual budget for the Court Challenges Program, established to help bring charter challenges to the Supreme Court of Canada, such as pay equity cases.
• Passing the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act, which had federal civil service employees bring pay equity complaints to their bosses, instead of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal as was previously done.
• Cutting the GST from seven to five per cent, which meant a $130.5-billion loss of government revenue between 2007 and 2012. Again, women have lower incomes and would pay less GST. Status of Women Canada's report said that 70.8 per cent of permanent part-time workers in Canada in 2013 were women. According to the Feminist Alliance for International Action, 40 per cent of Canadian women's incomes are so low, they don't pay any income tax. Cutting the GST would also mean less revenue for social programs that impact women's equality, like home care and social housing.
By 2014, Canada had slipped to 19th out of 142 countries, according to the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report. The good news? In educational attainment we shot from 33rd in 2006 to number one, but in women's health and survival we plummeted from 51st to 100th.
There's no one policy or tax cut responsible for this drop, and in many cases the Conservative government policies that impact women most are a continuation or amplification of policies introduced under the Liberals.
But according to Day, unlike the Liberals who were on the verge of introducing a national child care program that -- if successful, and we don't know it would have been -- could have helped hundreds of thousands of Canadian women earn more by working more, the federal government is no longer interested in promoting equality.
"It's a very ideological issue here, which has to do with what you think the role of the federal government is. And it's very important to women, because women are reliant on government to try and equalize things for us," Day said. "We need it to intervene in the economy and in family life, in fact, to make us equal."
Original Article
Source: thetyee.ca/
Author: Katie Hyslop
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