WOMEN DON'T HAVE THE RIGHTS WE THINK WE HAVE!I'm in possession of a copy of the report "Canada's Failure to Act: Women's Equality Deepens" by FAFIA (Feminist Alliance for International Action) and if you don't believe that the status of women in Canada is in trouble, I'd advise you to find a copy of this and read it. The facts prove that "current policies and practices are, in fact, ignoring women's entrenched disadvantage and pushing women backwards". For instance, on poverty alone, 56% of sole support women are poor, making their children poor as well, 49% of women 65 and over, 47% under 65, some of these are the largest numbers in 30 years.
Most of women's poverty is due to cuts in social services and programs, reduction in women's "good jobs", tightened rules for access to services such as Employment Insurance, heavily sex-segregated employment policies which were supposed to be largely eliminated but haven't been, lack of equal pay for work of equal value.
Gender-based analysis due to different impacts on men and women by legislation and policies was promised in "Setting the Stage for the Next Century: The Federal Plan for Gender Equality" but this has not been implemented and there's no plan in place to make it mandatory when and if it is.
Human Rights for women is another area where the government has announced improvements that have never happened. The report "Human Rights Act Review Panel Promoting Equality: A New Vision was issued in 2000 with clear and urgent recommendation and the federal government has neither commented or acted.
The Court Challenges Program which was supposed to guarantee accessibility to socially disadvantaged groups in Canada is limited to funding equality test cases which challenge federal laws, policies and practices. Many, nay most, areas of law vital to women are provincial and not covered by these.
What is above is only from the first few pages of this long report and are fairly general. The report gets quite specific. The unrecognized truth is that government policies that claim to promote women's equality and value are mainly just "lip service", they are either insufficient or do the exact opposite.
I have no faith in a law that says I can be jailed for defending myself against a physical attack by a male or someone stronger than me just because somebody thinks being equal means it should be this way. That's another result of one of the so-called laws toward women's equality, yet we are still denied many legal services because of poverty issues when this happens to us.
The report has many specific sections concerning situational issues, violence, poverty and employment, race and colour discrimination, immigration & refugee issues, prison discrimination, the legal system in general, health care and other categories I can't recall at the moment. It's a real eye-opener.
Since this report is so big and so concise, I can't address everything in it on this forum but I am willing to look up some specific issues when I have time. I'm doing online advocacy work concerning women's rights and have a very busy schedule at the moment due to issues that are going before the government.
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posted 06 March 2003 01:29 PM
What rot! If anything, it may be the best time ever to be a woman in Canada. For all our imperfections as a society, there are many people in other parts of the world who would gladly change places with us.
