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Women’s Rights as Human Rights
Miles to Go…
Twenty-five years ago, Canada was one of the first countries to sign the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, also known as CEDAW treaty. Since then, however, various UN committees have told Canada its performance is lagging. Canada’s federal government has been asked to take urgent action to remedy the profoundly unequal status of Aboriginal and First Nations women, the systemic discrimination confronted by immigrant and refugee women as well as women who come to Canada under the Live-In Caregiver Program, the scarce resources for legal aid for family and civil law, women’s increasing poverty, and the downloading of care-giving onto women due to cuts in social programs.
www.fafia-afai.org/en/node/191
Women’s organizations in Canada mobilized around these concerns in the fall of 2006 when the federal government made decisions which undermine women’s access to justice and to the advancement of women’s human rights. WICC and other women’s organizations participated on Dec. 10, 2006, in a round table forum with parliamentarians to discuss the state of women’s equality Canada. Hundred’s of women’s organizations signed on to the December 10 Statement for Women’s Equality and Human Rights.
The Vision
We envision a country where women and men live in equality, sharing power and decision-making, with equal access to systems and resources, both in law and in lived experiences. We envision a country where women live without fear of male violence in any form, where everyone has equal access to food, shelter, clothing and decent public services, where no one is forced to choose between feeding our families and paying the rent, and where gender is not a barrier to access.
Women have been active participants in trying to bring about this vision. We have struggled to provide food and housing for our families, advocated with governments to legislate change, initiated creative alternatives such as community kitchens, shelters and women’s centres, and joined with women in Canada and around the world in movements for change.
The Reality
However, we know that women bear the brunt of economic, social, and political inequality. (See Assessing Gender Equality: Trends in the Situation of Women and Men in Canada, Status of Women Canada (2005)) According to a 2005 report:
- 70% of people living in extreme poverty worldwide are women
- women represent half of the world’s population, are responsible for two-thirds of the world’s working hours, earn only one-tenth of the world’s income and own less than one-hundredth of the world’s wealth
- about half the women in Canada have after-tax incomes ranging from 0 to$13,786. Only 11% of women have after-tax incomes over $32,367.
- Women aged 45-64 make only 51% of the wages of their male counterparts.
- 75% of all women in Canada live the last quarter of their lives in poverty.
To be a woman in Canada today is to face the likelihood of being poor at some point in your life. Poverty means not having enough money to maintain a decent standard of living for yourself and your children. It means not having access to decent affordable housing, to day care, to adequate health care, to expanded educational opportunities. Poverty is the denial of fundamental human rights.
WICC has supported efforts to address and eradicate poverty experienced by women.
- It housed the Task Force on the Feminine Face of Poverty (FFP) from 1987 – 1994, which came in to being to give voice to women living in poverty and to challenge church and society to work together with women in poverty to bring about social and economic change.
- At the national gathering “On the Line, Below the Line” organized by the FFP, “the Wall” had its beginnings as a tool to bring a gender analysis to both the Canadian and the global economy. This process of “starting with women’s lives” to do economic analysis is now being used by women’s organizations in many countries.
- Representing church networks, WICC participated in the Canadian Women’s March Committee in 2000 as this coalition of national women’s organizations mobilized women in Canada around a platform calling for changes to eliminate women’s poverty and to end all forms of violence against women.
- In 2005, the Women’s March Coalition again participated in the World March of Women as it developed the Global Charter for Humanity. In Canada, the coalition organized events across the country focused on poverty, child care, pay equity, and violence against women.
- WICC continues to participate in a coalition of women’s organizations that are calling on our government to legislate changes to address the systemic inequality of women. Coalition partners include:
The 13 Demands
The Canadian Women’s March Committee, a coalition of 25 national women’s organizations, presented the following platform of demands in 2000 to address the violence and injustice experienced by women. To date none of these demands have been met and they continue to be crucial to the lives of women.
Women in Canada Call on the Federal Government to:
- Restore federal funding to health care and enforce the rules against the privatization of our health care system.
- Spend an additional 1% of the budget on social housing.
- Set up the promised national child-care fund, starting with an immediate contribution of $2 billion.
- Increase Old Age Security payments to provide older women with a decent standard of living.
- Use the surplus from the Employment Insurance Fund to increase benefits, provide longer payment periods and improve access, as well as improve maternity and family benefits.
- Support women's organizing for equality and democracy by: allocating $50 million to front-line, independent, feminist, women-controlled groups committed to ending violence against women, such as women's centres, rape crisis centres and women's shelters; recognizing and funding the three autonomous national Aboriginal women's organizations to ensure full participation in all significant public policy decisions as well as providing adequate funding to Aboriginal women's services, including shelters, in all rural, remote and urban Aboriginal communities; funding a national meeting of lesbians to discuss and prioritize areas for legislative and public policy reform; providing $30 million in core funding for equality-seeking women's organizations, which represents only $2.00 for every woman and girl child in Canada - our Fair Share.
- Fund consultations with a wide range of women's equality-seeking organizations prior to all legislative reform of relevance to women's security and equality rights, beginning with the Criminal Code and ensure access for women from marginalized communities.
- Implement immigration reform to: provide domestic workers with full immigration status on arrival; abolish the "head tax" on all immigrants; include persecution on the basis of gender and sexual orientation as grounds for claiming refugee status.
- Contribute to the elimination of poverty by: supporting the cancellation of the debts of the 53 poorest countries; increasing Canada's international development aid to 0.7% of the Gross National Product
- Adopt national standards which guarantee the right to welfare for everyone in need and ban workfare.
- Recognize the ongoing exclusion of women with disabilities from economic, political and social life and take the essential first step of ensuring and funding full access for women with disabilities to all consultations on issues of relevance to women.
- Establish a national system of grants based on need, not merit, to enable access to post-secondary education and reduce student debt.
- Adopt proactive pay equity legislation.
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