Women's equality

Our choices

We need a government that works for, and with, women. We need a government that cares about women's equality in Canada.

We need a government that can work on more than five priorities at a time… and on priorities that matter to women.

Here are a few ideas. A few good choices.

1. Putting equality back on the women's agenda for government
2. Protecting public services
3. A national child care program
4. A strong proactive federal pay equity law
5. A universal publicly funded and delivered health care system
6. A national strategy to address violence against women
7. Getting more women into politics and government

1. Putting equality back on the women's agenda for government

   • Restore the funding to Status of Women Canada
   • Increase the funding to the Women's Program
   • Restore funding for research lobbying and advocacy
   • Maintain and improve the capacity of Status of Women Canada to coordinate federal policy development
     
   
   

2. Protecting public services

   Women are users of public services – from health care to food safety to clean water to public transportation to education, and the list goes on. Our public services are an asset – to working women and men, and to corporations who benefit from our public and social infrastructure. Let's start talking about the “public service wealth”.

3. A national child care program, and a child-care act that makes child care funding an obligation and child care services a right. Check out the Code Blue Campaign for Child Care.

4. A strong proactive federal pay equity law. OK, we've waited long enough, we've consulted long enough and we know enough. We need a good federal law, and we need it now. Pay equity is a human right. Working women and men deserve no less.

5. A universal publicly funded and delivered health care system that puts people before profit and stops the privatization of health care. Let's keep up the good work the labour and social justice movements have done to fight for it.

6. A concerted national strategy to address violence against women. While we have come some way to addressing violence, the problem still persists, it's costly to all of us, and we can't have equality unless we do something about it.

   • We know women are more likely than men to be victims of the most severe forms of spousal assault, homicide.
   • Violence against women in the north and against Aboriginal women is even worse. For example, the rate of spousal violence against Aboriginal women is three times higher than for non-Aboriginal women or men.
   • Young women experience the highest rates of violence.
   • Less than 30% of women who experience spousal violence report it to the police, and less than 10% of those who experience sexual assault report it.
   • In the year ending in March 2004, 52,127 women and 36,840 children were admitted to women's shelters.

   Violence against women is a national problem – it's a national tragedy. It's linked to and leads to poverty. We all need to be part of the solution, and we need the political will to do something.

7. Getting more women into politics and government

   News flash! Women are 52% of the population. And women elected to Parliament in 2006 have dropped to 63, or 20.4%. That puts us in 45th place worldwide in terms of representation of women. We can do better than that, and let's hope the next time around, we do. It won't solve all of our problems, but it sure won't hurt.

Status of Women Canada. What we are losing

Read all the facts on the cuts at Status of Women Canada.