Thanks. It's a real pleasure to be able to speak with the committee this morning.
My professional work focuses on issues of women's equality, specifically in reference to constitutional law, international human rights, and social justice and the law. I've worked with a number of women's equality-seeking groups at both the national and the provincial level, in particular in relation to women's rights and Canada's obligation at the United Nations with respect to women's rights.
I've circulated the remarks I'm making this morning to each of you, along with packages of some materials on the subject matter I'm talking about. That message sits somewhere, I'm sure, amidst dozens of others in your parliamentary mailboxes.
Today I want to urge the committee to recommend that the federal government develop and implement a national gender equality strategy. There are three points I want to make in relation to this topic.
First, I would like to talk briefly about why a national gender equality strategy is desirable. Second, I would like to talk about some specific characteristics of a human rights framework that such a strategy must have. Then I have a few key issues to mention that need to be included in the strategy.
The first topic is why would we want a national gender equity strategy? Discussions of gender inequality commonly reference the notion of systemic inequality. We have done this already this morning. That's the recognition that unequal outcomes result for the institutions and structures of society—political, economic, and social—independent of discrimination or animus that is individual in origin.
It's a complex of institutional practices, attitudes and stereotypes, economic structures, and patterns of social relations that account most meaningfully, most predictably, and most intractably for women's inequality.
The result is that the policy that addresses women's inequality needs to be multifocal, and it needs to look at how these different systemic mechanisms pile onto each other augment and enhance each other. This means that effective policy development and implementation to address women's inequality requires a coherent and a coordinated line of policy. Identification of policy objectives, stages of action, and legislative coordination are key tools for effective policy implementation in this area.
Canada's federal government has already recognized the wisdom of this approach to complex problems by committing to a national housing strategy and a national poverty reduction strategy.
By the same logic, the time is now to commit to a national gender equality strategy. Development of this strategy will mean that policies are more effective, more coherent, and will also communicate that the government takes seriously its obligation to gender equality, and that the government is committed to effective change.
The second point I want to raise has to do with the ways in which a national gender equality strategy would be the fulfillment of Canada's international human rights obligations and, I would argue, its constitutional equality obligations.
As you all know, in 1980 Canada signed on to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. As a state party to this convention, Canada ideally comes up every four years, albeit not in reality every four years, for what's known as a periodic review before the committee that administers women's convention. The last review took place this last fall, and on November 18 the CEDAW committee released its concluding observations on Canada.
In those concluding observations, the committee emphasizes, importantly, that the Government of Canada needs to implement a national gender strategy, policy, and action plan that addresses the following:
the structural factors causing persistent inequalities, including intersecting forms of discrimination, against women and girls, with a special focus on disadvantaged groups of women and girls, including First Nations, Inuit, Métis, Afro-Canadian, disabled, migrant, refugee, asylum-seeking, single parent, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and intersex women and girls.
So it's clear that this committee of women's human rights experts, charged by the United States, considers a national gender equality strategy to be a best practice for meeting Canada's human rights obligations under the women's convention. Indeed, Canadian women agree with this.
Just over a week ago, a national campaign was launched with dozens of organizations representing thousands of women signing on to a letter to the Prime Minister calling for a national gender equality strategy. Now, there are a number of key features that mark such a strategy as a human rights document or that mark it as proceeding from a human rights framework. I don't have time to go over these in detail, but I'll list them simply.
First of all, of course, the content, the issues addressed, reflect entitlements that women have, which means these are basically not bargained away or instrumentalized in terms of other objectives such as budgetary concerns or other political goals.
Secondly, a human rights framework demands, as the UN's framing of its recommendation to Canada shows, a commitment to addressing the issues of the most vulnerable and marginalized women as a priority, and a commitment to hearing the voices of those women in the process of structuring the strategy.
Finally, we know that human rights cast collective duties on the government. It's the government's obligation to deliver these conditions of equality; and a strategy must have effective accountability mechanisms, benchmarks, oversight mechanisms, and time frames that ensure that it's an effective policy.
My last point is simply to flag a couple of substantive issues that a national gender equality policy must address. Of course, these are not the only issues that are critical. In the materials I've circulated, there are some important documents set out from the Feminist Alliance for International Action; a list of the policy recommendations from the CEDAW committee; and also a list of those that could be implemented by the federal government within the next 12 months.
Among these is the expression of the key, central need for a national child care framework that ensures universal, available, affordable child care access for all Canadian women. The role that the national government plays in relation to medicare is equivalent to the role that we need our federal government to play in relation to child care. Until quality child care is universally available, progress on other fronts of women's economic inequality will be stalled.
Secondly, adequate housing is of course a key concern. We've been told by the United Nations special rapporteur that Canada has a housing crisis. We need a gender-sensitive approach as the national housing strategy is developed.
Similarly, the national poverty reduction strategy has to reflect the fact that the poverty of women is deeper and different from the poverty men experience. The poorest of the poor are women and we need to have a gender-sensitive lens in crafting the national poverty reduction strategy.
Finally, I want to conclude simply by noting that national strategies address important areas of human rights observance and, currently, failures. This necessitates as well coordination across strategies. Human rights concerns are linked; systems function not in silos, but they network. Strategies have to reflect this. I've already talked about how the strategies around adequate housing, the right to adequate housing, and the right to income security must necessarily have a gendered face. We need to recognize that as we deal with women's inequality and develop strategies to address it. We need a productive synergy across key equality measures respecting the human rights of women, and really, the key to all of this, from the perspective of this committee, is the calculated oversight that a thoughtful national gender equality strategy can deliver.
Thank you.