Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Mount Royal.
It is rather sad that we need to deal with ideology on one side and ideology on the other. The Liberal Party feels like a party that is caught in the middle of a sandwich. The thing about ideology is that it leads to a great deal of rhetoric on either side and very little action.
Ideology is at the root of why the Liberal Party had to bring forward this motion today. I think the ideology of the Conservative government is that women are a special interest group. That ideology has been repeated many times in the House in the past. Those of us who have been here a while know what has been said.
This ideology says that people who advocate should never be funded. That is ideology, because anyone who has watched and followed the rise of human rights will know that it is advocacy that brings forward the issues which show that a particular group is in fact discriminated against or is vulnerable in our society. Advocacy is key to moving forward good public policy and good public legislation that will in fact bring about equality for these groups.
Women in this country are still facing enormous barriers to equality: equality of access to justice, equality of access to housing and equality of access to equal pay for work of equal value. There are still many challenges that women face. To disallow and stop funding groups that bring forward this kind of advocacy is a disservice to women in Canada.
As well, the ideology of dumbing down any kind of fact or research is another ideology that we are forced to deal with in regard to the government today. It has cut the research funding for Status of Women Canada. As the minister who brought in that research funding in 1997, I have to tell members that many important pieces of research in this country came out of that program.
It was the first time that a government brought together academic research and what we call in vivo research, which is community research, and put them together to create answers, not only about how the law deals with things on a piece of paper, but with people on the ground and the reality of their lives, people who know how to make public policy that will actually work, have effect and bring about the changes they want.
This resulted in research that told us about the trafficking of women within this country. It brought out research that told us about the barriers that women face when they are being trafficked and what we could actually do, based on evidence, that would allow this to change.
This research brought forward the issue, which most people did not realize, about the inequality of women who are farmers in this country. For starters, because they live on farms and the farms are their homes, they are not seen as actually being in the paid workforce. Therefore, access to child care was denied them. Even the ability to deduct from taxes any child care they paid for was not allowed, because they were not considered to be “working women”.
There was huge disparity, discrimination and lack of understanding of the reality of women who farm in this country. The research project, working with the University of Saskatchewan, brought forward an extraordinary amount of information and knowledge about this and decisions on what we could do to create public policy that would help farm women in this country.
Because of research and advocacy, women were able to bring forward the issues that affected them in the hope of good government, government that realizes it has a role to play in improving the lives of its citizens. That is now gone. The ability to do that is gone. That is very disappointing for women in this country.
I think that at the heart of this ideology is a lack of understanding of the role of women in society and the reality of women's lives in society. A good example is the cancelling of the court challenges program. Ideologically, Conservatives do not like the court challenges program. Mr. Mulroney cancelled the court challenges program.
When the Liberals became government in 1993, one of the first things we did was to bring back the court challenges program, because access to justice is fundamental to equality in this or any country. It is key to have the ability to have access to the courts and bring forward the legal arguments when people are discriminated against for various reasons.
The court challenges program allowed women in this country who were poor, who were visible minorities, who were immigrants and who were voiceless, vulnerable people with no money, to have access to courts. It allowed them that ability to have access to courts to bring about equality for them. I am going to give two examples of how the court challenges program helped women.
One example is that of Baker v. Canada, which involved a challenge by Ms. Baker, a Jamaican-born woman who worked illegally in Canada as a domestic worker for a number of years. After the birth of her fourth Canadian-born child, she suffered postpartum psychosis and was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. After undergoing treatment at a mental health facility for one year, she applied for landed immigrant status on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. Her application was denied and she was ordered deported.
Here was a woman with no money to be able to access justice. As a result of the court challenges program, she was able to go to the Supreme Court of Canada, which found at the outset in reviewing the fairness of the decision-making process that the immigration official showed an “impermissible bias” against single mothers and women with a psychiatric history. In Ms. Baker's case, this meant that when deciding whether she, as a mother, might remain in Canada on humanitarian grounds, the immigration officer should have given very serious consideration to the impact of that decision on her existing children in Canada, who were all young children. That is a good example.
Another example is that of a woman, 61 years old, who had to take time off work to look after her terminally ill stepson and then her chronically ill mother. During seven years, she was unable to work. We know that the CPP seven year dropout provision, which recognizes that the ability for women to bear and have children does constitute a barrier to pensionable earnings at the end of a lifetime, does allow a dropout for up to seven years, which does not count in the calculation of pensionable earnings for women if they do so to take care of a child under the age of seven. In this instance, the child was not under the age of seven, but he was terminally ill, and obviously the mother was not under the age of seven, but looking after her mother was key to this woman's family functioning and because that was what she could do.
With the assistance of the court challenges program, this woman appealed to the CPP review tribunal and went on to appeal to the Pension Appeals Board. She got no for an answer. She was just about to utilize the court challenges program to go to the courts of this land when the program was terminated. This woman now has no access to justice because she is too poor to afford a lawyer and take her case to court.
When we talk about people with no voice and no money, the court challenges program gave access to those people. Let us look at the fact that by cancelling the court challenges program the Conservative government actually slammed the door shut on women and minority groups in this country. It then decided to bar and nail down the windows by denying funding for advocacy, because, as a result of this, the National Association of Women and the Law, a group that has taken on cases for women who were discriminated against and needed access, had to close its doors. Therefore, women have no court challenges program and no access to associations to help them.
The very nature of women, the very nature of the fact that women are anatomically and physiologically different, creates very specific barriers for women in having access not only to justice but to work. We know today that not only what we used to call poor families but also middle income families are two paycheques away from bankruptcy. Therefore, the women and both parents have to work.
With the cutting of the national child care program that the Liberal government negotiated with the provinces, these women who must work to make ends meet are therefore denied access to good, quality developmental care for their children. This is hitting people when they are down. Nothing has been done by the government to understand even that simple basic issue.
I still continue to say that the NDP was very irresponsible when it brought in the current government, knowing for sure that it would cut all of those policies.
Gender-based analysis is an important issue. It tells us that men and women are different and that they face different barriers. Therefore, in standing and speaking to this motion, I want to say that it is time for the Conservative government to recognize the uniqueness of women's lives and to do something to help them.