Irene Mathyssen

[October 21st, 2009]

Madam Speaker, the parliamentary secretary certainly has high praise for her minister and her government, but the truth of the matter is that her party and the minister responsible for the status of women have been ignoring and continue to ignore the challenges faced by women in this country.

I would ask, where is the affordable child care? Where is the affordable housing for women needing to escape violence? Where is pay equity? They destroyed pay equity. It is no more. This country has a system now in place where men get 100¢ dollars and women get 70¢ dollars. It is simply not acceptable.

All of this was made crystal clear just this month. This is Women's History Month and the minister has chosen to focus on women in winter sports. Celebrating our athletes is important, but the violence, the poverty and the lack of equality that women face is simply horrendous, and the government needs to respond.

[October 21st, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I thank the parliamentary secretary for taking time to further answer questions about the dramatic increase in the number of women accessing shelters in Canada.

On May 14, I asked the Minister of State for Status of Women what her government would do about the staggering increase in the number of women seeking shelters in our country. I would like to review some of the statistics that I mentioned in May and highlight some additional numbers that have come out since then. Unfortunately, things are now worse, not better across Canada.

Since May, in my home town of London, Ontario, the London Abused Women's Centre has seen a staggering 105% increase in service demands over last year. That is up from a 79% increase earlier this year. The director of the agency still managed to find a positive in the numbers and was pleased that at least women were seeking help.

This past May, Ottawa women's shelters released a report entitled “Hidden from Sight: A Look at the Prevalence of Violence Against Women in Ottawa”. The report showed the desperate state of many women in this city. It states:

Ottawa shelters are almost always full and frequently over their capacity. On average, most shelters report turning away 1-3 women daily as there are simply no beds available. In 2007, 3,281 requests for emergency shelter were turned away. Local shelters are forced to turn away 6 times more women than they are able to house. Most women requesting shelter space are fleeing a violent partner with their children. Almost 450 children were living in shelters in 2007 and many more were turned away.

In Calgary a women's emergency shelter help line had a 300% increase in calls.

According to Statistics Canada, nearly 200,000 women reported that they had been assaulted or sexually assaulted by a spouse in 2003.

Intimate partner violence can be found in every province, territory, city and community within Canada. Police reported over 38,000 incidents of intimate partner violence nationwide, representing approximately 15% of all violent incidents reported to police. Eighty-three per cent of victims of spousal abuse are women.

A YWCA policy paper, released in January of this year makes it clear that recessions, like the one that we are in now, hit women hard.

Women make up a disproportionate share of low income Canadians and are particularly vulnerable in any economic crisis. Women account for 70% of part-time employees and two-thirds of Canadians working for minimum wage. Income statistics show women of colour, aboriginal women and women with disabilities are even more at risk than other women.

The YWCA report makes it very clear:

When women flee abuse, they leave homes, networks and communities behind. Lack of affordable housing and the other multiple challenges make them vulnerable to the recurrence of violence. Studies show that economic downturns have the potential to escalate domestic violence as stresses mount on families.

Domestic violence not only has a physical and emotional effect on families but also costs Canadian taxpayers. According to the United Nations, in Canada, a 1995 study estimated the annual direct costs of violence against women to be $684 million for the criminal justice system, $187 million for police and $294 million for the cost of counselling and training, totalling more than $1 billion a year.

The minister is hiding behind her action plan. There is no action plan. We need responsibility from the government.

[October 20th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, nothing I heard yesterday or today reassures me.

Status of Women Canada has the expertise in gender-based analysis, GBA, and this was recognized by Treasury Board and other departments. However, Status of Women Canada lacks any real power to force departments to perform GBA.

Treasury Board fully admits that it has the ability, the tools and leverage needed to enforce GBA within the federal government, yet it refuses to change practices and document the challenge function. The government seems to feel a verbal discussion is all that is needed.

I want to point out that the Auditor General did not find this at all sufficient and was very suspicious of the verbal discussion, as almost all discussions between Treasury Board and the departments are done through email therefore leaving some sort of paper trail. Treasury Board insisted there was no paper trail. With no paper trail, there is no accountability.

Why does the government keep insisting on accountability when there is nothing? When is it going to put in a gender-based analysis that we can be assured of?

[October 20th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the parliamentary secretary for taking the time to further answer questions on the Auditor General's scathing report on gender-based analysis in federal departments.

As I am sure the parliamentary secretary is well aware, the Auditor General and the Treasury Board secretariat testified yesterday at the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. I had the opportunity to attend that meeting and hoped to get some answers. During question period on May 12, 2009, the President of the Treasury Board claimed that his government is committed to gender-based analysis and denied that the Auditor General was critical of the government's actions.

The President of the Treasury Board was incorrect. The Auditor General was and still is very critical about how gender-based analysis is or, more accurately, is not performed in government departments and at the Treasury Board. I will briefly summarize her findings.

Gender-based analysis has had a weak take-up in federal departments. Of the 68 cases assessed by the Auditor General, only four had GBA incorporated in policy development. Only 30 of the cases had some analysis done. Twenty-seven cases had not considered GBA at all. There is no policy requiring departments to do GBA, and departments do not know when GBA should be performed.

Furthermore, the Auditor General was astonished that the challenge function at the Treasury Board was based solely on verbal exchanges and no documentation was undertaken. How can anyone be assured if GBA has even been considered, never mind performed, if there is no written record?

Continuing in her criticism, the Auditor General stated that the government does not care about GBA. She found that the lack of documentation made it clear that GBA was and is not a priority. She felt that the government should further help Status of Women Canada fulfill its mandate and support gender-based analysis in all departments.

It was reported yesterday that individual departments are left to their own devices as to how or whether they do GBA. Some training has been done in various departments and at the Treasury Board. Time and money have been invested in GBA, but the results found by the Auditor General show that despite this investment, GBA is rarely performed, often dismissed and very rarely applied.

Transport Canada, for instance, felt that it was gender-neutral and did not need to do GBA at all. It seems very unlikely that absolutely nothing Transport Canada does would affect men and women differently. Sadly, the best the Treasury Board could say for their best practices was that they distribute a pamphlet on GBA and that they include GBA in their boot camp.

They repeated over and over that they did not think that they should have to document whether a GBA was done on a project and that departments should take care of that themselves. If departments are not regulated, encouraged or forced to do GBA and the Treasury Board is uninterested in enforcing GBA, who is left?

Many of the witnesses yesterday insisted that the buck stops at the minister's desk. Ministers alone have the ability to ignore the results of a GBA, if it has even been performed. Only four projects actually took GBA into account. This is a dismal record and it is not acceptable. The system is clearly failing at the department level, at the Treasury Board level and when it arrives at the desk of each and every minister.

I have a very simple question for the parliamentary secretary. After the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women recommended that GBA be mandatory for all government departments, why does the government refuse to make gender-based analysis mandatory?

[Persons Case, October 19th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, October 18 was an important landmark for Canadian women. It is the 80th anniversary of the court case where women were finally recognized as persons under the law.

The famous five showed leadership, daring and courage in their struggle for women's equality. Women could finally begin to take their rightful place in the political life of our nation.

Yesterday, the Women's Events Committee of London, Ontario, honoured five of our sisters who have shown the same daring, leadership and courage. London's famous five are: Sister Patricia McLean, Jane Bigelow, Dr. Mary McKim, Winn Whitfield and Kem Murch. Their determination has been critical to the progress made since 1929, but we have not come far enough.

Tragically, the government does not care and has failed the women of Canada. Women face violence and poverty. There is still no affordable housing policy and no safe universal child care. The lack of equality haunts women right across this country.

The famous five of history and the famous five of London, Ontario, have shown the way. It is time for this Parliament to follow.

[Violence against Women, October 7th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, last spring, Roohi Tabassum came very close to being deported to Pakistan. Her ex-husband has threatened to kill her if she returns to Pakistan. Her only crime is that as a hairdresser in Canada, she cut men's hair.

She has filed a refugee claim and a permanent resident application on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, but to no avail. The courts have granted her temporary permission to stay here in Canada but her case is still not resolved.

I have requested that the minister intervene and help Roohi. His only response has been to promise information that has never been delivered. I am saddened that this woman's life remains in limbo and that the minister seems uninterested in protecting Ms. Tabassum.

Perhaps the Minister of Foreign Affairs, like his colleague, the Minister of State for the Status of Women, is afraid to admit that violence against women still exists in this world and that many women remain vulnerable.

This month is Women's History Month. We need to remember the important things in this world, such as the value of a woman's life.

[Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, October 5th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, interestingly enough, there is a huge migration of Colombians into my riding of London—Fanshawe. Many of them are teachers and I have had the opportunity to speak with them. They talk about the war against teachers.

If we look back at totalitarian governments or regimes or those who used violence to get what they wanted, very often their first move was to kill the teachers, the intellectuals, and those who had the ability to speak up to analyze a situation and to talk about justice. That is precisely what has happened in Colombia. Teachers and their families have been targeted because they have the ability to speak up for justice and fairness.

We have a great deal to learn from past agreements and from the teachers of Colombia.

[Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, October 5th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I can safely say that the position of New Democrats is for fair trade, the kind of fair trade that respects human rights, that promotes human dignity, and that means at the end of the day that there is not the kind of imbalance that we have seen in many countries.

I would ask the member how free trade has helped Mexico. I can recall many instances of Mexican workers being murdered because they wanted to have a union or to increase their wages. I can recall the situation in Chiapas, where Mexican labourers, farmers, were removed from their land at gunpoint, so that multinational corporations could grow cheap strawberries for the North American market, a monoculture that destroyed the land and a methodology that destroyed the lives of these people. Murdered peasants, murdered workers in Mexico and environmental degradation, the trade agreement did nothing for Mexico.

[Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, October 5th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I would echo what we have said before. Why is the labour agreement a side agreement? Why is it not integrated into the main agreement? Why does it have to take second place? I would suggest that it is because in the House, among some members, human rights are an inconvenience. They certainly seem to be an inconvenience in Colombia. It is absolutely integral to our values as Canadians that human rights be first and foremost.

I would like to also offer an observation in regard to a meeting I had this spring with a young woman, a trade unionist. She was a union steward for a service union. She came here with the help of the Canadian Labour Congress, but we had to meet very quietly. She did not tell me what village she came from. She only talked briefly about her family. She said her visit to Canada was kept absolutely secret from authorities in Colombia because were she to return and they had found out, she would be killed. She worried very much about her children while she was gone. She was very concerned that her children were in danger.

The point is, last spring a trade unionist feared for her life. What has changed in Colombia?

[Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, October 5th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the members of the NDP caucus and, in particular, the member for Burnaby—New Westminster for his consistent and principled fight to put an end to the free trade agreement between Canada and the Republic of Colombia. His fight against this unacceptable trading arrangement is truly the fight of every fair-minded person who cares about labour rights, human rights, environmental protection and the individual's right to freedom from violence and displacement from home and agricultural land.

Violations of labour rights and violence committed against unionized workers are among Colombia's foremost human rights challenges. Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world to be a trade unionist. A deep seated anti-trade union culture exists in Colombia both within government and among entrepreneurs who see the autonomous organization of workers as a threat.

Two thousand, six hundred and ninety trade unionists have been murdered in Colombia since 1986, with 46 deaths in 2008 and so far in 2009 27 murders.

Impunity rates for these violations is unchanged. There is only a 3% conviction rate for those who murder. Tragically, these crimes are tolerated by the Colombian government.

Canadians must never be a party to tolerance for violence. It goes against everything that we believe about ourselves. The Uribe government continues to inaccurately denounce union members as guerillas, statements considered by the unions as giving carte blanche to paramilitaries to act, putting workers in extreme jeopardy.

Substantive labour rights protections remain in a side agreement rather than in the body of the free trade agreement. Enforcement of these rights is entirely at the discretion of the signatory government. It is not a matter of discretion. It is a matter of life and justice, and justice has been denied because the complaint process is not investigated nor evaluated by independent judicial or even quasi-judicial bodies that could lead to real remedies for the affected parties. It is, as I said, only a matter of discretion in this agreement.

Unlike the provisions for investor's rights, the agreement offers no trade sanctions, no countervailing duties or abrogation of preferential trade status in the event that a party fails to adhere to the labour rights provision. What it does institute is fines, fines for murder, and that is beyond credulity. Investors have rights but workers do not. It defines any kind of logic that killing a trade unionist means paying a fine. This is hardly acceptable or effective. Fines neither address the causes of the violence nor generate substantive incentive or political will in Colombia to address the crisis and bring an end to that violence against trade unionists. There is no justice.

Given the scale and the depth of labour rights violations in Colombia, neither the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement nor its labour side deal will be an instrument to guarantee labour rights and freedoms. In fact, it is more likely the agreement provisions for market liberalization and investor rights, which are substantive, will exacerbate conflict and violations of worker's rights. How on earth can we be a party to this?

I would also like to address the investment chapter of the CCFTA. Canadian oil and mining companies are well established throughout Colombia, including in the conflict zone. Canada's embassy in Bogota estimates the current stock of Canadian investment at $3 billion and predicts it will grow to $5 billion over the next two years with a focus on the oil, gas and mining sectors. Regions rich in minerals and oil have been marked by violence, paramilitary control and displacement.

The ongoing human rights crisis undermines the roles of citizens and communities in deciding which foreign investment projects proceed in their region. It also hampers their ability to advocate for greater community benefits, decent wages and working conditions and improved environmental protection. Canadian companies operating in conflict zones are not neutral actors. Even when investors are not directly connected to the violence, their interests are often intertwined with the perpetrators. Canadian companies cannot evade their responsibility. The CCFTA investment chapter pays mere lip service to corporate social responsibility with best efforts provisions, which are purely voluntary and completely unenforceable.

Almost 4 million people in Colombia are internally displaced. Sixty percent of this displacement has been from regions of mineral, agricultural or economic importance, where private companies and their government and paramilitary supporters have forced people from their homes. Agriculture in Colombia is pivotal for addressing poverty and human rights. Twelve million people live in Colombia's countryside. Agriculture provides 11.4% of the GDP and accounts for 22% of employment, nearly twice the level of manufacturing.

The CCFTA aggressively opens the Colombian agricultural sector to Canadian exports, including the immediate elimination of duties on wheat, peas, lentils, barley and specified quantities of beef and beans. Small scale wheat and barley producers in Colombia will be the hardest hit by a free trade agreement with Canada. Twelve thousand livelihoods will be undermined by Canada's industrially produced wheat and barley exports. A voluntary best efforts clause is not good enough. This trade agreement means additional displacement of the rural poor.

In addition, African palm is also critical. It is the fastest growing agricultural sector in Colombia. Colombia's President Uribe wants to take advantage of the growing global demand for palm oil and biodiesel by promoting the industry. However, the palm oil sector has a dark side. In all four palm growing zones, palm companies have been linked to paramilitaries and human rights violations, including massacres and forced displacement. Human rights groups have documented 113 murders in one river basin by paramilitaries working with palm companies to take over Afro-Colombian owned land.

I would like to also address the environmental side of the agreement in the CCFTA. Colombia is the second most biologically diverse country on earth, but it is losing nearly 200,000 hectares of natural forest every year. This deforestation results from agriculture, logging, mining, energy development and infrastructure construction. The environmental side agreement, or ESA, is unable to provide an effective buffer to counter the pressure of enforceable investor rights that undermine environmental measures.

We have repeatedly heard from the government and others that trade can support the realization of human rights if it brings benefit to vulnerable people and allows willing states to promote developmental outcomes. However, neither the political conditions in Colombia nor the terms of the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement provide these reassurances.

While Canadian officials have argued that the FTA will strengthen democracy and improve human rights in Colombia, Colombian civil society organizations are concerned that the effect will be the reverse. They point to the deep connections between human rights violations and commerce in their country. The systematic attacks on trade unionists that resist liberalization and deregulation of local industry, as well as the dispossession and disappearance of peasants and Afro-Colombians as an expedient means to clear land for export plantations and mining investments, are serious problems.

In 2008, our parliamentary Standing Committee on International Trade undertook a study on human rights and environmental considerations of the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement. That committee report was important for making issues of human rights and the environment, issues in which Canada has numerous binding obligations under international law, central to debates on the deal. The committee concluded that the FTA with Colombia should not proceed without further improvement in the human rights situation in Colombia.

I think that it is imperative that we take that kind of advice. This FTA, signed behind the backs of the Colombian people without any real participation from civil society or any study on the impact, has caused great problems and violence in that community.

I would like to conclude my remarks. At the beginning, I said that the fight against the CCFTA was principled and truly a fight that every fair-minded person should support. After listening to the debate in the House, I have not changed my mind.