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Following the various acts and provisions for women to vote and to work while having the ability to make a formal complaint within the system set up against them in some or many instances in Canadian society, the next steps for the equality of women came with some of the enforcement of equity for Canadian women in different work domains and within sub-set considerations of the workplace too.
Some of these other acts were fro 1953, 1956, and 1986, found in the Canada Fair Employment Practices Act. Each of these three subsequent acts gave another basis upon which women could build their proverbial rock, as the discrimination against women seems more than palpable. Indeed, the discrimination against women would require the acts in order to have a legal and rights basis, or set of bases, upon which to enforce equality or fight for equality in the cases of explicit, overt discrimination on the basis of sex.
The Canada Fair Employment Practices Act of 1953 was specifically applied within the context of the civil service. The Female Employees Equal Pay Act of 1956 formally mandated that any discriminatory pay scale based on sex was, in fact, what it was the whole time but with the possibility for legal recourse now, wage discrimination. That discriminatory wage on the basis of sex could be something for women to fight for and pursue equality in a formal context with a legitimate pretext in law.
Not only found within the law, the implications for the social life also remain significant over time. As we see with the access to the arena of education around the world for women decades prior, we see the emergence of the dominance of women in education compared to men in most or all developed nations at all or most educational levels from kindergarten through graduate school.
Coming into 1986, there was the implementation of the Employment Equity Act; something important for two purposes within the federally regulated employee-employer relationships. In that, there must be an identification (of what?) and elimination (and how?). The identification of the barriers to employment opportunities. Individuals who want to find their way into the mainstream of the society require the ability to take on work without superfluous and unneeded barriers to access.
Those positions that do have unnecessary boundaries to the work become discriminatory, especially, within the context of the topic today, in regards to sex. Each act, though decades apart even, provides a solid or sound foundation for one aspect needing to be covered in some way, shape, or form for the further equality of the sexes (and of others) in Canadian society, to, in essence, democratize not only the civic and political life of the society with the right to vote for everyone but also the workplace with the equal opportunity to take part in the mainstream of the society’s professional and economic life.
This then extends into the international world as well. Canada has been taking much of the lead in the world of the gender equality. A particular item of note on the pathway towards the achievement of the SDGs or the Sustainable Development Goals. Canadians should, maybe, harbor a sense of happiness over achievements and trend lines in these spheres for the nation.
Some of those international documents coincide with commissions and councils working for the equality of women around the world and specifically within Canadian borders and society as well. If you look at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, we can see a specific series of functions and operations based on documented stipulations for the commission to work for the equality of women in Canada.
Then we have the Human Rights Council from which Canadian women can have their rights further voiced for and enforced in a manner of speaking for the greater equality with the men in Canadian society. It amounts to an international context with national implications. In this, we can see the relation, or for starters one relationship, between the nature of equality within the country, Canada, and around the world, for the rights in some documents in the former connecting to the rights in the documents in the latter and vice versa.
International women’s rights link to national women’s rights and contrariwise. The nature of the logical reciprocal relationship provides a global consensus basis both within and beyond borders for the equality of the sexes. Then we can see this stipulated in various domains of human concern and life. If we look into the ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Canada was one of the first countries to ratify the document. Good job, Canada.
The change, as with other documents and ratifications, in the social and cultural life also take some time. It is in this sense that we seen the standards set for the elimination of gender discrimination. These will take time and may only been seen in full after we are dead, gone, and dust. But then again, great societies and systems and ways of life can be instantiated as quickly as they can go away, and if not, why not?
Why not permit the possibility in the imagination’s horizon, immediate even, for equal status of women in the society at all levels right away, it could be tomorrow or the “tomorrow” spoken of in the hopeful messages of those others dead, gone, and dust of whom we are the those of needed some time and then only saw. It can be immediate, could take a long time, but remains an ever-present possibility while never an inevitability.
In 2002, entering and ushering in the new millennium, Canada ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, that was originally adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2000. In this ratification, our country remains not only legally but also morally bound in a way to the dictates of the international moral consensus – close to but not quite objective and transcendent insofar as these functionally relate to the lives of individual human people around the world – see in this document and, as bears almost infinite repetition, others.
The status of the document and its responsibilities include a national report from Canada as a Member State to the United Nations per four years for the information about the status of women in Canada – and the progression towards equality – and for the observation about how well the measures have worked in the previous four years. More on this can be seen here and here. That is the short article series on the historical context for women’s equality in Canada. Now, we see the modern pushbacks. Will we slide down or crawl up? It all comes to a matter of human choices and honoring the progress from before or not.
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Image Credits: Pixabay