BUDGETS AS IF WOMEN MATTERED: A Public Forum
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Tuesday, Sept 20th, 7:00 PM
Royal Saskatchewan Museum, Auditorium, (corner of College/Albert, Regina)
FEATURING
Shelagh Day
, Director, Poverty and Human Rights Project (Vancouver)Armine Yalnizyan
, Progressive Economist (Toronto)Isabella Bakker
, International Gender Budgeting Expert (York University)CHAIRED BY Barbara Byers, Former President of the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour (SFL), current Executive VP, Canadian Labour Congress
HOSTED BY by the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action (a pan- Canadian coalition of women's organizations and human rights groups)
TO REQUEST
sign language and child care, e-mail info@fafia-afai.org by Thursday, Sept. 15$5 suggested donation.
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WHY A PUBLIC FORUM ON WOMEN AND BUDGETS?
This forum will bring together human rights and budgeting experts who will discuss how governments in Canada can create better budgets that are truly responsive to women’s realities. It will also address findings in a ground-breaking report commissioned by FAFIA earlier in the year which measured the federal government's budget performance against the explicit commitments it made to women’s equality in Beijing in 1995. This report showed that massive spending cuts unduly hurt women in the deficit era and that the interests of women and their communities have not been sufficiently met since Ottawa began posting surpluses (see http://www.fafia-afai.org/proj/gb/index.php for more info on this report). Canada as a whole has suffered as a result.
FAFIA has chosen the topic of women and budgets in part because we realize that federal Minister of Finance Ralph Goodale comes from Regina, SK. In February 2004, prior to the release of the 2005 budget, Minister Goodale agreed to subject all future federal budgets to a gender based analysis. This is good news! This forum will give three cutting edge thinkers an opportunity to provide critical information regarding how such an analysis can be done so that women and their communities are equal benefactors of budget expenditures, and budget surpluses. We have also extended an invitation to Minister Goodale’s office to attend this event. During the 2nd half of the forum, we will invite women to share their experiences to date, and expectations of future budgets at the federal and local levels.
This event is being organized by FAFIA during our national conference, also being held in Regina later this month.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
Isabella Bakker
Isabella Bakker is Professor of Political Science (and former Chair) and
Women's Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada. She spent last year as a Fulbright New Century Scholar based at the United Nations in the Division for the Advancement of Women in DESA. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research in New York. Her published work includes "The Strategic Silence: Gender and Economic Policy" (1994), "Rethinking Restructuring: Gender and Change in Canada" (1996), and “Power, Production and Social Reproduction” (2003) with Stephen Gill as well as numerous other works on gender and restructuring, fiscal policy and the political economy of state finance, the changing role of government, and globalisation. She is an expert on gender-sensitive budgeting and has worked with the United Nations, UNIFEM, UNDP, the Commonwealth Secretariat and the OECD on these questions.
Shelagh Day
Shelagh Day is a human rights expert and advocate. Currently, she is one of the Directors of the Poverty and Human Rights Project. A central goal of the Project is to strengthen the human rights of the poorest people. The publisher of Canada’s law reporter in the human rights field, Shelagh Day is also a partner in a human rights consulting firm which provides advice to governments, human rights commissions, universities, and non-governmental organizations.
Shelagh Day is the co-author of two books on Canada’s constitutional guarantees of equality for women, and of numerous articles on constitutional and statutory human rights. She has also authored submissions to United Nations treaty bodies regarding Canada’s compliance with its international human rights obligations.
Shelagh Day has a long and distinguished history working with both government and non-governmental organizations to advance the equality of Canada’s most disadvantaged groups. She was the Director of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission, the first President of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund, and a Vice-President of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. She was a founder of the Canadian Disability Rights Council, and a Board member of the Canadian Association for Community Living. She is currently the Special Advisor on Human Rights to the National Association of Women and the Law.
Armine Yalnizyan
Economist and media commentator Armine Yalnizyan has worked with governments at the federal, provincial and local levels, with international NGOs and community-based organizations and coalitions, always with the goal of making policies better respond to the needs of the most marginalized members of society. After 10 years as program director with the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, she authored a ground-breaking report in 1998 on income inequality in Canada, entitled The Growing Gap. In 2002 she became the honoured first recipient of the Atkinson Foundation Award for Economic Justice and received the Morley Gunderson Prize in 2003. Armine’s recent focus has been on the economics of health care, which is deeply integrated with her work over the last decade monitoring governments’ allocation of resources in the light of their explicit commitments to basic human rights. In 2004, Armine wrote one of the first reports in Canada on how the last ten years of federal budgets (1995-2005) have negatively affected women.
