Margins Magazine - Volume 4 Issue 4

VOL. IV | ISSUE IV
MARGINS
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the solutions we have offered are solutions that will make the economy work for everyone.
For us, that is the biggest piece of the puzzle.
I think one of the fundamental things every single party needs to look at for any platform
they put out is what is their intersectional gender-based analysis, that is going to be very,
very important. Right now we have something called the Canada Budgeting Act. So as you
have probably seen in the budget there is towards the end, even in the fall economic statement,
there is a starting base to identify whether this policy measure will affect women
more, or this will affect youth more. We’re starting to see some analysis of policies through
an intersectional lens, the same thing has to be done for platform recommendations. The
thing is, there are so many policy recommendations that have been put forward for generations,
I talk about childcare but we have been talking about this for 50 years, 50 years.
I’ve been talking to policy wonks who’ve been doing this work for 30 years and they said,
they’ve never seen a policy window quite like COVID-19, where things are seen as possible
that weren’t seen before.
As a member of civil society, my job is to essentially make sure people are aware of the
solutions that are possible. If we do have a snap election, for every single party we will
be doing a report card, if you will, of the different policy platforms that come out and we
will be actually putting it against this economic recovery plan. We have the roadmap right
there for parties to take on and that’s something we’re going to be looking at very closely.
I’ll say our top priority is childcare, we need to see a substantial childcare plan. We need
to see substantial focus on housing and homelessness. That is something COVID-19 has
shown us: if you don’t have a home, that is terrible for health, not just individually, but
public health. For us, the other big piece of the puzzle is gender-based violence. So if you
don’t see these three things addressed in a meaningful way, along with of course recovery,
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that’s something we’ll be disappointed by.
FA: So the last question, I guess we spent a lot of today talking about some long
term goals and sort of what we’ve seen so far. How do you measure success? Is it
appropriate?
AS: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think as an organization in this very challenging media
landscape, it’s challenging to make issues matter to people. I think one of the big indicators
of success for us was when we saw in the speech from the throne, an explicit mention of
a feminist recovery. I think that is actually unheard of in many countries around the world
and I know other civil society organizations and other countries are pushing for that. So
that really spoke to the advocacy and the success we were able to have in terms of shaping
the public discourse.
I think another measure of success was how many different types of organizations have
essentially started to talk about this issue. For us, what has been really promising to see is
how chambers of commerce have started to reference our report and start to talk about the
importance of child care, and a she-recovery in addressing this through a feminist recovery
lens. So that’s been interesting to see. I think the biggest test is, we’ve done our part of
civil society to put forward policy solutions. Part of our job is also to push public pressure
and we’ve done that immensely. Through the media relations we’ve been doing over the
last three to four months, I think the key now is knowing the balls in the court of the government.
So it’s up to them to essentially get their different players at the table because
we’ve made very clear what the economic, gender equality, and health equity arguments
are. So now we’ve done our part, but we’re also holding the government accountable to
follow through.
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