Feminist Legal Studies Queen’s hosts innovative conference

Photo by Bernard Clark

Back row (l-r): Prof. Bita Amani (Queen's); Prof. Sonia Lawrence (Osgoode); Ekaterina Yahyaoui Krivenko, lecturer (Montreal); Kristen Skinner, doctoral candidate (York); Pamela Cross, policy consultant (NAWL); and Laura Robinson, equality activist and Olympic competitor. Front row (l-r): Yael Hasson, Women's Budget Forum coordinator (Adva Centre); Valeria Seigelshifer, Gender Budgeting Project coordinator (Adva Centre); Erin Durant, Law '11; Prof. Marcia Zug (South Carolina); Prof. Heather McLeod-Kilmurray (Ottawa); Prof. Nathalie Chalifour (Ottawa); Maria Wersig, visiting scholar (Pace); Beth Atcheson, cofounder (LEAF); Prof. Sharon McIvor (Nicola Valley); and Prof. Kathleen Lahey (Queen's)

Lawyers, academics and law students from all over Canada gathered in Macdonald Hall on October 22-23, for a conference titled “Women and equality: Gender-based analysis, law and economic rights,” hosted by the Feminist Legal Studies Queen’s research group. The conference, organized by Professors Kathleen Lahey and Bita Amani, explored legal and policy dimensions of the fight for women’s equality.

After a welcome reception and buffet on the evening of October 22, the conference workshops kicked off the next morning. In her opening address, Lahey articulated the reasons for holding the conference. She highlighted the fact that throughout the 1990s Canada was consistently ranked at the top of UN rankings for the pursuit of equality, but in recent years has fallen increasingly behind.

The morning session was organized into two sets of presentations, “Sex Equality in the Twenty-First Century” and “Ecofeminism and Environmental Policy Analysis.” In the earlier session, Osgoode Professor and Institute of Feminist Legal Studies director Sonia Lawrence argued that s.15 of the Charterwas not a sufficient guarantee of gender equality and that the “failure of gender justice” was a result of the failure of courts to adequately employ gender analysis. Kate McInturff, executive director of the Feminist Alliance for International Action, compared the present situation for women’s human rights in Canada to one of “downsizing,” with a sharp reduction in support from the federal government, which has lately attempted to link human rights to market forces and cost effectiveness. 

“I don't care if they're cost effective or not,” McInturff said. “I don't think that human rights need to be subject to the logic of market forces. I don't think we should only invest in human rights when there are positive market conditions.”

Following McInturff was Beth Atcheson, co-founder of LEAF and an experienced women's rights campaigner. Atcheson discussed the difficulties with moving from one wave of feminism to the other, stressing the need for adaptation to present circumstances, and exploring the difficulties involved in making the public understand misogyny as its own problem requiring a solution, as opposed to unfairness in general.

The high level of discussion did not end when the conference broke for lunch. Sharon McIvor, a lawyer and Professor at the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology, spoke on “Aboriginal Women: The Long Hard Road.” In discussing the fight against gender discrimination in the Indian Act, she spoke about the historic battle she and her son had waged for his status rights.

McIvor reported that her struggle is still ongoing – after witnessing years of delays by the government on her case, including an effort to make her drop it by granting her son his status, and finally winning a Supreme Court victory, the Conservatives filibustered their own bill as part of an effort to claw back concessions, and the matter remains unsettled.

“The bad part is that there are a lot of people that will remain discriminated against,” McIvor said. “I guess the good part is they've asked us all along to just take a little bit, and leave the rest for later, and myself and my son have always said that he could have got his status that day if he said 'okay, we'll make it moot,' but he said 'no – let's make sure everybody is included if we can.'”

The afternoon began with “Sex Discrimination in Taxes, Spending and Budgetary Policies” and then “Women, Children and Family Law: Whose Equality?” University of South Carolina Law Professor Marcia Zug discussed the difficulties faced by undocumented immigrant families in the context of US family law. Queen’s Professor Patricia Peppin spoke on the next panel, “Whose Images? What for? The Making of ‘Women’ in Politics, Medicine, and Religion,” dealing with advertising by pharmaceutical companies.  

The day concluded with the highly topical “Equality Redux: Olympic Women, Sex Discrimination in Sports, and the Upcoming PanAm Games” panel featuring Olympic competitor and journalist Laura Robinson and student Erin Durant, Law ’11. Robinson took a historical look at the issues of women's rights and the equality struggle in the Olympics, examining the scandals and secrecy involved with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and then bringing her findings to bear on the women's ski jumping scandal of Vancouver 2010, where jurisdictional issues settled in court allowed the IOC to act and set events unbound by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Durant, who will be articling next year with Borden Ladner Gervais LLP in Toronto, followed with a discussion on how federal government funding for amateur athletics consistently fails women. Tracking down how the money was spent, she found a vicious cycle where the lack of international opportunities for women's sports was used to justify less funding, while the lack of funding and participation was used by international sports bodies as an excuse for excluding women from sports.

“What we have is a perfect case of systemic discrimination,” Durant said. “How on earth are women going to get better and compete at a higher level if we're not going to give them any money?”