"Jobs and Justice! Bread, but Roses too!"
Women's march against poverty
A cross-country caravan drew women from across Canada to a spirited demonstration on Ottawa's Parliament Hill on June 15th. Inspired by the highly successful June 1995 women's march on Quebec city, the march was organised on a shoestring budget, and with only a few months of organising time. By Mark Johnson The caravan was launched in Vancouver, on Canada's pacific coast, and St. John's, Newfoundland and St Johns New Brunswick in the Atlantic far east. According to Edmonton march organiser Giselle Renault, "the final march in Ottawa was ten blocks long (estimated at 5-8,000 marchers). But this represented a small fraction of the tens of thousands of women, children and men who cam out in support of the march as it passed through cities and towns across the country"
Hundreds of thousands of Canadians were made aware of the demands of the 1996 woman's march against poverty. And important openings were made for future work around poverty, feminism, racism, and trade union activities. According to Laurie Siver of the New Socialist Group, "the women's call to action was a great show of solidarity that simultaneously made links between economic injustice and the multiple forms of women's oppression: race, class, sexuality, ability and so forth. Fighting for decent jobs and social programmes was clearly worth the struggle." Mixed judgement
Feminists are divided in their evaluation of the main march sponsors, the Women's Committee of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC). Irshad Manji of This Magazine, English Canada's largest radical monthly, defends the NAC against growing criticism from a sector of universitybased feminists who accuse it of extremism and intolerance. "More men than even have gotten involved with the NAC since Sunera Thobani [an immigrant woman]. became president. I don't think they would join an extremist, anti-male movement. "the NAC has [recently] sponsored Canada's first national conference challenging the Liberal government's social programme cuts. The fact that it was the first, and that it was national, is a sign of credibility, not extremism. And now there is a cross-country march, co-sponsored by the NAC, against poverty. The number one issue facing
Canadian families is unemployment, which often leads to poverty. This is hardly an issue that affects only immigrant, refugee and lesbian women."
Feminists from the revolutionary left see a different problem. For them, NAC, like the trade union bureaucracy, doesn't go far enough in its economic campaigns. "The CLC and NAC did little to link the [federal] Liberal government with the loss of federal transfer payments to provinces for social programmes, or with the provinces' current right-wing social and economic agendas," argue Julia Barnet and Lorrie Silver, in the September issue of Socialist Challenge magazine. "Neither body has pointed to the necessity to identity and act upon future strategies." Ontario, Canada's economic and political heartland, has seen an unprecedented rise in labour mobilisation and popular protest since the 1995 election of an unpopular provincial government led by "Progressive Conservative" Mike Harris. Together the women's movement and labour could build a movement that would bring has been happening in Ontario. The Ontario Federation of Labour has called several major days of action over the last nine months, winning support from a wide range of community organisations and local labour councils. Over 14,000 people braved sub-zero temperatures to march and picket in London, Ontario on December 11, 1995. By doing so they built a momentum which led to North America's largest ever pro-labour demonstration. Over 25,000 people struck and picketed in Hamilton, Ontario on Friday February 23, and the next day over 120,000 Canadians demonstrated against the Tory party convention, held at the Hamilton Convention Centre. Several days earlier, 67,000 public sector workers voted 2:l to strike for against cuts in service and working conditions. Several thousand members of the public sector union OPSEU attended a Toronto rally to mark International Women's Day. Subsequent days of action have been smaller than Hamilton, but they remain the largest mobilisations seen in those regions Ontario (Kitchener-Waterloo 45,000 on April 19, Peterborough 8,000 on June 24)
Unfortunately, the organisation of the Women's march against Poverty in Ontario and Canada's largest city, Toronto, suffered
Canada * the same bad organisation and bad leadership the Peterborough labour mobilisation. According to local government (CUPE) activist Julia Barnett. "local organisers in Toronto mirrored the provincial labour dispute, which split the focus of the day's events and showed its weakness in building a long term-fight-back on a provincial basis." Quebec
The women's march was one of very few popular mobilisations to occur more or less simultaneously in English Canada and Quebec, the French-speaking region conquered by Britain in 1759 and still discriminated against by the country's Anglo-Scottish bourgeoisie. Building on last years Bread and Roses march, the Quebec Federation of Women made connections with social movements to sponsor a vigil and rally in the provincial capital, Quebec City. Over 6,000 participants, of all ages, gathered at the Assemblée nationale (provincial parliament), and dumped bread crumbs at the doors of major banks and corporations. They demanded that the federal government and the local ruling Parti quebecois adopt policies to create jobs, and boost social spending. Participation this year was 30-40% lower than at the first march, which co-incided with a more militant climate linked to the October referendum on re-negotiation of Quebec's relationship with Canada. Nationalist leader Jacques Parizeau addressed the marchers, in the hope of co-opting their support for the referendum. "This year, the Parti Quebecois government is introducing cutbacks in social spending," notes march organiser Jacqueline Loiselle. "Parizeau had nothing to bring to the march. And people were less optimistic about making demands on the government."
In this context, Loiselle argues, the 1996 march was a real success. From her own region, Outaouais (in western Quebec, on the border with English-speaking Ontario, just across the river from the Canadian capital Ottawa), she estimates that two thirds of the women who filled the four buses for Quebec hadn't participated in last year's march.
Jaqueline Loiselle's union, the Public Sector Alliance of Canada (PSAC) provided funds to free her for workplace organising, which enabled her to involve more than 20 union members in the march, compared to
March 1997 #286 29
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* Canada only three last year. This is relatively common in the Quebec union movement, but it was probably the first time unionists in the capital region had been freed to work on an action that wasn't strictly union business.
Union officials are clearly keen to link up with community initiatives. But there were few trade union women at the march in Quebec City. The Confederation of National Trade Unions (CSN), Quebec's largest trade union federation outside the CLC, supported the march with money, but apparently they couldn't mobilise their members. Participants from Loiselle's hometown of Hull were "mainly from the women's movement; women who provide services to women in difficulty-battered women, for example. I think that was true for other regions."
The demands of the Quebec march were the same as in 1995, but with a greater emphasis on minimum wage, pay equity, and a halt to cuts in social assistance. Committees within the Quebec Federation of Women are currently discussing the form that this year's march will take. And an international women's march to New York in the year 2000. Unfortunately, Loiselle reports, while the trade unions are participating, delegates "don't take the demands back into the union membership. All they do is report back to the women's committees of the various unions. Uneasy sisterhood
There is an uneasy relationship between the women's movements in English Canada and in Quebec. This reflects the general pattern of (relatively mild) chauvinism on the English-speaking left. As Toronto activists Julia Barnet and Lorrie Silver explain, "little or no effort was made to work with Quebec women and their demands for self-determination, nor was there a concrete understanding of the frustrations they face within Quebec under the governing Parti Quebecois. Furthermore, there was no push to organise women in English Canada to participate in the Quebec rally and march. The English Canadian women's movement has effectively adopted a successful theme from their
Quebec sisters, but, it seems, without making the necessary links."
The final rally in Ottawa was "more or less" bilingual, though the day-to-day reality in the capital region is that there are two women's committees, one in Ottawa (Ontario) and one in Hull (Quebec). The one in Hull is French-speaking and the one in Ottawa is officially bilingual. But, according to Loiselle, "you have to speak English to be understood." As Loiselle explains, "we don't have the same way of looking at things or the same way of doing things. So there is some sand in the gears, even though there is a lot of good will on both sides." Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was hard to mobilise Quebec women for the Ottawa event, even in Hull, which is part of the same urban zone. "Even though Ottawa is so close, we had to work hard to mobilise because we really feel sometimes that Ottawa is in another country. Of the 200 Hull women who went to Quebec City (tour hours by bus only about 25 crossed the river to Ottawa."
Despite these shortcomings, which are hardly specific to the women's movement in the Canadian state, many local experiences were positive. In Edmonton, Alberta, the Women's Committee of the Alberta Federation of Labour and the AFL executive initiated an organising committee that attracted over 45 women. According to union activist Giselle Renault, these participants "represented various trade unions, women's groups, women of colour and religious organisations. But, most importantly, the meetings attracted the essential input of women who were living in poverty, and it was these women who were encouraged to take the lead, to demand justice, not charity, from our elected and supposedly accountable politicians.
*This was the first time such a diverse group of women came together. We mobilised over 2,000 people, and highlighted the plight of women in poverty. After the march had passed through, we agreed to continue to nurture the coalition whose seeds were planted this spring. The women's network will continue to confront the sterile deficit hysteria of the Liberal government and their provincial counterparts." The march generated very concrete demands for job creation and increased social spending. But, like any social movement "from below" it facilitated and encouraged reflection on the causes of poverty, and the long term solutions. Giselle Renault: "Beyond the immediate relief of poverty, we have the task of understanding the systematic corruption that is the basis of a society that favours corporate and banking interests over the interests of the very people who create the wealth. Do we rely want a society that panics when unemployment goes up, because the stock market's start speculating about wage inflation?
"Our governments are in a frantic race to the bottom, with lower wages and cuts in health, education and social programmes. With this goes a blame-the-victim mentality promoted by the politicians and the bosses. But a poorly educated, unhealthy and poverty-stricken population can hardly "compete in the global economy." A society that sees people as a liability and not an asset is politically and morally bankrupt.
"We must expose the corruption and propose positive alternatives. Coalitions that are rooted in concrete actions and demands for concrete positive changes are never out of fashion, regardless of the Right's dismissal of us as "special interest groups As if all their independent' research institutes, manutacturers associations and chambers of commerce were not "special interests". We must rely, not on money or police power, but on the strength of our numbers and our convictions. Never give up! Never give in!" * This article is compiled from articles in the September issue of Socialist Challenge and the July/August issue of This Magazine.
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