Fall 2021: What the Women’s Council is watching for in the coming months

In the fall in New Brunswick, we would typically see a speech from the throne open a new session in the legislative assembly. This year, the speech from the throne was abruptly cancelled and the legislative assembly simply resumed the session that adjourned in June. Throne speech or not, here’s a round up of what we’ll be watching for in the legislative assembly and from the Government of New Brunswick in the coming months.

Negotiations with CUPE

Is the strike, and the stalled negotiations that preceded it, a women’s equality issue? Undeniably.

The workers on strike belong to CUPE NB locals — this means that they’re all public sector employees. While we don’t have gender-disaggregated data on the CUPE locals that are striking, we do know that women make up the majority of public sector workers. GNB’s most recent workforce profile, covering 2020 and only speaking to Parts I, II, and III of the public service, reports that 73 per cent of public service workers are female. More specifically, 51 per cent of Part I workers are female; 75 per cent of Part II workers are female; and 84 per cent of Part III workers are female.[1]

It’s critical to keep this in mind when government says that public sector wages are too high based on comparisons with the private sector. Here’s why, courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA):

The concerns expressed over public sector wages stem from the position that no one should be paid more simply because they are in the public sector. But are they? No. Salaries are higher in the public sector precisely for those groups of people who experience the greatest discrimination in the private sector — because the public sector goes further in correcting those discriminatory practices.

This work was published in 2014 and based on 2011 data, but progress on wage gaps is slow so these findings are still all too relevant today. In their analysis, the CCPA looked at wages for full-time workers in the public and private sector and found “significant gaps in the wages of women, aboriginal workers and visible minority workers. Those gaps are bigger in the private sector in every instance.”

What did the CCPA attribute this to? “There are several factors that appear to contribute to the lower levels of wage discrimination in the public sector. Unionization and access to collective bargaining is strongly correlated with a reduction in wage inequality.” The CCPA concluded that “The result is not higher wages but rather a more equal system of pay.”

Co-creation

We hope to see government use co-creation in much of its upcoming work. Co-creation means involving the people and communities who are impacted by the situation in the process of identifying the problem, designing the services that will address it, and establishing how the services will be evaluated. You can read more about it — and why it often doesn’t happen — here.

We must note that earlier this year government used the language of co-creation in relation to First Nation communities in New Brunswick while approaching the proposed work in ways that do not align with co-creation. Co-creation is not simply new language to apply to existing dominant ways of working to make them sound more inclusive and equitable. It is a specific approach that is rooted in sharing power and requires those in decision-making positions to adopt a stance of cultural humility.

This is particularly important given the amount of work that the legislative assembly and government has on the horizon that is focused on individuals and communities who have been marginalized, underserved, or harmed by government or society more broadly. This includes the work of the Commissioner on systemic racism, the research project on systemic (anti-) Black racism, the development of an Accessibility Act, social assistance reform, information gathering on Indian Day Schools in the province, the development a three year action plan on campus sexual violence, and the development of the next iteration of the province’s plan to prevent and respond to violence against Indigenous women and girls. This work will require government to consider and plan for trauma-informed approaches, research ethics, and fair compensation for research participants and contributors (when research ethics allow it) on such pieces of work.

Respectful working relationships with First Nations, First Nation communities, and Indigenous persons

Reconciliation is essential to the equality of Indigenous women and Indigenous women’s equality is foundational to the equality of all women. There can be no equality for women in New Brunswick without reconciliation.

We hope to see government prioritize establishing a respectful working relationship centred on reconciliation with First Nations, First Nation communities, and Indigenous persons in New Brunswick. We’ve offered recommendations on this, including committing to an exploration of the land back movement.

You can find information on what Indigenous women told the Women’s Council about their experiences and priority issues via our Resonate initiative here. We also want to make sure you know about two particular organizations: Indigenous Women of the Wabanaki Territories and the Wabanaki Two-Spirt Alliance.

Results of the health review

GNB should be unveiling its five-year health plan soon. You can read the Women’s Council’s full submission to the health review government led in the spring here, but our premise is this: if New Brunswick’s next health plan is going to be effective, it must be equitable for women. The plan must take women’s distinct needs and experiences into account and respond to them — if it doesn’t, we’re setting it up to fail our province, plain and simple. Some of our high-level recommendations to government are:

• to support health care, support women as workers;
• treat care work as the critical infrastructure that it is; and
• do not rely primarily on strategies that are focused on individual lifestyle changes to improve the health and wellness of New Brunswickers — address oppressions that negatively impact people’s health, including gender-based inequality, racism, poverty, and ableism.

Our submission also provides an overview of women’s experiences of health care in New Brunswick; concrete recommendations on specific health care issues; and information on critical concepts for health care policy, program design, and delivery like intersectionality and trans inclusion.

Measures to increase the number of women running provincially

In June, the legislative assembly’s Standing Committee on Procedure, Privileges and Legislative Officers tabled a report in response to a motion calling for the committee to “undertake a review of initiatives that will encourage more women to offer as candidates to represent New Brunswickers in the New Brunswick Legislative Assembly” (you can see our contribution to that review, which focused not only on increasing the number of women running but also the diversity of women candidates, here at the 6:12:00 mark and a follow-up written submission here). We’re eager to see what the legislative assembly does with the recommendations in the report.

Agreement with the feds on early learning and child care

Only New Brunswick, Ontario, Alberta, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut have yet to sign bilateral agreements with the federal government under the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care Plan . New Brunswick needs to reach an agreement that supports accesses to affordable, high quality early learning and child care. This agreement must address the low wages of ELCC workers and shift New Brunswick toward a not-for-profit sector.

Public disclosures on the use of gender-based analysis

Gender-based analysis (GBA) is a tool used to assess how specific populations may experience policies, programs, and initiatives differently than others. GBA goes beyond sex and gender to consider intersecting factors that shape individuals’ experiences, including age, location, race, culture, disability, and language. It is an essential part of effective and evidence-based public policy.

The Women’s Council has consistently reiterated the importance of rigorous GBA to government and recommended that as a matter of transparency and accountability government should publicly share more information on its use of GBA as well as information generated by GBA processes.

Earlier this year, government made strides in this area by publishing a Gender Impact Statement (GIS) as part of the budget. The 2021 GIS did a number of things well in terms of providing public education, increasing transparency, and affirming the importance of GBA in decision-making. The GIS was not as strong in its account of how GBA informed and shaped budget decisions and priorities; it provided high level process information and highlights from a final product without accounting for how government arrived there.

Our recommendation on GBA has always boiled down to show us your work. We’ve advised government to iterate the GIS format to speak more robustly to the use of GBA in the budget process and how GBA contributed to budget decision-making. We’ve also asked that government provide a robust public account of how gender-based analysis shaped the upcoming health plan.

Want more issue analysis, advice, and recommendations? Check out our Issues Brief and our critical questions on COVID-19 (you can also see a full list of past briefs and submissions to government here). We’ve also created a library of online content on the COVID-19 pandemic that considers marginalized populations, the not-for profit sector, or uses a social justice lens.

[1] Check out pages 2–3 of this document for an explanation of why it’s problematic to conflate sex and gender and why the Women’s Council treats data about female persons as data that can be interpreted as being about women.