Unsurprisingly, we didn’t get a gold star. Our missing and murdered Aboriginal women and the sex discrimination of the Indian Act were a couple of issues rightly brought to a global stage. As was Canada’s refusal to respect the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which mentions the rights of women and children throughout. The federal government apparently sees the international declaration as a suggestion, even though it is now legally binding. Either way, it does not adhere to its message, which can be summarized in its Article 43: “The rights recognized herein constitute the minimum standards for the survival, dignity and well-being of the indigenous peoples of the world.”

Dr. Pamela D. Palmater wrote about the review, on the subject of Indian Act sex discrimination, and included her recommendations as a Mi’kmaw lawyer and a member of the Eel River Bar First Nation in New Brunswick, in an article for Rabble:

“Indigenous women and their descendants are already impoverished and without Indian status, miss out on health benefits, post-secondary education, and other social programs critical to their health, safety, and well-being; which we already know makes them vulnerable to violence”

She adds: “Canada also stated that they have a ‘Special Rapporteur’ that is currently ‘consulting’ with First Nations on how to clean up the Indian Act discrimination. This is simply not true—and if it has done so, they have not informed anyone.” The Indian Act is how Canada determines who is and is not a “Status Indian.” Status is determined by equations, and a woman is not looked at as an individual, but as her connection to the status of her father or husband. If these standards continue, many worry—rightly—that it can result in a bureaucratic genocide of sorts.

All countries that have signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights are reviewed. The committee’s report on Canada is due by the end of the month.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her second year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

Theoretically, the treaty will stop the free-flow of weapons to human rights abusers, with hopes of reducing the number of people (about 2,000) who die every day from arms violence.

Photo: facebook.com/ControlArms

The ATT is a huge victory for human rights groups Oxfam and Amnesty International, which, for the past two decades, have been lobbying for arms regulation. Desperately, they’ve been feeding us stats such as, “every year, we produce two bullets for every person on the planet”, and “bananas and MP3s are more tightly regulated by international laws than weapons”.

The push for regulation really gained momentum in 2003 when a group of Nobel Peace Laureates backed the effort.

So when 154 of 193 UN states voted yes for the treaty, benevolent leaders and humanitarians everywhere rejoiced. Amnesty tweeted (after a series of anticipatory updates): “We did it! 20 years of work for the Global #ArmsTready pays off.”

Well, not yet, it hasn’t.

For sure regulating the deadliest business in the world is a good thing, but first, a few factors have to line up.

Before the treaty is even ratified, 50 countries have to pass legislation in their own states agreeing to play by the rules.

The other problem, as you may have guessed, is that some of the top weapons exporters aren’t interested in regulating the trade. China and Russia, both among the “big six” arms exporters, didn’t show up to vote. We can bet neither will adopt the treaty, which is bad news, seeing as both are big dealers to the bloodiest conflicts in recent history. Russia, for example, is the top supplier to Syria, where anywhere from 62,000 to 120,000 have been killed in conflict since March 2011.

The idea, though, is that the arms trade treaty would prevent future disasters like Syria. That is, if all goes as planned.

At this point, exactly how the UN will keep weapons away from corruption is vague. The rules state that governments can’t ship arms if there’s a “substantial risk” of human rights violations or if shipment would provoke instability, hamper development, or support organized crime or terrorism. Governments will report details of their weapons trading to an “implementation support unit”—a watchdog of sorts—meant to keep governments in check via … penalties? fines? The enforcement method is yet (if ever) to be defined.

Although I’m not as optimistic as many treaty advocates, I won’t say the ATT is completely useless—it’s not. By documenting how governments trade arms—to whom and how many—we can red flag weapons that make their way to war lords. It creates boundaries between the black market and legitimate trading, which is essential for catching illicit dealers.

Sure the treaty is riddled with loopholes, but it sets international standards. Violating the standards could shame a country, hurt their reputation, and ostracize them from the global community. Is the treaty enough to stop genocide and instability? No. But it’s more than we’ve ever had.

But happiness day wasn’t just about getting your grin on. The idea is to recognize happiness and well-being as valuable measures of growth.

Most of the world measures growth and development through gross domestic product, where increase in GDP means progress. The problem is a lot of terrible things inflate GDP. Like oil spills and wars.

As the prime minister of Bhutan, Jigme Thinley, said:

Economic growth is mistakenly seen as synonymous with well-being. The faster we cut down forests and haul in fish stocks to extinction, the more GDP grows. Even crime, war, sickness and natural disasters make GDP grow, simply because these ills cause money to be spent … We need to rethink our entire growth-based economy so that we can thrive more effectively on our own resources in harmony with nature. We do not need to accept as inevitable a world of impending climate chaos and financial collapse.

In Bhutan, a small country on the southern slopes of the Himalayas, happiness defines progress. It’s the only country where gross national happiness (GNH) replaces GDP. Bhutan’s happiness index measures factors such as cultural preservation, environmental quality, physical and psychological health, and good governance. These values are entrenched in the country’s policies with mandates that require the country to be carbon neutral and leave 60 percent of the land covered in forest. School enrollment for Bhutanese children is 100 percent, and export logging is banned.

The idea is to reduce needs to match the available resources; to strive for happiness rather than material gains. But when you’re constantly trying to maximize your resources—a la Western capitalism—your needs (or wants) increase in parallel. To fulfill our insatiable neediness, we increase our goods and services. This is what we call “growing the economy”.

For years, renegade economists have challenged this type of progress. Jeff Rubin, among others, predicted an “end of growth” economy and called for a “holistic” economic approach that factors in well-being. These economists were mostly ignored until the stock markets crashed and natural disasters became a first world problem. Clearly we’re doing something wrong.

So last April, the UN discussed “new economic paradigm” inspired by Bhutan’s gross national happiness initiative. Three months later, the UN declared March 20 International Day of Happiness, recognizing the importance of well-being in public policy.

The trouble is: how do we measure happiness? Subjective happiness is easy. Just measure someone’s general life satisfaction through surveys and questionnaires. The trickier measure, objective happiness, looks at more universal ideals presumably linked to well-being, like health levels, crime rates, literacy and life expectancy.

There’s no consensus on how policy-makers can apply well-being scores to economics or even how being happier can help the economy. The good news is people are talking about it—reminding each other that happiness is really the only important thing in life. And not just happiness for ourselves but for other people and future generations.

Interior of one of the Habitat ’76 hangars. Image courtesy Lindsay Brown.

Walk around Vancouver’s Jericho Beach in 2011 and you’ll see some odd architecture: an empty concrete wharf, a welded steel railing that overlooks English Bay, a strange rail embedded beneath the sailing club. These are all that is left of a complex of five gigantic aircraft hangars that was home to an international conference 35 years ago.

Lindsay Brown, a textile designer and board president of Vancouver’s Or Gallery, is working to unearth a forgotten piece of Vancouver’s history: Habitat ’76, a United Nations-sponsored conference that brought together figures like Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, and Mother Teresa, to discuss and explore human living conditions and social justice. She is gathering information towards publishing a book.

An adjunct to the UN Habitat Conference on Human Settlements, the Habitat Forum was infused with a distinctly mid-’70s brand of optimism and utopianism. The five huge seaplane hangars, left over from the 1930s, were converted into theatres, halls and restaurants for the thousands of people who attended. The theatre, styled to look like a First Nations longhouse, had a Bill Reid mural.

Brown, a thirteen-year-old girl at the time, visited the Habitat forum and calls it a life-changing experience. “It had a kind of a carnival atmosphere. It had a less controlled atmosphere than the city generally had. People call it ‘No Fun City’ now. When you’re thirteen, you don’t exactly know what’s going on, but it had that feeling of ideas and experimentation as well as fun. It was so beautiful.”

Exterior of one of the Habitat ’76 hangars. Image courtesy Lindsay Brown.

She was impressed with the ferment of artistic and political ideas and creativity at Habitat, in contrast to the staid conservatism she experienced in the rest of the city. “You did get the sense you were in a global event rather than the sort of parochial Vancouver I’d been used to.”

Years later, Brown never forgot about Habitat. She would Google it now and then, but was often frustrated that little or nothing turned up. Habitat seemed to have been forgotten. In 2009, she decided that if nobody else would write a book about it, she would.

Brown managed to track down Al Clapp, Habitat’s organizer and a prominent broadcaster. ““I said, ‘Hi, I’m a child of Habitat. I want to write about it. Can we talk?’ He said, ‘Sure. I’m in Victoria. Come on over.’” Brown visited Clapp, who loaned her his archive of photos and other material. “That’s when I knew there was a book in it.”

Brown says that, unlike Expo ’86, Habitat ’76 was deliberately buried by Vancouver’s city government. “It’s very hard to keep a history alive when you have absolutely zero public, official recognition of it. I think it was deliberately suppressed.” The aircraft hangars were demolished and the 35th anniversary came and went with little fanfare.

More than just nostalgia, Brown believes that Habitat’s ideals are increasingly relevant today with the renewed focus on urban planning. “One of the interesting things about Habitat is that it thought about those things, what is actually livable at a human level? What should neighbourhoods and cities be like?”

Illustration by Matt Daley.

In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, the Canadian government commissioned the departments of Foreign Affairs and National Defence to investigate the feasibility of a United Nations rapid-response service. The research was co-directed by Peter Langille, an academic and defence analyst known as a critic of NATO’s military doctrine, a key figure in the development of the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, and a national expert on UN peace operations. Langille and his team realized early on that such a service was both possible and necessary, as events in Rwanda and Srebrenica had already grimly proved, but would require three things: a compelling concept; a broad base of national and global support; and the strength to withstand the inevitable opposition.

The United Nations Emergency Peace Service, as the initiative came to be called, is imagined as the UN’s answer to 911: a permanent first responder, capable of deployment within 24 hours of authorization from the UN Security Council. Langille, whose slow, deliberate speech suggests years of explaining concepts that people don’t or won’t understand, stressed that UNEPS would be a service, not an armed force, meant to complement existing national and UN arrangements. “It would draw on the best and brightest of individuals who volunteer for a dedicated UN service—military, police, and civilians who are well-prepared, highly trained, and likely more sophisticated [than national armed forces] in addressing a wide array of emergencies,” he says.

It’s designed for five key functions: to stop genocide, prevent armed conflict, protect civilians, address human needs, and launch—quickly—the complex and long-term peacekeeping operations of the UN. The Canadian study, which concluded in 1995, “did attract 26 member states into a group known as the Friends of Rapid Deployment,” Langille says, “but it became clear that it was running into a lot of powerful political opposition.”

Despite strong endorsements from a number of high-ranking UN officials, politicians, and prominent peace researchers, UNEPS has yet to get off the ground. “We haven’t attracted the broader organizational support required, the funding necessary, the backing of key member states,” explains Langille. Apparently, there are threats implied in anti-militarist global cooperation. “Some see this as a harbinger of world governments, or a stronger UN that might actually work. Some don’t favour that system.” This is unfortunate, because UNEPS proponents see it as the best means of preventing another Rwanda. Off the top of his head, Langille lists other recent crises where UNEPS could have helped: East Timor, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Darfur, Ivory Coast, Haiti. “It’s not hard to go on,” he says.

When Langille visited the UN in December, it was clear to him that interest in UNEPS was up. There’s a new emphasis in global politics on protecting civilians from war, he says, and more and more groups are calling for the creation of a UN standing force to deal with humanitarian crises. Still, the need for advocacy remains; the general public must be made to understand that an alternative to current defence arrangements exists, that it’s been derived from the experience of UN officials and various defence establishments, and that it addresses, sustainably, the urgent requirements of collective global security.

The Canadian chapter of World Federalist Movement is at the forefront of national efforts to promote UNEPS, actively advocating for its creation in an effort to swing public policy. I ask Langille if there’s something we can do to help them. “Yeah,” he says, without hesitation. “Send money.”

It was comforting, at the end of our conversation, to know that some answers remain so simple.

— Katie Addleman

The following are the countries that supported the amendment (79): Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belize, Benin, Botswana, Brunei Dar-Sala, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, China, Comoros, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United Republic of Tanzania, Uzbekistan, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

The countries that abstained (17): Antigua-Barbuda, Barbados, Belarus, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Colombia, Fiji, Mauritius, Mongolia, Papau New Guinea, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, Vanuatu.

The countries that were absent (26): Albania, Bolivia, Central African Republic, Chad, Dominica, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Honduras, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Marshall Island, Mauritania, Nauru, Nicaragua, Palau, Sao Tome Principe, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, Togo, Tonga, Turkey, Turkmenistan.

Before yesterday’s vote by the General Assembly of the United Nations, the message from Canadian government officials was one of cautious optimism. There might be tense moments and flustered diplomats, but Canada had not lost a vote for a Security Council seat in 60 years.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper made two big speeches to the UN at the end of September, and Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon sacrificed his Thanksgiving weekend to stay in New York and bat his eyelashes at other delegates. Besides, we were competing against Germany and Portugal for the two spots available for our region, and, with France and the UK already holding permanent seats on the Security Council, no way the international community would give Europe two more seats. Right?

But it did. Very embarrassing. Our government’s first response, naturally, was to blame Michael Ignatieff. He’d said some mean things about how we maybe didn’t deserve to sit on the Security Council. The other countries must have seen our lack of unity and lost faith in us. Perhaps. Except that CBC’s The National reported last night that most of the foreign delegates it spoke to at the conference didn’t know who Ignatieff was.

There are, of course, many possible explanations. Perhaps the General Assembly remembered that, before this recent show of affection, the PM’s last significant appearance at the UN had been a courtesy call after he was elected in 2006. Perhaps some representatives from Africa were concerned that last year Canada cut eight African countries from its list of priority aid recipients. Perhaps yesterday’s announcement of efforts to strengthen trade with Israel reminded other countries of our no-questions-asked friendship with the right wing of Israeli politics. Perhaps it was the ongoing skirmish with the United Arab Emirates over our unwillingness to exchange extra airline routes for an almost-secret military base.

Or maybe we failed to adequately counter-act the “rotten lying bastards” phenomenon, in which up to a third of the countries which promise to vote for you are really just too shy to say ‘no.’ In the frustratingly polite world of international diplomatic disagreements, all we can be sure of is that we’re not as popular as we thought we were.

Millions around the world live without access to clean drinking water that plays a role in a host of easily preventable diseases. Photo courtesy: from a second story)Mike Bailey-Gates, FlickCreativeCommons.

UPDATE: Wednesday, July 28, 12:14 — The Council of Canadians reports that the United Nations general assembly has voted in favour of the resolution to recognize water and sanitation as basic human rights. The still-unofficial vote count was 124 votes in favour, zero votes against, and 42 abstentions. We’ll update with the official vote when it’s known. It is our presumption, and not reported fact, that Canada abstained, given its obstructionism on this issue to this point; but we’re willing (and hoping!) to be surprised. We will update with further details when we know officially.

UPDATE: 12:32 — Council of Canadians updated their report (viewable here) confirming that Canada did abstain on the vote.

Human rights: what are they? It should be a relatively straightforward question, but posed to any group of people, it’s bound to elicit a huge range of responses. To date the most successful attempt to articulate a workable standard is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on December 10, 1948, by the United Nations and its constituent countries.

The document consists of 30 articles outlining our most basic and universal human rights, from all individuals’ inherent equality before the law (article 1) to the right to education (article 26) to the right to seek asylum from persecution (article 14).  Despite having the distinction of being the most widely translated document in the world—available in over 375 languages and dialects—it is only part of an ongoing struggle to entrench dignity as the cornerstone for all human interactions. Even a casual perusal of the days headlines reveals that this struggle is far from realized.

Today, the United Nations General Assembly will consider adding a 31st article to the Declaration: the human right to “available, safe, acceptable, accessible, and affordable water and sanitation.”  The political and environmental landscape of our day is far different then the postwar horror that birthed the original human rights declaration in 1948. Few then predicted a future when water would become a contested issue. But access to water now presents us with the most pressing human rights concern.

Article 25 of the Declaration reads:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

All human rights are interrelated, interdependent and indivisible; in this regard, guaranteeing a standard of living and health based on the availability of food, clothing, housing and medical care while making no provision for water calls into question the entire project.  What level of well-being can possibly be achieved when 884 million people in the world do not have access to safe water; what standard of living is provided for when 2.6 billion people in the world do not have access to basic sanitation; and what principle are we using to measure health when 1.4 million children die every year from preventable diarrhea caused by contaminated water and poor sanitation.

When we consider the tragic realities of those 3 billion people who do not have access to running water within a kilometre of their homes, the obvious oversight of water rights becomes startlingly clear; its absence is glaring.

Today’s UN vote is the culmination of several years of lobbying by international and community groups advocating for water justice.  These groups demand that the right to water, like the right to food and shelter, be protected by a binding UN convention guaranteeing that no individual can be denied water because of an inability to pay.

And yet, despite the obvious gravity of the situation, a small bloc of nations—with Canada (surprise, surprise) at the helm—have worked to curb even the most modest recognition of the right to water while they have worked behind the scene to quash any UN proposal. At the World Water Forum at the Hague in 2000, in Kyoto in 2003 and in Mexico City in 2006, Canada refused to recognize water as a human right.  Canada was the only country to vote against a 2002 UN resolution on the human right to water (baldly stating: “Canada does not accept that there is a right to drinking water and sanitation.”) and again in 2008, Canada played a pivotal role blocking the motion by Spain and Germany to officially recognize water as a human right at the UN Human Rights Council.

Our government (under both Liberal and Conservative leaderships) has offered little in the way of explanation for their stance on water rights.  Those opposing the concept would have us believe that, if passed, it would see Canadian lakes drained and Canadian water shipped off to hotel fountains and golf courses in water-parched Las Vegas and other U.S. states.

This is simply not the case, and our government—and anyone familiar with UN rights conventions—knows it.  Rights conventions oblige each country to uphold and enshrine the right within their borders and for their population and to report these steps to the UN (Canada, for example, despite having signed the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is under no obligation to provide Americans with the right to own property or the right to peacefully assemble. We would likewise be under no obligation to provide Americans with the right to water).

The reality is that NAFTA and the proposed EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement threaten Canadian water far more then the recognition (I’d say elevation but let’s be honest: for the majority of the world, the right to water is a no-brainer; it’s just us in Canada that are the holdouts) of water as an inalienable right. While NAFTA and the EU-Canada CETA provide windows for far greater privatization of our water, enshrining water as a human right would serve to temper corporate hegemonic control of our most basic necessity. And it would transform water from a resource to be exploited for profit, to a human right to be safeguarded for the public good. It would also provide legal recourse against those who would pollute our waters—tar sands, I’m looking at you. You can’t, after all, turn massive amounts of a human right into toxic tailing ponds that pollute groundwater and the Athabasca River.

Canada’s backward stance on water rights around the globe should, unfortunately, surprise no one; we have only to look in our own backyard and the availability of clean water in many indigenous communities across the country to see how little our government—the current Conservatives as well as the Liberals before them—values water access. The Ontario community of Kaschechewan gained national attention in 2005 when 1,000 of its residents were forced to evacuate because of poor water quality and unsanitary conditions. Kaschechewan, while an extreme example, is the rule and not the exception: over 80 First Nations communities are currently under “boil water advisories” (meaning they can’t drink their tap water), and 21 communities are deemed to be at high risk for contamination.

The UN vote has the potential to be at once both historic and self-congratulatory: if it passes today, it will see water enshrined alongside food, shelter and safety as an undeniable basic human right.  But, as we have seen with other human rights, there is a huge gap between the words written in the convention and the actions of our government.  At the risk of repeating myself from earlier posts: we are no longer “Canada the good.” We do, however, have the opportunity to lead this time—by ensuring that the resolution will pass, and by acting quickly to realize its goals, both at home and abroad.

1. Create your own “pure” water by investing in an at-home water filtration system. Get a water-quality report from your municipality to see if there are any contaminants you need to be aware of (usually only an issue in rural settings) and to find out whether you need a point-of-entry unit that will filter all water before it’s distributed through your house, or a smaller unit that treats water once it’s out of the faucet.

2. Pick up a stainless-steel water bottle to carry that tap water in. With the safety of reusable plastic bottles in question for containing bisphenol A (BPA), a suspected hormone disruptor and carcinogen, it’s time to ditch that “indestructible” Nalgene bottle in favour of a shiny, metal version. Bring it everywhere.

3. Pass on overpriced bottled water when you’re out to eat and request a glass of free ice water instead. No need to be afraid: Canadian tap water is more rigorously screened than the bottled stuff.

4. Lobby to make tap water more convenient. Contact your city council and ask to have more drinking fountains and water spigots installed around town.

5. Create a bottled-water-free bubble at your school or office. On World Water Day in March, 2008, the Polaris Institute launched a campaign to discourage bottled water use on Canadian campuses in an attempt to reject the commodification of one of the world’s most precious resources. Visit PolarisInstitute.org for more details and talk to your powers above to create your own tap-water-only zone.

6. Donate your autograph to the cause. Head over to Article31.org and sign a petition asking the United Nations to declare access to potable water a human right.

7. Do the math. A litre of tap water in most Canadian municipalities costs less than a tenth of a cent, whereas a litre of bottled water can cost $1 or more. The switch should be a no-brainer.

British Columbia’s adherence to the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has been recently assessed by the West Coast Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) with disturbing results. West Coast LEAF’s first annual Report Card has assigned the B.C. government a grade of “D” when it comes to women’s equality.

Canada ratified the UN CEDAW in 1981. The Convention contains various measures that call for the end of systemic and direct discrimination against women in the legal, occupational and judicial realms and require the protection of women’s rights by public and legal institutions.

To ensure that Canada, and all other signed parties, comply to the Convention, a national report documenting progress must be submitted every four years. Between the four-year CEDAW reporting periods, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), such as West Coast LEAF, can produce shadow reports that monitor provincial compliance to UN CEDAW obligations that fall within provincial jurisdiction.

In all areas assessed by West Coast LEAF, BC’s performance is abominable. When it comes to social assistance, protection against violence, access to childcare, housing and legal support, and the treatment of Indigenous women, the B.C. government still has many obligations to fulfill.

For example, the Report Card notes that the prevalence of unaffordable housing in areas like Vancouver, exacerbated by the upcoming 2010 Olympics, have left women of colour, Indigenous women, new immigrant women and impoverished women particularly vulnerable. Furthermore, according to the Report Card, there “has been little progress on improving social assistance for women since the last CEDAW Committee review in 2008. In fact, B.C. continues to have the highest overall poverty rate in the country at 21%, which includes disproportionately high numbers of women, children and Aboriginal people. With the economic crisis resulting in 47% more recipients of social assistance between September 2008 and May 2009, the government needs to work harder on ensuring equal access to sufficient social assistance for women and marginalized people.”

The West Coast LEAF Report Card examines a total of seven key areas, identifying problems and offering solutions to them. Essentially it calls for a much greater commitment by the B.C. government to uphold international obligations on women’s rights and to stop the feminization of poverty and systemic discrimination against women that are perpetuated by the lack of affordable childcare, housing, and legal aid services, access to social assistance, and protection against violence.

Overview:

1) Women & Social Assistance — Grade: D
2) Missing & Murdered Aboriginal Women and Girls – Grade: F
3) Violence Against Women and Girls – Grade: C
4) Women and Girls in Prison – Grade C
5) Access to Childcare – Grade D
6) Women & Housing – Grade D
7) Women & Access to Justice – Grade D

It becomes apparent that although British Columbia is touted to be “The Best Place on Earth” all the pristine wilderness can’t make up for one fact: BC is not the best place on earth if you’re a woman, especially an impoverished, Aboriginal, recent immigrant, or nonwhite woman.