National Post (National Edition)
WHAT BRITISH COLUMBIA NEEDS IS A HIGH-HEEL TAX.
The British Columbia general election is less than a month away. Big issues are on the table, but all parties have coalesced around a scientific and political consensus in full support of a bill banning highheels requirements in workplace dress codes.
It was an easy policy victory for Andrew Weaver, leader of B.C.’s Green party. The international climatemodelling expert and carbon-control crusader introduced a private member’s bill on International Women’s Day last month to amend the province’s workers compensation law to keep high heels low.
Weaver’s proposed amendment would “ensure that employers do not set varying footwear requirements for their employees based on gender, gender expression or gender identity. Consequently, this act would make employers unable to require select employees to wear high heels and instead give them the option of wearing other types of appropriate footwear.”
Liberal Premier Christy Clark agreed with the Weaver initiative. “In some workplaces in our province, women are required to wear high heels on the job…Our government thinks this is wrong.”
As with climate change, regulatory intervention will be necessary. How high is too high? It’s a question that applies to high heels as well as global temperatures. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says a temperature increase of between two and four degrees Celsius is bad for the health the planet.
For high heels, there is unfortunately no international standard, but Ontario’s human rights commission established in a report last month that “if there is a heel it may be no more than 2.5 inches.” British Columbia, home of Canada’s first carbon tax, has already assigned one of its agencies, WorkSafeBC, to come up with heel-height regulation, expected before the end of the month.
The science behind these measures is a little uncertain. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on High Heels (IPHH) has yet to issue its first report, although there is a consensus that high-heeled footwear is a sexualized and genderbased form of dress that is unsafe, unhealthy and unacceptable. As Weaver put it, with unimpeachable logic, if every single employee of a restaurant had to wear high heel shoes “then every man would have to wear high heel shoes. And I suspect there would be some protestations there.”
Good point. Although I would not be surprised if a few of the racier hot spots around Vancouver require some of their male staff to wear heels that exceeded the 2.5-inch cut off. Also, some restaurant and night club employees might resist the high-heels ban. Earlier this week I spoke with Fifi Déshabiller who works at an establishment in downtown Vancouver. Déshabiller, an expert in the legal aspects of full disclosure and total transparency, said she was appalled at the idea of not being able to work in high heels. “I will look ridiculous,” she said. And what could be next on the list of taboo items one can and cannot be required to wear — or not wear — while on the job?
But a consensus exists, and not just the 97 per cent consensus claimed for climate change science. “This is an immediate health and safety risk,” Weaver told The Tyee online news outlet. “I’ve got 100 per cent positive feedback on this.”
Since nobody forces anyone to work at any particular restaurant, this seems like an issue that could be worked out between owners and individual employees without the intervention of government regulation. Don’t like high heels? Don’t work at places that require them. That’s apparently too much free-market thinking for one of Canada’s political party leaders.
Have women been forced to wear high heels over the past decades? Retailers seem to be selling lots of them, some higher than a toddler, to consumers who freely buy them. Both men and women seem to find them attractive and sexy rather than genderoppressive. The Bay — to pick one example — has dozens of models in its spring collection.
Maybe what B.C. needs is a high-heel tax similar to its world-famous carbon tax. A five-dollar tax could be collected by the province on each pair of heels sold with a height of more than, say, three inches, escalating to $10 for the six-inch versions. The money collected would go into a High Heel Mitigation and Adaptation Fund to compensate women who suffer from health effects or harassment in the bars and restaurants were they work.
On the other hand, women could just be left to make up their own minds about where they want to work.
THE PROVINCE COULD COLLECT $5 ON EACH PAIR SOLD AT MORE THAN 3 INCHES.