Step up with a ban

British Columbia’s female-led Liberal government has rightly gone where Ontario’s Wynne government, for puzzling reasons, fears to tread.

Premier Christy Clark’s government banned mandatory high heels in the workplace last week with a simple amendment to the Workers’ Compensation Act. It now says employers cannot force workers to wear footwear with a design, construction or material that inhibits the worker’s ability to safely perform a job.

This doesn’t mean women can’t choose to wear high heels to work. It just means companies can’t make it a requirement of employment.

That’s a good step forward. Simply paying lip service to the issue, as Ontario’s lawmakers have done in the past year, has not worked.

On International Women’s Day in March 2016, for example, the Ontario Human Rights Commission published a report criticizing restaurants that require female servers to wear high heels or impose other sexualized dress codes.

What happened? Not much, despite the endorsement of the government. One year later, the commission felt compelled to issue yet another report on the issue.

Did even that spur the government to action? No. Women’s Issues Minister Indira Naidoo-Harris simply stated the obvious. “Places of work should not be demanding that women wear something they’re not comfortable wearing.”

And where was the opposition? Sadly, Progressive Conservative MPP Laurie Scott went so far as to pooh-pooh the very notion of legislation around the issue, saying education was enough.

Wrong. As Robyn Durling of the B.C. Human Rights Clinic noted, the regulatory changes Clark made there reinforce the human rights code. In other words, they give it teeth.

That’s something lacking in Ontario, where too many employers are ignoring the intent of the human rights code, forcing women to wear back-breaking heels or other sexualized garments to keep their jobs. The Wynne government should stop that in its tracks.