A Feminist Economic Recovery Plan for Canada
The COVID-19 pandemic has had enormous impact in Canada and around the world. Globally, over a million people have tragically lost their lives to the illness. The pandemic has also had powerful economic consequences and securing the future of Canada’s economy is now top of mind for Canadian residents — whether they have lost their job, shuttered their business or are serving as frontline workers in essential services.
2020 marked the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the most comprehensive set of globally agreed-upon recommendations to advance gender equality. What might have been the moment to reflect on how far we have come as an international community may be seen as the year that the gains to advance gender equality over the last few decades unravelled. Without attention to inequity in post-pandemic recovery, a potential decline in our achievements is a real threat, given the gendered economic, health and social impacts of the pandemic across all aspects of society.
A paradigm shift is afoot. A broader range of people across Canada are now seeing the importance of feminized and racialized labour for our health and well-being — where women, especially women of colour and recent immigrants, are leading the response to a major health crisis and preventing further economic and social fallout. However, there was much that was not working before COVID-19. It took a pandemic for the country to see what was already broken. We cannot ignore the historical context that has created the unstable foundation for the harms we are seeing play out in this current crisis.
In the past few decades, Canada has made major strides towards a more gender-inclusive workforce — with cis women, trans women, non-binary, Two-spirit and gender-diverse people gaining greater access to employment and advancement. But systemic barriers still exist — and the first phase of the pandemic’s economic downturn has shown that gender inequities are influencing who is bearing the brunt of the pandemic’s effects.
What lies before us is an opportunity to reimagine our future — a future that disrupts the thinking about who counts in our economy. The pandemic has revealed who is truly essential and the degree to which the caring economy — both paid and unpaid — underpins our entire economic system. After all, our Canadian public healthcare system materialized from the Great Depression and World Wars. Advocates for human rights and social justice recognized, as did the broader public, that building a strong safety net protects us all.
As Canada rebuilds, we can realign the economy around equity for all Canadians. The proposals in our report — “A Feminist Economic Recovery Plan for Canada: Making the Economy Work for Everyone” — offer an intersectional perspective on how we can recover from this crisis and weather difficult times