The Truth About Canada (47 page)

In 1987, 30 percent of those employed in managerial positions were women. By 2004, this was up to 37 percent.

In 2003, women working on a full-time, full-year basis had average earnings of $36,500, some 71 percent of what their male counterparts earned. The same year, 31 percent of unattached women aged 16 and
over lived on a low income, and 38 percent of all families headed by lone-parent mothers had incomes below the after-tax low income line. In a list of 21 OECD countries, in 2004 Canada had one of the largest gaps in women’s full-time earnings compared to men’s earnings. Only Switzerland, Germany, Japan, and Korea had larger gaps. Canada, at about 22 percent, had only a slightly larger earnings gap than the United States but was some 4 percent higher than the OECD average.
⁸

In 2003, 43 percent of all children in a low-income family were living with a lone female parent, whereas these families accounted for only 15 percent of all children aged 17 and under.
⁹

Also bad news is that women in Canada have only a very poor 15 percent of the senior executive positions in business, and, in 2006, only 13.5 percent of all directors on the boards of the 100 largest corporations in Canada were women. Almost forty percent of board directors in Norway are women. Meanwhile, despite the fact that increasingly women have become university presidents and deans of faculties across the country, and while in 2004/2005 about one-third of all university faculty were women, they made up only 19 percent of the full professors. Female full professors earned some $6,000 a year less than their male counterparts. Recent comments from Janice Drakich, director of faculty recruitment at the University of Windsor, described the situation as “systemic discrimination alive and well in the academy.”
¹⁰

In terms of self-employment rates, 20 OECD countries have a higher female rate than Canada’s 8.1 percent self-employed out of total female employment. This compares with the OECD average of 13.9 percent and the EU15 average of 10.8 percent. The U.S. rate is only 5.9 percent, the worst in the OECD.
¹¹
In 2006, there were 1.62 million men in Canada who were self-employed, compared to 877,000 self-employed women.

In 1982, some one in seven of the top 5 percent of income earners were women. By 2004, it was one in four.
¹²

Now let’s turn to Canada’s poor record on women in politics. As Rosemary Speirs, former national affairs columnist for the
Toronto Star
, writes, “Why is it that our city councils, provincial legislatures and even our House of Commons are dominated by a pinstriped sea of men — an
almost 80 percent male political majority? Or, in the four Atlantic provinces, an 85 percent male majority?”
¹³

Despite all the talk and all the years of promises, women are not making progress in the numbers of seats they hold in the House of Commons. In the federal elections of 2000, 2004, and 2006 an average of just under 21 percent of those elected were women. In 1993, the number of female candidates was actually higher than in the 2004 and 2006 elections. In the 2006 election, only a very poor 12 percent of Conservative candidates were women and only 26 percent of the Liberal candidates were women. The NDP had 35 percent female candidates. At this writing, in preparation for the next federal election, 42 percent of nominated NDP candidates are women and 35 percent of Liberal candidates, but only a tiny 14 percent of Conservative candidates are women.

In the 2006 federal election, in the 32 ridings in Atlantic Canada, the Liberals nominated only two women, the Conservatives only one, and only one woman was elected, Alexa McDonough of the NDP.

Fair Vote Canada compares the three remaining major democracies still using single member plurality, or first-past-the-post, electoral systems in 2006 in terms of the percentage of women in the lower or single houses:

In sharp contrast, here are the percentages of women in major Western democracies using various forms of proportional representation:

After the 2006 federal election, Canada ranked way down in 36th place among nations in its percentage of women MPs, and down in 17th place among the 30 OECD countries. Among the many countries with a higher percentage of women MPs are Rwanda, Mozambique, Portugal, Argentina, Lithuania, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, Belarus, Tunisia, Honduras, South Africa, Pakistan, and Uganda.
¹⁴
All of these countries have parliaments that are between 33 and 49 percent female.

Looking at the percentage of women in government at the ministerial or deputy-ministerial level, Canada was down in 31st place at only 23.1 percent as of January 1, 2005. Finland led the way at 60 percent, followed by Spain at 50 percent, Germany 46.2 percent, Norway 44.4 percent, and South Africa 41.4 percent. The United States is far down the list at only 14.3 percent. Other poor performers, also at 14.3 percent, were Luxembourg and Switzerland. The Russian Federation was at an appalling zero percent, as were Singapore, Cyprus, Slovakia, Kuwait, and Uruguay.
¹⁵

I can’t leave the subject of the status of women in society without mentioning that 28 years ago the United Nations adopted an important Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. By 2005, 170 nations had endorsed the treaty. The United States is the single developed nation that incomprehensibly opposes it.

There is very little doubt that Canada’s failure to provide a public national child-care system remains a barrier that has held many women back from active political participation during their child-rearing years. Meanwhile, most OECD countries have developed successful policies to increase women’s labour market participation and to reconcile work and family responsibilities on a basis more equitable for women.

All Canadians should be ashamed at our failure to do so, and should be ashamed at our embarrassingly low level of female political electoral participation. It’s hard to believe we’re still way down in an appalling 39th place. How truly disgraceful!

Finally, in 2006, the life expectancy at birth for women in Canada was 83 years while for men it was only 77.4 years. Three countries had longer life expectancies for women: Japan, with 85.6 years, Spain 83.8 years, and Switzerland 83.7 years. Australia, Belgium, France, Iceland, Italy, and Sweden all had female life expectancy rates similar to Canada’s. U.S. women were down in 22nd place in life expectancy among OECD countries at 80.1 years.

At this writing, around the world there are 15 elected women as heads of government, including, since 2005, Chile, Finland, Argentina, Jamaica, and the Republic of Korea, and in 2007 a woman was elected in India to the largely ceremonial position of president.

Overall, women in Canada have clearly come a long way in recent years in their level of education and participation in the workforce. Equally true, compared to many other countries, Canadian women still have a long way to go to reach the income and societal levels they deserve.

CONCLUSION
INTEGRATION BY SECRECY AND STEALTH

“If it isn’t a conspiracy they’re doing
their best to make it appear like one.”

I
n February 2003, the vice-president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, in Canadian Senate hearings, said that de facto integration of Canada with the United States was here already, “whether many Canadians realize it or want to accept it,” and that we don’t need “duplicate systems of approval” anyway.

Got that? No need for duplicate systems of approval. I suppose, then, there’s no need for the House of Commons or provincial legislatures either. Let’s just rubber-stamp American policies, standards, and values.

Back in 2002, the continentalist
Financial Post
columnist Diane Francis said that “Canada is more integrated with the United States economically than any two European countries are,”
¹
and the noted Canadian economist Richard Harris and the Carnegie Endowment both said the same thing.

David O’Brien, chairman of the board of the Royal Bank of Canada, has said that Canada would have to adopt U.S. immigration policies: “We’re going to lose increasingly our sovereignty, but it’s necessarily so.”
²
Patrick Daniels, president of Enbridge, hilariously complains that Canada pushes its sovereignty a little too far.
³

In June 2006, the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC), consisting of business leaders from each of the three NAFTA countries, was formed “to advise governments.” Toronto lawyer Paul Bigioni called it “an anti-democratic institution.”

On the surface, the NACC appears to be an initiative of government. It is not. It was entirely conceived by the private sector. In 2003, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives launched a sales pitch designed to convince governments to pursue such business-friendly initiatives as “re-inventing” borders, regulatory convergence and energy integration. It is no coincidence that the NACC currently pursues the same objectives.

In fact, all the Canadians on the NACC are members of the powerful Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) lobby group, and the CCCE serves as the Canadian secretariat. The big-business NACC is the only non-governmental organization making recommendations to the secret tripartite Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP).

In the preface to this book, I alluded to the top-secret meetings — behind closed doors — that have already been held, with more of the same planned for the future. These meetings are designed to further integrate Canada into the United States, have us adopt even more American standards, values, and policies, and give Americans even more guaranteed access to our resources and the unimpeded ability to buy up the ownership and control of even more of our country.

Perhaps you don’t know about the three days of highly secret meetings that took place at the Banff Springs Hotel in mid-September 2006, meetings between top-level American, Canadian, and Mexican government officials and many senior corporate heads. In fact, you probably
don’t
know. But then again, why would you know? Despite the fact that the list of very high level attendees was leaked to me and I sent it to the media, along with the agenda, there wasn’t a word about the meetings in our two national newspapers, the
Globe and Mail
and the
National Post
. There was nothing on CBC television, on CTV, or on Global.
⁴

The documents that I obtained and sent out had been marked “Internal Document. Not for Public Release.” The three heavyweight co-chairs of the secret meetings were former Alberta Conservative premier and strong pro-FTA advocate Peter Lougheed, former U.S. Secretary of
State George Shultz, and former Mexican Secretary of the Treasury Pedro Aspe.

Among the many well-known Canadians scheduled as “participants” were Stephen Harper’s Conservative cabinet ministers Stockwell Day (who at first denied attending) and Gordon O’Connor, who was then the defence minister; deputy ministers Ward Elcock (Defence) and Peter Harder (Foreign Affairs); associate deputy minister William Elliott
⁵
(Public Security); Liberal continentalist Anne McLellan, Canada’s former deputy prime minister and a defender of the oilpatch; the Alberta minister of energy, Greg Melchin; General Rick Hillier, Canada’s chief of defence staff; former Conservative cabinet minister Perrin Beatty, now president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce; the infamous continentalist Thomas d’Aquino, head of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives; Rear Admiral Roger Girouard; Major-General Daniel Gosselin; plus numerous top corporate heads, lawyers, petroleum industry officials, and others.

Among the many scheduled American participants were the political advisor to the head of the U.S. Northern Command; the president for the Americas of Lockheed Martin Corporation; the senior director for the Western Hemisphere of the American National Security Council; the U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense; Carla Hills, who was the primary U.S. NAFTA negotiator; the senior United States Air Force military assistant to the then secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld; the commander of U.S. Northern Command; the chair of the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology, Dr. James Schlesinger; the former American secretary of energy and defense; the deputy secretary of energy; plus many other top business, government, and military officials, and representatives of similar groups from Mexico.

In the intended-to-be-secret “internal agenda document” were plans for detailed discussions about economic, energy, security, military, and other forms of integration.

After I distributed the list of participants and the agenda to the media and to my e-mail list, many concerned people across Canada phoned the participants seeking more information. Almost no calls were returned,
and those that were produced zero answers to the many questions asked about what was decided at the three-day meeting, who paid for the meetings, who organized them, and why every attempt was made to keep them secret.