In his first major move as Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney eliminated roughly a third of all cabinet positions, including the crucially important Minister of Women and Gender Equality. This decision marks a major setback for women’s rights in Canada at a time when these rights are under threat around the world.
Carney, sworn in as prime minister on Friday, has justified the trimmed-down cabinet as a “smaller, experienced cabinet” positioned to move fast and secure Canada’s economy in the face of US President Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada and other threats.
But deprioritizing gender equality does not help Canada’s economy, and risks entrenching serious gendered harms. The gender wage gap and gendered poverty and inequality persist in Canada. Women and gender diverse workers also face disproportionately high levels of harassment and violence at work. Much work also remains for Canada to ensure and support sexual and reproductive health rights at home and abroad.
One cool thing they could do that would benefit women and workers would be to mandate better staffing policies for nurses at hospitals, clinics, and long-term care homes. These places receive provincial and federal funding, so hiring more nurses and medical aides (roles which are predominately filled by women) would be a great step in growing the number of healthcare workers and improving access to medical care.
The “nurse shortage” is entirely manufactured by medical groups that deliberately underpay and under-fund their own personnel and facilities. Just look at their books: they’ve got record profits almost across the board.
Take a look at: provincial responsibilities
And yet provinces have accepted federal funding that is contingent on meeting certain requirements that are in line with federal policy goals. There is still a federal role in healthcare no matter how many people tell me it’s impossible for the feds to do anything helpful in this sector.
Don’t you think your energy would be better spent emailing MPs than making low-effort excuses on part of the feds that I’ve been hearing for years?
The boosted healthcare funding that JT gave the provinces isn’t bound by the same rules tho, as every province refused to sign the agreement forcing the extra billions to be spent on healthcare alone.
For the most part the premiers love their little fiefdoms and will protect them with our lives.
There was and will be federal healthcare funding that Trudeau is not attached to. It’s disingenuous to claim that the federal government has no tools available to achieve its goals if it so chose to make healthcare spending official policy. Historically, these things often start at the provincial level, but that doesn’t mean that they have to or that federal funding wouldn’t help a province already moving towards improving their existing system.
It’s not beyond them to invent a new program with specific funding requirements, they’ve done it many time. If voters are made more acutely aware that provinces are leaving money on the table due to corporate lobbying and partisanship while healthcare languishes and nurses exit the field, that could go very poorly for some Premiers (like Smith, whose administration is showing their ass in the middle of a healthcare spending scandal).