Foodbanking Women’s Issues

I’m sure when foodbanks first started popping up they were considered a stop gap. A temporary fix to a major problem.

I’m sure there was an assumption that advocacy and research would be done to target the reasons for and solutions to most of the underlying causes.

Of course capitalism itself requires a certain level of poverty and unemployment to continue, it therefore, owes something to those upon whom the illusion is built.

Of course we know that despite the studies and proposed solutions the Liberal and Conservative governments have seen fit to reward corporations with tax cuts, and creating class warfare upon the poor.

The Conservative government has now taken the same approach to women’s issues.

Of course they do not want lobbying and advocacy because to allow reports would be to admit there is a problem. Of course they want their front men REAL women out there with their SOW campaign. Shouting for all the world to hear that feminists don’t speak for them.

Ironic how their right to a voice came from the feminists that proceeded them. But then perhaps REAL women don’t understand complicated subjects like history.

It has recently made news that the Conservative government wants to give money to shelters

Federal Conservative MPs are calling women’s shelters in their local ridings to solicit applications for grants from Status of Women Canada, says the Ontario based provincial association of women’s shelters.

“A number of our members have received calls from their local Conservative MP asking them to make an application,” said Eileen Morrow, Coordinator of the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses (OAITH), the association representing 75 members across Ontario, primarily first stage emergency shelters for abused women and their children.

Wednesday in the House of Commons, Beverley Oda, Minister Responsible for the Status of Women denied that MPs were calling shelters in their ridings but the Association says it has heard from some members in Ontario that they have received such calls.

Well of course they want to fund shelters. It is the least they can do and still try to spin that they are concerned with Canadian women.

Shelters are the last resort, they are the bandage on the festering sore of a society which accommodates the misuse and abuse of women.

A system which sees a payment of a hundred dollars as a legitimate response to daycare needs. Which sees creating a taxable income for the poorest women while alternately developing plans to save taxes for the wealthiest. A system which treats their own political colleagues as second class and tries to silence debate with the time tortured jeers of radical, hairy legged, bra burning feminist, bitch or whore.

I suppose the notion of taking care of the caretakers, of seeing women and the work both paid and unpaid that they preform as important is a radical notion to them.

For some even the notion of allowing women and children to escape abusive situations is radical.

The theme of these many letters is that “shelters for abused women and children protect them from the violence.” (No mention of the studies which indicate that half of domestic violence is instigated by the women.) The letters also claim that women need the support of the Status of Women to work for pay equity, marital property and senior women’s income, etc.

Never is it mentioned that the Status of Women, including women’s shelters themselves, are matters of provincial jurisdiction only. They do not fall within federal jurisdiction and there is no reason why the federal government is funding so generously these provincial issues and organizations. Further, there is no reason why the Status of Women portfolio is included in the Cabinet.

In case you missed it in the above article;

When James Flaherty (federal Finance Minister) and John Baird (Chair of Treasury Board) were MPPs in the Ontario government of Mike Harris they participated in cuts to the base budgets of these very same shelters and in the elimination of all program funding to abused women’s second stage shelters,” said Morrow.

Food banks have not ceased to be but have in fact proliferated and still do not come close to meeting the needs of the ever growing ranks of the poverty stricken.

Likewise shelters will not solve the issues, will not be able to meet the many and varied needs of the women of Canada.

Cannot service the women and families escaping abuse or needing rape counselling, as well as the women suffering depression from rape, poverty or caregiving.

Cannot service those who work and care for children, or who work and care for elderly or dying parents or loved ones.

Cannot service those whose caregiving is forcing them into poverty when they cannot continue to work or are fired for taking days off.

Cannot service the women whose jobs leave them unable to qualify for EI.

Single mothers trying to dash from school to work to home to suppers to homework to their various other activities do not have the time or the funds to research or do advocacy. It is all they can do to keep body and soul together and some would grudge them even that.

It is not feminists who do not care about the caregivers. It is not feminists who disrespect the large unpaid economy of women. It is not feminists who do not care about the quality of care children get or the amount of time they get to spend with their families.

Indeed it is the so called defenders of the family who want to institute the very laws and practises that would destroy it.

“I do think there are many social critics on the right who’ve made great careers for themselves going around the country telling women to stay home. … There’s a romanticism about motherhood, that you can drop out of the cold, hard male world of working, and get that brass ring of motherhood … but I think that what feminism fought for was every woman to do what she wanted to. The message increasingly is that you can have one or the other, but not both. And men, well, they get both.”