There are a number of areas in which attention has been focussed in Canada. Dobrowolsky argues that “the input of femocrats (i.e., feminists within the bureaucracy) is a significant, if underacknowledged, aspect of the women’s movement in this country.” (9). Sue Findlay has been charting this territory by analyzing and problematizing the experiences of feminists working in women’s policy machinery (federal, provincial and municipal) in Canada and their interactions with the women’s movement. Others are beginning to explore this terrain as well.³² Work is also being done around the need for reinstating federal funding of women’s groups to strengthen these ‘inside/outside’ ties.³³ Efforts have been aimed at pushing for feminist policy analysis and for gendering budgets³⁴—a technique for analyzing the gender impact of all government allocations, from education to the military. Feminist concern around representation is beginning to filter into calls for a more representative bureaucracy.³⁵ Finally, the onslaught of neoliberal ‘restructuring’ of the public sector, including downsizing, privatization, and managerialism has been problematized for its devastating impact on women’s labour (both paid and unpaid) and their working conditions.³⁶

Of particular interest is the work that has been done to show how current public bureaucracies and structures of representation are organized in defiance of ‘intersectionality’ (the idea that citizens have overlapping experiences of class, race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, nationality, and age). Gabriel has shown that within the Ontario Women’s Directorate (OWD) and the Race Relations Department (RRD) “racism and sexism were … largely conceptualized as separate and distinct,” and so “women of colour … often fall between the mandates of those advocacy offices promoting gender and racial equality” (185, 191). Similarly, Tobin found that in Britain’s Greater London Council (GLC), “formal support for gay rights often ended up coming from either the Women’s Committee which encompassed lesbianism within its remit or from the Ethnic Minorities Unit which employed gay rights workers” (60). The Women’s Committee did not encompass the existence of a lesbian who is also a woman of colour and a worker. The Ethnic Minorities Unit took for granted a unity of interest between lesbians and gay men. In neither case was there much room for women with disabilities; a situation outlined by Sue Findlay. Findlay gives an example from the municipal administration of the Mayor’s Committee on Community and Race Relations and the Interdepartmental Action Committee on People with Disabilities in Toronto. The operation of the two separate entities demonstrated to Findlay that categorization is obviously not a solution that ‘makes sense’ for the representation of ‘women with special needs.’ Their lived realities visibly challenge the separation of race, gender, abilities—and obscure class differences… ‘women’ is a highly differentiated category that can be defined only in terms of the interrelationships of class, race, gender, abilities, and sexual orientation in the everyday lives of women (1993: 159f).

More Work of This Sort Needs to be Done to Create a Truly Femocratic Administration

In keeping with the caution seen earlier, about the need to link the democratization of the state with that of the market, femocratization of the market is also important. For women, a shorter workweek (or workday), as advocated earlier by Albo, not only reduces the ‘double-burden’ of paid and unpaid work,³⁷ but also contributes to workplace democracy, by leaving women more time to engage in union activities and providing a more equitable distribution of unionized jobs for women (White 94).³⁸ This corresponds to Panitch’s observation that a shorter working day allows more time for democracy, both in the workplace and in the state (1994: 88).

The need to pay sufficient attention to the market and the family in order to fashion a truly femocratic administration is further reinforced when the reality of women’s complicated relationship to the public and private is recognized. Panitch, while providing useful suggestions for a more participatory state, does not acknowledge many of the gendered barriers to this participation. The persistent gendered division of labour in the family, in which women’s unpaid work interferes with full political participation, is often not scrutinized. Phillips has identified the “tyranny of domestic commitments” (38) as one of the largest obstacles to this type of democracy.

Feminist work on valuing women’s unpaid labour is essential in this regard. Many are beginning to identify new ways in which this unpaid work could be valued. Waring calls the persistent undervaluing of voluntary and unpaid work “patently pathological.” Efforts at placing a value on unpaid labour range from calculating the loss of leisure time to figuring out what it would cost to purchase similar services in the market. Most try to place a market value on this labour. Even though she often finds calculations of the monetary value of unpaid work to be “perversely useful,”³⁹ Waring voices concern over the commodification of women’s unpaid labour that is inherent in such measures that treat everything as a mere transaction (2000a). Waring seeks to avoid the commodification of this labour by employing time-use studies such as those being tested in a pilot study in Nova Scotia called the Genuine Progress Index (GPI).⁴⁰ So far, the GPI (which measures three factors: voluntary/community labour, household labour, and unpaid overtime and under-employment) indicates that the time spent doing the first two is equivalent to 571,000 full year, full time jobs (2000a). Waring’s conclusion is that devolution to the ‘community,’ therefore, raises important policy questions since “these time-use studies demonstrate that there aren’t a large bank of human resources sitting about in the community with time on their hands just desperate to take over the devolution of services” (2000b).

This dovetails nicely with the work that Bakker has done. In a report for Status of Women Canada, Bakker argues that “[p]olicy makers are rarely explicit about how such assumptions [of unpaid work] guide their decision-making. Yet, policy development in Canada is ignored by implicit models of the macro-economy as well as the family” (1998: viii). The downloading of social services to the family and/or voluntary sector does not consider the costs in terms of women’s unpaid work, and thus Bakker suggests that “policy makers must make explicit their assumptions which underpin macro-economic policies ... When governments choose to forego lost revenues in exchange for savings on health expenditures partly realized through unpaid activities in households and communities, such a policy decision should be stated clearly” (1998: x, 4). That it seems radical for both Waring and Bakker to emphasize that policies should be aimed at reducing the burden of women’s unpaid work, not increasing it, is a testament to the extent to which gender inequality is entrenched in society.⁴¹ This type of research is fundamental to any effort at femocratizing the market and the family.

Women’s paid work is also central to this project of democratization. Globalization has brought increasingly precarious employment, especially for women. This includes part-time, temporary, contract, and homework. Almost all of this work is non-unionized, and it is only recently that unions in Canada have shown any interest in organizing such workers. Ross and Martin identify the need for “appealing to ‘outsiders,’” such as women and youth, as one of the greatest challenges to the success of unionism in Europe (376), and Carchedi & Carchedi extend the argument to immigrant workers (143). Organizing marginalized workers is essential to any strategy aimed at reversing and resisting globalization.⁴² New recruiting is needed to strengthen the power of unions against capital. Beyond this, the growing polarization among workers by gender, class and race means that solidarity is all the more important. Panitch argues that even before thinking about how to democratize the state and market, there has to be a “refounding, reorganizing and democratizing [of] the labour movement itself,” in order to “‘reinvent solidarity’ in this era of globalization” (2001: 383, 389).

To this end, Julie White calls for a “fourth wave of unionization” in Canada to follow the first three (craft unions, industrial unions, public sector unions), which incorporates the precariously employed (51), but this is not an easy task. As both Warskett (2001) and Huws (1999) demonstrate, there is a history of union sexism that must be overcome. Further, Ursula Huws identifies the complicated class identity of the growing ‘cybertariat,’ drawing attention to the gender, race and class dimension of these workers (1999, 2003). However, the unionization of retail, hotel, and telemarketing workers has begun, by the Canadian Auto Workers and the Steelworkers, and creative ways of organizing some of the most vulnerable homeworkers in Toronto are being explored by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) (Yalnizyan 293-95). This must become a more concerted effort. These national efforts must then be supplemented internationally.

Linking the National and the International: The World March of Women 2000

A nationally-based strategy does not mean that international struggles are ignored. Panitch submits that...

building alternatives to globalization also must begin at home. Of course, there will need to be extensive international cooperation among such forces. While located on the terrain of each state, such movements and parties will have to inspire one another across state borders (1998: 22).

Is it possible to have a national focus that is internationally linked? What would this look like in practice? The October 2000 World March of Women, involving thousands of women in 157 countries, is a good example. The World March was inspired by the Bread and Roses march against poverty and violence against women that Quebec feminists organized in 1995 (David 149). Various local events were planned around the world starting on International Women’s Day, and running until Oct. 17, 2000. The events ended in New York City with a March on the United Nations (Miles 8).

In Canada, despite wild under-estimations in the major newspapers, over 20,000 women gathered at the Parliament buildings in Ottawa on Oct. 15, 2000. The Canadian Women’s March Committee explained that...

[i]n solidarity with women from 157 countries, Canadian women are marching to demand that our federal government adopt immediate and effective measures to end poverty and violence against women in the year 2000. Across Canada, in all languages, communities, cultures, races, and sectors, women are calling on the government to radically change its way of governing, and to actively promote the public interest and adopt specific measures that will move us forward in the progressive realization of women’s rights (Canadian Women’s March Committee, 21).

These specific measures were compiled in a short document entitled “It’s Time for Change: Demands to the Federal Government to End Poverty and Violence Against Women,” published by the Canadian Women’s March Committee, composed of twenty-four women’s organizations (5). The Committee highlighted sixty-eight areas, which were summarized into thirteen demands called “The Feminist Dozen” (8f):

1. Restore federal funding to health care and enforce the rules against the privatization of our health care, beginning with Alberta

2. Spend an additional 1% of the budget on social housing

3. Set up the promised national childcare, starting with an immediate contribution of $2 billion

4. Increase Old Age Security payments to provide older women with a decent standard of living

5. Use surplus from the Employment Insurance Fund to increase benefits, provide longer payment periods and improve access, as well as improve maternity and family benefits

6. Support women’s organizing for equality and democracy by:
a. allocating $50 million to front-line, independent, feminist, women-controlled groups committed to ending violence against women, such as women’s centres, rape crisis centres and women’s shelters;
b. recognizing and funding the three autonomous national Aboriginal women’s organizations to ensure full participation in all significant public policy decisions as well as provide adequate funding to Aboriginal women’s services, including shelters, in all rural, remote and urban Aboriginal communities;
c. funding a national meeting of lesbians to discuss and prioritize areas for legislative and public policy reform;
d.providing $30 million in core funding for equality-seeking women’s organizations, which represents only $2 for every woman and girl child in Canada—our Fair Share.

7. Fund consultations with a wide range of women’s equality-seeking organizations prior to all legislative reform of relevance to women’s security and equality rights, beginning with the Criminal Code, and ensure access for women from marginalized communities.