Federal minister not welcome at provincial meeting on women's issues

January 10, 2007 - 18:21 By: JOAN BRYDEN

OTTAWA (CP) - The Harper government has shown so little interest in women's issues that provinces have decided to meet on their own to plot a national strategy without bothering to invite federal Status of Women Minister Bev Oda.

The snub follows two recent federal-provincial meetings on women's issues at which Oda put in only brief appearances and displayed "a complete lack of interest," according to Sandra Pupatello, Ontario's minister responsible for women's issues.

At a meeting of federal and provincial ministers in Saint John, N.B., in October, Pupatello said Oda showed up for only an hour.

"Because we have ministers who travel literally from coast to coast to coast, a couple of them that take two days just to get there, they were really quite offended that she would come for an hour," Pupatello said in an interview Wednesday.

Their frustration deepened on Dec. 15, when a federally organized teleconference, supposedly aimed at finishing up the agenda from the October meeting, was similarly cut short.

Pupatello said Oda "attended for 20 minutes and then had to excuse herself and insisted that the meeting be over when she left the call."

"It's hard to have an FPT (federal-provincial-territorial meeting) with no F. That sort of sums it up . . . It's just very frustrating because you feel like you're at the altar and the bride didn't show."

After the teleconference call, Pupatello concluded that provincial and territorial ministers need to get together on their own to devise a national action plan "because I'm not going through this charade of FPTs as if we're actually doing something dramatic here because we're not."
She said "every minister across the board" concurred with her assessment of the situation.

Indeed, another minister from a province not usually considered adversarial with the Harper government, privately expressed virtually identical criticisms.

Consequently, Pupatello will host a meeting of women's issues ministers - minus Oda - on Feb. 1 in Toronto.

"It clearly takes leadership at the federal level to bring us together. It is completely absent in my view and we are taking it upon ourselves to say, you know, this is either a priority or it isn't and regardless of federal involvement . . . what are we going to do about it?"

However, a spokesman for Oda disputed Pupatello's account of the federal minister's participation in the last two meetings and suggested the Ontario Liberal minister is simply indulging in a "partisan attack" on the federal Conservative government.

Chisholm Pothier said Oda attended an evening get-together prior to the meeting in Saint John and was in attendance the next day for about two hours.

He said the December conference call was scheduled to last for 90 minutes and went almost an hour longer, with Oda on the line the entire time.

"It seems to me to be a partisan fight," Pothier said of Pupatello's criticisms.

"I think it's sort of beside the point of working together to make concrete progress on issues of importance to women in Canada. I don't think this is a particularly helpful contribution to that and it's certainly not dialogue when you're trying to exclude people from the dialogue."
Pupatello said provincial ministers were frustrated with what little Oda did say to them at the past two meetings.

She did not, for instance, give them any details about the federal government's decision to slice $5 million over two years from the $23-million annual budget for Status of Women Canada, a federal agency that promotes gender equality and funds women's groups across the country.
Oda told them the money would be "redirected" into other programs for women but Pupatello said she couldn't explain how or when that would occur or whether the money saved by closing some of the agency's regional offices would remain in those regions.

Pupatello said Oda also claimed the Harper government has already done a "tremendous amount" on justice issues for women, pointing to stiffer sentences for gun crimes.

"The women who are being murdered here, they're being strangled and beaten and burned," said Pupatello.

"So please don't pretend to me that gun bill somehow was introduced and tabled in the House with a mind to assisting violence against women. You know, please."

However, Pothier contended that Oda has a strong record of advancing women's issues and will continue with her "agenda of action" whether or not she's excluded from meetings with her provincial counterparts.

Among other things, he said Oda has presided over changes to matrimonial property rights for aboriginal women, increased funding for on-reserve family violence shelters, eliminating conditional sentencing for sexual offences, and granting temporary visas to victims of human trafficking so that they can recover from their ordeal.