Padaviya

Canadians may soon be able to apply for passports that do not reveal their gender.

“Passport Canada policy in relation to the gender indicated on passports is the subject of a review,” reads a briefing note obtained by La Presse newspaper in an Access to Information request.

On Tuesday, Passport Canada spokeswoman Béatrice Fénelon confirmed that “the policy regarding transgender people is still under review.”

Although the details of the change are not yet known, Canada may follow the Australian example and allow Canadians to mark their sex as “X” rather than “M” or “F.” Or the agency may simply streamline the process for transgendered people to obtain a passport denoting their new sex.

Under current requirements, Canadians can change the sex on their passport only if they provide medical proof of having undergone gender-reassignment surgery. If they are still in transition they can obtain a temporary two-year passport by furnishing medical documents showing the surgery is scheduled for sometime in the next 12 months.

Critics note the policy effectively excludes a minority of transgendered people who identify with a different gender, yet are unwilling or unable to undergo genital surgery.

“As physically transitioning can be an extremely expensive process, including access to surgery and hormones, it can be untenable for many trans and gender diverse individuals,” reads a 2011 policy paper on gender-neutral passports by Canadian LGBT advocate Egale Canada.

Intersex people, who are born with ambiguous chromosomes or genitalia, are forced to choose a gender when applying for a passport.

“There are people in transition from one sex to another. In my view I don’t see why passports shouldn’t reflect reality,” said Karen Selick with the Canadian Constitution Foundation.

While the passport issue has long been a nuisance for Canada’s transgendered community, it was not until recently that it threatened to become a barrier to travel. Under a series of changes to the Aeronautics Act last July, airlines are not allowed to seat a passenger if “the passenger does not appear to be of the gender indicated on the identification he or she presents.”

“I don’t know why passports should have gender markers in the first place,” said Mercedes Allen, a writer on trans issues based in the Calgary area.

In September, Australia changed its passport policy to allow citizens to mark their gender as “indeterminate.” Then-minister for foreign affairs Kevin Rudd pegged the change as a way to remove the “administrative burden” on transgendered people.

“While it’s expected this change will only affect a handful of Australians, it’s an important step in removing discrimination for sex and gender diverse people,” he said.

In the wake of the Australian move, a spokeswoman with the U.K.’s Identity and Passport Service said the agency was exploring “the security implications of gender not being displayed in the passport.”

In December 2010, to accommodate same-sex parents the U.S. State Department removed the category for “mother” and “father” on its passport applications, opting instead for “parent 1” and “parent 2.”

Last year, the Bangladeshi Hijra, a long-established community of men living as women, obtained approval from the Bangladeshi government to denote their gender as “other” on passport applications. In neighbouring India, the Hijra have been able to list their gender as “E” for eunuch since 2005.

While there has been considerable attention in the United States to political moves intended to reduce access to women’s health services, our neighbors to the north are also experiencing conservative-led cuts that affect women’s health. Six Canadian organizations focused on research and communication in women’s health have been told that their funding will be cut off next spring.

The six organizations forming the Women’s Health Contribution Program focus on issues including: the women’s health implications of the federal government’s regulation of toxic chemicals; the hyper-sexualization of girls; the inter-generational legacy of residential schools on Aboriginal women and their families; the need for trauma-informed counselling for women with addictions; a working guide for conducting sex and gender-based analysis in health research; and a critical analysis of funding for the HPV vaccine. The Program’s work has also focused broadly on how to best deliver prevention and health care programs to women and their children.

A press release from the Canadian Women’s Health Network describes dissatisfaction with and potential impacts of the cuts:

Staff and directors managing the centres and networks add their voices to the growing body of Canadians who are shocked and outraged by the short-sightedness of the federal government cuts to programs, services and the federal civil service. These cuts are in direct contradiction to the pledges regarding gender equality that Canada has made both in international commitments and to Canadians. Women are being hit particularly hard with these cuts, and, because the research being eliminated generated proactive, preventative strategies for health promotion, these cuts will cost everyone in the long term. The end of this work will be most strongly felt by the disadvantaged and the disempowered.

A spokesperson for Canada’s Health Minister has said that the organizations should compete for funding for individual projects via the $33 million budgeted for “gender health research” through the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR). Critics of the cut have suggested that the move is one more sign that the current administration, led by Conservative Party leader and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, is not interested in receiving the groups’ policy advice on women’s health (the non-CIHR groups being cut had a mandate to advise the federal government on policy).

An opinion writer in the Vancouver Sun calls the cuts “penny wise and pound foolish,” writing that:

Set adrift will be researchers and staff with specific expertise; lost will be the opportunity for better and more-effective care and prevention programs for two of the poorest and most vulnerable groups in Canada – elderly women and children growing up in poverty.

Federal budget cuts are also directly affecting programs targeting the health of Aboriginal women in Canada. The Native Women’s Association of Canada points out tremendous health disparities faced by Aboriginal women, calls on the government to rethink its decision, and directly addresses how the move further hurts a vulnerable population:

…more is needed to help local communities struggling with health disparities, but cutting the head off the national voice for Aboriginal women’s health shows a lack of commitment to address the issues that affect the most marginalized population in this country — a country that is envied by many other nations across the globe for its ‘great’ health care system and quality of life

In an orgy of axe swinging and program bludgeoning last week, the federal government set their sights on taking a clean shot at the health and well-being of Canadian women. With all of the vitriol and paternalistic reining in recently, one can’t help but wonder if the government has lumped people with two X chromosomes in with the other “radical” enemies of the state, like Dr. David Suzuki or people who like whales. The latest casualties? 6 federally funded women’s health programs, which fall under the umbrella of the Women’s Health Contribution Program.

The following programs from Halifax to Vancouver will be forced to close their doors by March 31, 2013 or accept funding elsewhere:

• Le Réseau québécois d’action pour la santé des femmes (RQASF)
• The Canadian Women’s Health Network (CWHN)
• The Atlantic Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health (ACEWH)
• The British Columbia Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health (BCCEWH)
• The Prairie Women’s Health Centre of Excellence (PWHCE)
• The National Network on Environments and Women’s Health (NNEWH)

What does this mean? Limitation, cessation or compromise of access and research in the following areas of women’s health:

• women’s health implications of the federal government’s regulation of toxic chemicals (NNEWH);
• hyper-sexualization of girls (RQASF);
• inter-generational legacy of residential schools on Aboriginal women and their families (PWHCE);
• need for trauma-informed counselling  for women with addictions (BCCEWH);
• working guide for conducting sex and gender-based analysis in health research (ACEWH);
• a critical analysis of funding for the HPV vaccine (CWHN).

Shame on the Feds, who have simply succeeded in creating further burden on our exhausted health care system, and once again shown that the status of women across the country is truly second class.

Abortion rights are at the centre of a debate set for this afternoon as MPs consider whether to hold a special committee to look at when human life begins.

Stephen Woodworth, a Conservative MP from Kitchener, Ont., introduced a private member’s motion calling for the committee. Woodworth says current Canadian law says human life begins when a child has fully emerged from the mother’s birth canal, which is based on a 400-year-old definition imported from Britain.

The motion isn’t binding, but allows MPs to spend two hours discussing the need — or lack thereof — for a committee to examine the question of when life begins.

When he announced the motion, Woodworth had argued he was simply interested in updating the law to agree with 21st-century medicine. But speaking to Radio-Canada on Monday, he admitted his motion is linked to abortion.

“It certainly allows us to have an honest discussion about the abortion question. How can we honestly discuss all of the complicated issues around abortion if we cannot decide whether or not a child is a human being before the moment of the complete birth?” Woodworth said.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, he cast the debate as one about human rights.

“If in Canada we cannot agree that a law which decrees that some human beings are not human is wrong, then we need to definitely have some discussion about that. That really is the starting point for any just system of laws,” Woodworth said.

“It’s a serious debate. It should be addressed.”

The motion will get one hour of debate at about 5:30 p.m. ET. Then it drops to the bottom on the order of precedence, and gets another hour of debate when it returns to the top of the list. The House will vote on the motion the following Wednesday, which Woodworth expects will be in June or September, after the summer recess.

No New Democratic MP support

NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said no one in his caucus supports the motion but he plans to whip the vote, or force his MPs to vote along party lines.

“We’re resolutely in favour of women’s right to choose, so it’s very clear for us, and we are absolutely opposed to this motion of Mr. Woodworth,” he said.

Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae said he’s going to allow Liberal MPs to vote however they want, known as “voting their conscience.”

In question period, New Democrat MP Niki Ashton said the Conservatives are rolling back Canadian women’s rights.

“A woman’s right to choose, in Canada, in 2012, is not up to negotiation,” she said.

But some of Woodworth’s colleagues disagreed.

Conservative Saskatchewan MP Brad Trost, who has previously talked about wanting to limit abortion, said he plans to support the motion.

Trost said MPs keep bringing up the issue — despite Prime Minister Stephen Harper saying repeatedly that his government will not reopen the debate on abortion — “because Members of Parliament are duty-bound by both their constituents and their conscience to argue for things that they feel [are] important.”

“Mr. Woodworth feels this is important. He feels this is a thoughtful, proper thing for Canada. And I, like a lot of members, think it’s time that we looked at this in a way that brings compassion to everyone involved.”

Question of conscience

While Harper has pledged not to raise the abortion issue, it’s not clear whether the Conservatives will whip the vote for cabinet ministers or for the caucus as a whole.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, who is a practising Catholic, says party tradition is to allow free votes on issues of conscience.

“I’m going to consult my constituents and consider the implications before taking a decision,” Kenney said.

“My position is that we must have free votes on questions of conscience.”

A spokesman for Harper says the government doesn’t usually “communicate its parliamentary strategy” before a vote.

“The [prime minister] has been clear — he will not reopen this issue,” Andrew MacDougall told CBC News.

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Women’s groups say they were shut out of Senate committee hearings about the repeal of the long-gun registry, legislation they say will only increase gun violence against women.

The bill to kill the registry passed its final vote in the Senate Wednesday evening by a vote of 50 to 27, and will likely be given royal assent Thursday.

While a number of women’s groups were invited to testify at the House of Commons hearings on controversial bill, their requests to be heard at the chamber of sober second thought were denied.

“This blatant exclusion is extremely troubling,” said Brenda Wallace, president of the Canadian Federation of University Women. “Women’s organizations were shut out completely”

Wallace said the government did not conduct a “gender-based analysis” of Bill C-19’s impact, but should have.

“We believe it is extremely important for the Senate to hear from all groups affected by the changes in this legislation and take steps to address their concerns, particularly those of women experiencing violence,” she said. “Failing to do so shows that they have not done their due diligence.”

Liberal Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette said the Conservatives used time allocation to limit the amount of debate that was held on Bill C-19. She said it is not fair that witnesses who supported the bill were allowed to testify, but not opponents.

“They were bullied,” she said. “When we’re dealing with very important matters, you don’t muzzle.”

Pamela Harrison, who works at the Transition House Association of Nova Scotia, said many women’s shelters applied to testify, but all were denied. She said shelters across Canada are unanimous in their opposition to the bill.

“This is not an emotional issue. This is safety issue for women,” she said. “We know for a fact that men use guns to threaten and harm their partners. They do it all the time.”

YWCA Canada CEO Paulette Senior said bill weakens the state’s ability to seize guns from men.

“This bill seriously weakens the ability of police to remove weapons from men who pose a threat to their families, and makes it much easier for them to purchase long guns with fake or invalid licences,” she said. “This is a very dangerous change for the women we serve.”

Tory Senator John Wallace, the chair of the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs committee — which examined the bill — could not be reached for comment.

The long, sordid story of serial killer Robert “Willy” Pickton did not end after he was convicted of viciously murdering six vulnerable women from Vancouver’s downtown eastside, said to be the poorest postal code in Canada.

No, his convictions merely heralded the agonizing aftermath of determining how and why the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Vancouver Police Department bungled an investigation that could have and should have ended much sooner.

But even before those questions could be answered, the public shook their heads in disgust as they grappled with the outcome: How could a serial murderer only be convicted of second degree murder? What could have possibly led a jury to conclude that the murders were not planned and deliberate?

Of course, the Crown was correct that a first degree murder conviction would not increase his sentence, but it was the ultimate slap-in-the-face to a grief-stricken community, just recovering from the senseless cruelty.

With 49 victims according to Pickton; he travelled from his Port Coquitlam pig farm, intent on plucking the easy-pickings: down-on-their luck working girls whose daily grind of selling sex and buying drugs turned them into defeated and exhausted risk-takers.

Their suffering families, who were used to broken promises, took another blow when the British Columbia government decided not to proceed with the trials of twenty additional women whose DNA was discovered on the farm. Unfortunately, the victims’ families were still in the dark when the announcement was made, another blunder in a case that had become a public relations nightmare.

But there was more to come, much more. In August 2010 informant Bill Hiscox received a portion of the $100,000 reward money for information he provided to the Vancouver Police and RCMP in 1998, yet it took another four years and 14 more missing women, to arrest Pickton, while he continued his unspeakably barbaric activities, only a few miles from the Port Coquitlam RCMP headquarters.

With his arrest in 2002, a trial in 2006, and the last appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada completed in July 2010, it took another 15 months to get the Pickton Inquiry off the ground, but not before the government’s choice of Commissioner was mercilessly attacked.

Former judge and Attorney-General Wally Oppal, had become a sacrificial lamb in the 2009 provincial election, leaving his safe seat in Vancouver for a riskier one in Tsawwassan, an opening that saw ex-VPD and former West Vancouver Police Chief Kash Heed crash and burn after he was elected.

The Liberal government apparently did not foresee the fall-out from their pay-back to cabinet minister Mr. Oppal and despite the outcry, he carried on. But it hasn’t been easy.

The Inquiry has been plagued with controversy. From the outset the Inquiry’s terms of reference, focusing on the role of the police, rather than the social causes of the victims’ vulnerabilities, was criticized.

While a plethora of much-needed community groups were given status to participate in the Inquiry, they quickly realized they could not afford to fund or match the legal talent hired by the battery of senior police officers whose alleged inaction or worse, indifference, became the focus of the exercise.

To his credit, Mr. Oppal made personal overtures to the Liberal government to obtain funding for lawyers to represent the disenfranchised stakeholders. Their answer was “no”. His appointment of two of British Columbia’s leading litigators as pro bono counsel was a boost to the beleaguered Commissioner.

When lawyer Robyn Gervais, appointed to represent aboriginal interests, handed in her resignation in March 2012, the now-frail Inquiry sustained another gut-punch. This one was serious enough to shut down the proceedings until new counsel could be selected, a delay of three weeks.

Mr. Oppal’s request to Attorney-General Shirley Bond to consider extending the June 30, 2012 deadline for the Inquiry to complete its work, was also denied, Ms. Bond citing the $4 million price tag of the Inquiry to date.

The latest scandal to hit Mr. Oppal’s faltering ship is the allegation that the Inquiry environment is a sexist, “old boy’s club”, a club that Commission counsel Art Vertlieb denies, but identifies its only possible members as Mr. Oppal, executive director John Boddie, a former VPD police officer, who is now, rather mysteriously, on leave from the Inquiry, and himself.

Can the Pickton Inquiry claim any legitimacy in light of these devastating events? I believe it still can,  but only if the Commissioner exposes the unsavory circumstances of a flawed investigation, seeped in internal politics, that screams to be seen in the light of day.

This is how the woman, then young, remembered the August day in 1963 on which she gave birth to her illegitimate daughter: She was in an Edmonton hospital; the doctor ordered she receive an injection. She blacked out, and when she started to come to, a male voice said: “knock her out.”

She claimed she woke up sometime later and was told she had given birth to a girl, but the baby had died.

Her baby girl did not die, though. She was adopted by a married couple.

“I never wanted to give up any child of mine for adoption,” the Edmonton mother swore in an affidavit before her recent death. “I went through my entire life believing that the baby I carried in 1963 had died…. I believe that I was lied to and my baby was stolen from me.”

Since the National Post launched an investigation earlier this month into coerced adoptions between the 1940s and 1980s, dozens of mothers have said they were forced by social workers, medical staff and churches into surrendering their child because they were young and unmarried.

But some of these women say they never surrendered their child at all: They say they were told their child was stillborn or died shortly after birth, when in reality they allege their baby was adopted or essentially handed to a married couple.

Her baby girl did not die, though. She was adopted by a married couple.

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“Women Can’t Be Trusted.” That’s the new name that women activists at the NDP convention have given to Motion M-312, Tory MP Stephen Woodworth’s thus-far successful trek down the bloody path of ending abortion rights in Canada. Women are angry, and the NDP is hearing them.

The slogan is not as snappy as my favourite, “Wombs for Woodworth,” but it has the virtue of being direct, much better than the Kitchener MP’s own timid “Canada’s 400-Year-Old Definition of a Human Being Motion M-312.” He’s passing himself off as a modernizer, this absurd MP who Tweets about his head cold and declares on his website, “All Canadians want the same things.”

No. We don’t. I hope your cold gets better. But we don’t all agree that a girl or a woman should be forced to give birth. Please leave us alone, sir.

Woodworth pretends that allowing a woman dominion over her own body is as old-fashioned as carbon paper. Golly, let’s digitize these old rules for gals and what goes on Down There. He won’t use the word “abortion,” and I call that cowardly.

His progress so far: in April, he will begin a Commons debate on establishing a Conservative-led MPs committee to decide how deeply the state can intrude into the body cavities of every pregnant woman.

We can reasonably assume the committee will find that life begins right at conception, when the egg and sperm meet. It may even begin before that, who knows, when a man reaches orgasm and his sperm travels hopefully toward a lolling egg. I know, it’s hard to believe we’re discussing this again.

A woman’s uterus is not her own, according to many Conservatives. I cannot help envisioning bony — or indeed fat — government fingers inside what I called “Ladyland” in a recent column, for the sheer colloquial fun of it. More realistically, these MPs want to rule on what happens medically in the vagina, cervix, uterus and, let’s get breezy again, Female Whatnot.

But the fact is, the Supreme Court decided the matter in 1988; the motion is legal nonsense born of misogyny, and it violates a woman’s right to “life, liberty, bodily security, conscience and equality,” as the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada has elegantly put it.

The fact that there is no legal case to make isn’t stopping Woodworth.

NDP women — and men — must make sure women’s rights are front and centre at the convention. A majority Conservative government gets its way on everything. The NDP needs a fiery leader who can win over Canadian voters on abortion rights, even if the House of Commons votes against women.

There is indeed a war on women. It’s boiling in the U.S. right now, with birth control under threat and women being tormented, and not just by thugs like Rush Limbaugh either. Texas women, told that their fetus is terribly deformed and will suffer constant pain, cannot now have an abortion without enduring ultrasounds, elaborate fetal descriptions, waiting periods and incorrect medical advice that abortion causes breast cancer. The women sob and the clinicians apologize repeatedly, saying the law makes them do this.

An Arizona bill would allow employers to not only refuse to pay for birth control but demote or fire women who then choose to pay for their own.

Women are responding with ridicule, posting news of vaginal events on politicians’ websites and Facebook pages. Comedian/commentator Stephen Colbert, misplacing his blender, used a transvaginal ultrasound wand on his show — to make margaritas.

But it doesn’t change the fact that the most primitive politicians in the U.S. and Canada — elected partly because our political systems no longer attract the best, brightest people — are targeting women, sexuality, modernity and urban ways.

So much is at stake here. Feminism has faded from the screen. We women took our rights for granted. The candidates for NDP leader are hardly charismatic, Layton having failed to groom a terrific successor. We are paying the price now. The party needs a firebrand, a passionate soul, maybe a yeller.

Will the new NDP leader have the courage, luck, intelligence and stamina to defeat a long-held — if currently stifled — Conservative desire to end women’s right to choose? The issue is crucial to how women vote, donate and believe.

I watch the NDP and tremble for the future of our daughters.

Conservative MP Steven Woodworth is putting forward a motion to open debate on “when life begins”, which of course is actually a ploy to open the debate on abortion, with the goal to criminalize it.

—FemRev Collective
2011 RebELLEs OC

OTTAWA — A controversial proposal from a Conservative backbencher to legally define fetuses as human beings — and reopen the abortion debate — will have its day in the House of Commons.

Tory MP Stephen Woodworth wants Parliament to create a committee of politicians whose task it will be to review a law that stops short of defining unborn children as “human beings.”

A committee of MPs has agreed to give Woodworth at least one hour of debate sometime in April. He will receive a second hour of debate sometime either in late spring or early fall.

If parliamentarians agree to Woodworth’s request, a special committee would review Section 223 of the Criminal Code, which says a child becomes “a human being … when it has completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother.”

That section of the Criminal Code says a homicide on a child happens when someone “causes injury to a child before or during its birth as a result of which the child dies after becoming a human being.”

The review, he argues, is needed because the law is based on a 400-year-old definition of human being.

“If a child five minutes before birth can be defined as not a human being, then the question is who’s next?” he argued.

Woodworth said his proposal will be wrapped up in the emotions that surround the abortion debate, but he doesn’t intend to back down even though his own party has said the government has no interest in reopening the abortion debate.

“The prime minister and justice minister have to speak for themselves. I don’t take any issue with any statement that the government won’t reopen this debate,” he said.

“I’m acting as a private member.”

Since 1988, Canada has had no legal restrictions on abortion.

Despite new guidelines intended to crack down on the practice, Canadian women under anesthesia may still be subject to pelvic exams without their consent, charges a new report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Patients must be informed if medical students are to play a role in their care and provide consent for a pelvic exam, according to updated guidelines published in September 2010 by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada and the Association of Academic Professionals in Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

But the guidelines, which were updated in response to a public outcry over the fact women were routinely given pelvic exams by students for educational purposes while under anesthesia and without their explicit consent, don’t appear to apply to medical residents, according to the new paper in the CMAJ Monday.

As a result, residents may still be able to do pelvic exams without patients’ knowledge, a serious issue that needs to be revised, said Elaine Gibson, lead author of the analysis and associate director of the Health Law Institute at Dalhousie University.

“It shows a lack of respect for women. It’s degrading even, potentially,” Prof. Gibson said in an interview. “This one has its impacts directly and exclusively on women…in what would be considered the most private part of women’s bodies.”

The issue of pelvic exams and consent came to a head in 2010, after publication of a Calgary-based study that found few women who had undergone gynecologic surgery in the past were aware a medical student could have performed a pelvic exam while they were sedated. More than 70 per cent of women surveyed said they expected to be asked for consent before an exam can be conducted.

Guidelines at the time said patient consent for pelvic exams was “implicit” when patients agreed to a medical procedure where trainees may be involved.

But media attention to the issue prompted the SOGC and APOG to revamp the guidelines in 2010.

The updated version maintains that it’s important for medical students to conduct pelvic examinations in order to better understand women’s health. The guidelines also state that doing exams while patients are under anesthesia is beneficial in several ways, including the fact patients don’t experience discomfort and there is less time pressure involved.

But it spells out that patients must provide explicit, verbal consent before any pelvic exams are conducted by students.

Many gynecologic experts and patients said the move is an important step to ensure the rights and dignity of patients are respected.

Now, Prof. Gibson is raising concerns that the wording of the updated guidelines still allows too much leeway for medical residents. The previous guidelines governing pelvic exams, published in 2006, referred to “medical trainees,” but the new version only speaks to medical students.

The concern is that residents can still routinely do pelvic exams for educational or training purposes without consent.

“With the replacement of the 2006 practice guideline by the 2010 policy statement, a substantial gap was created,” according to the analysis published in the CMAJ. “Residents are subject to fewer requirements with respect to pelvic examinations for teaching purposes than are medical students, but there is no logical or legal justification for this.”

In a statement, the SOGC disputes the accusations, pointing out that the guidelines state consent for pelvic examinations performed while the patient is under anesthesia must be obtained by the surgical team, which includes the resident.

“A careful review of our policy statement will identify the presence of appropriate and necessary statements regarding the practice of pelvic examinations involving medical students and/or residents,” the statement says.

The guidelines state in several places that before pelvic exams can be done while patients are sedated, verbal permission must be obtained “by the gynecologic surgical team, including the medical student.”

But Prof. Gibson issued a written response that says because the guidelines fail to address the issue of medical residents and the need for them to obtain verbal consent, women may still not be fully protected against the practice.