5 female-friendly initiatives the Trudeau government unveiled

[CBC News]

Justin Trudeau has shown himself to be one of Canada’s most feminist prime ministers, unveiling several female-friendly initiatives that coincided with International Women’s Day.

Trudeau already earned praise and headlines late last year for selecting a cabinet made up of an equal number of men and women. He’s also on record as saying he and his wife plan to raise not only their daughter as a feminist, but their two sons as well.

An op-ed by Trudeau, highlighting the importance of women’s equality, ran in the Globe and Mail on Tuesday, and the prime minister attended an International Women’s Day event with cabinet ministers Patty Hajdu, Judy Foote and Bill Morneau.

Below are five female-friendly initiatives announced this week by him and the Liberal government.

Women on bank notes

There is, of course, already a woman on all Canadian coins, plus Queen Elizabeth on the $20 bill. But when the country’s redesigned bank notes began to roll out a few years ago, critics pointed out that they featured plenty of men — and an icebreaker — but no Canadian women.

That will change in 2018, Trudeau announced on Tuesday, when the next issue of bank notes is released.

“Today, on International Women’s Day, the Bank of Canada is taking the first step by launching public consultations to select an iconic Canadian woman to be featured on this new bill,” he said.

The prime minister and Finance Minister Bill Morneau didn’t indicate who would appear on Canadian bills, or which denomination would be selected. But until April 15, Canadians can go online to nominate impressive Canadian women who, pardon the pun, fit the bill.

Female filmmakers

The country’s cabinet isn’t the only place in Canada where you can find gender parity. Thanks to an announcement made Tuesday by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), at least half the production budget for films from the government-funded producer will be given to female filmmakers going forward.

“Today, I’m making a firm, ongoing commitment to full gender parity, which I hope will help to lead the way for the industry as a whole,” NFB head Claude Joli-Coeur said at the Vancouver Film Festival.

This expands on staffing strategies already in place at the NFB, where two-thirds of the agency’s upper managers and three-quarters of its board of trustees are women. The initiative will roll out over three years, the NFB announced, and the agency will provide online updates on its progress towards funding parity.

The move has the potential to seriously change the gender balance for the Canadian film industry. A sampling of feature films produced in 2013 and 2014, done by the non-profit Women in View, found that women made up only 12 per cent of cinematographers, 17 per cent of directors, and 22 per cent of writers.

Women in combat

Another of Tuesday’s announcements came from the Canadian War Museum, whose newest research initiative will examine the role of women during war. Women and Conflict will be the first time a Canadian museum has comprehensively studied how war impacts the lives of women both at home and away, museum director general Stephen Quick told the Ottawa Sun.

There’s evidence of an appetite for this line of study — the museum’s ongoing World War Women exhibit has attracted more than 35,000 visitors so far, 50 per cent more than expected.

Over $100,000 has already been raised for the Women and Conflict initiative, Quick told the Sun, and the goal is to raise enough to integrate the project into the museum’s permanent research efforts.

Female athletes

The Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro are just a few months away, but soccer fans in Ontario will get a couple of chances to check out the Canadian women’s soccer team — who won the bronze medal in London in 2012 — at the newly announced exhibition games this spring.

The Canadian women will play the Brazilian women’s team in Toronto on June 4 and in Ottawa on June 7, Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson announced with Sports and Persons with Disabilities Minister Carla Qualtrough on Tuesday.

Qualtrough acknowledged that highlighting some of Canada’s premier female athletes on International Women’s Day wasn’t an accident.

“We have a ways to go, there is not parity when it comes to sport,” she said at the announcement. “There may be in cabinet, but not in sport.”

International reproductive health funding

It was technically announced Monday, a day before International Women’s Day, but the Liberal government’s new investment in international reproductive health could also be added to its list of new women-friendly initiatives. Canada will provide $5 million to the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) contraception-supplies program, International Development Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau said Monday.

The government also announced $11 million in funding, over five years, for the UNFPA’s efforts to prevent adolescent pregnancy in Honduras. The announcement is the implementation of a commitment made by the previous Conservative government.

What the funding does not provide, however, is funding for abortion services, including in countries where abortion is legal.

“Providing the service of safe abortion, maybe in some countries where it’s legal, it’s part of [reproductive health] and we’re not against it,” Bibeau told the Globe and Mail. “This is a difference. But we’re not promoting it right now.”

Other party pledges

The Liberals weren’t the only federal party to take notice of International Women’s Day. Rona Ambrose was shadowed all day by 12-year-old Lillian Strand, who attended International Women’s Day events with the Opposition leader. The party also had only female MPs speak in question period on Tuesday, and highlighted the persecution of Yazidi women in Iraq by the Islamic State during the leaders’ exchange.

The NDP, meanwhile, launched a new website that fit in well with this year’s International Women’s Day theme Pledge for Parity. The site aims to promote a bill, tabled by MP Kennedy Stewart, that would financially penalize parties that don’t run a gender-balanced slate of candidates in elections. The party’s Status of Women critic, Sheila Malcolmson, also released a statement Tuesday highlighting the inequalities faced by indigenous women, Canada’s most vulnerable women.