Dreams for Women – Seventh Week!
22 Saturday Mar 2008
Posted Dreams for women
in22 Saturday Mar 2008
Posted Dreams for women
in19 Wednesday Mar 2008
Posted Your Voice
inDear friend,
What kind of city do you want Vancouver to be? Will we see deep cuts to the
Parks Board, more shifting of the commercial tax base to residential taxpayers, or stepped-up investment in affordable housing to address our deepening homeless crisis?
Each year, the City of Vancouver holds a public consultation process for the upcoming civic budget. Think City wants to bring more people into this process so more Vancouverites can get informed and more citizens can be heard.
Think City and the University of British Columbia ‘s Political Science Department invite you to learn about, discuss and deliberate the 2008 City of Vancouver budget on the evening of March 19, 2008. HSBC Hall, UBC Robson Square , 7:00-9:30 pm, 800 Robson Street, Vancouver.
Space is limited so sign up today for this exciting evening of conversation:
http://thinkcity.ca/event_signup
Make sure your voice is heard, when city council decides the priorities for this year’s budget!
Think City’s survey and more information can be found at
http://www.thinkcity.dreamvancouver.ca
or contact us at
budget_talks@hotmail.com
17 Monday Mar 2008
Posted Your Voice
inStudents,
Do you like your U-Pass? Do you spend any time in the SUB?
Then listen up!
A referendum is coming at the end of March to save the U-Pass and renew the SUB. We are attempting to build a sustainable community by keeping the U-Pass and turning the most used and least sustainable building on campus (the SUB) into a model for others to follow. Here are the major issues:
1) The U-Pass: Translink has recently increased their fees and with that, the cost of the U-Pass. If we want to keep the U-Pass, we have to raise the fee by $1.75 per month. This is a pretty small increase and if it doesn’t pass, we will no longer have a U-Pass.
2) SUB Renew: As you can probably tell, the SUB building is old. It was built in the 1960s and has not meet the needs of students for the past ten years. This is the most used building on campus, yet student social space has gradually disappeared over the past ten years. We could be offering so many more services to students. We want to renew and expand this building to address the needs of current and future students.
If you are a UBC student, that means you are a member of the AMS, and thus, can vote in this referendum. Voting takes place online on WebVote at the student service centre: http://www.students.ubc.ca/ssc. The polls are open from March 25 – March 31. Don’t miss your chance to decide what happens on your campus.
For more information, check out the website: http://www.ams.ubc.ca
17 Monday Mar 2008
Posted UBC
inThe By-elections are upon us and this is an especially important time for us UBCers… or shall I say Vancouver Quadra residents. While I still vote in my home riding of Windsor, Ontario, I’m sure there are many readers and UBC students who will be casting a ballot Monday. Remember to vote as the papers are making this out to be closer than originally thought! Here are links the candidates their homepages:
Deborah Meredith – Conservative
And for more info about all the candidates… check out recent articles about them…
15 Saturday Mar 2008
Posted Dreams for women
in12 Wednesday Mar 2008
Posted Oxfam, Women and politics
inRobert Fox, the Executive Director of Oxfam Canada, writes a great op-ed in the Chronicle Herald about the need for Canada to make progress on women’s gender equality. Here is just one short snippet… read the rest!
And there is much to be done in Canada itself. When Canada provides aid to governments in developing countries, the Canadian International Development Agency quite rightly demands that developing countries provide an analysis of how women and men will be affected by these funds. They realize the impact on women is likely to be different than it is for men.
Wouldn’t it be a good idea if that same lens were applied here in Canada to budgets at the federal, provincial and municipal levels? That, too, could be part of Canada’s contribution to women’s equality worldwide.
If women’s needs were taken into account in the budget process, Canada’s socio-economic landscape would be very different. Too often, government budgets are assumed to be a gender-neutral policy tool. But experience has shown that spending and tax cuts affect women and men differently based on the roles they play in society. A gender budget ensures the budget contributes to the broader societal goals of social justice, sharing the benefits and costs equitably.
If women’s needs were taken into account, there would be no question about privatizing health care; it would remain public and accessible to all. We would have a national child care program and greater support for affordable housing. Pay equity would be guaranteed and access to post-secondary training and education would be assured. Those accused of violence against women would be fully and fairly prosecuted and survivors of violence would receive the support and respect they need.
Just as we expect of the governments in the global South that receive Canadian aid, Canadians should demand that our governments commit to a budgetary process that addresses the needs of women.
12 Wednesday Mar 2008
So… we’re back from the UN… but I want ot continue with posting Mira Hall’s updates! Here we are with Day Six:
UN day 6: The poverty frame North and south versus rural and urbanI’m sorry that this too has been late in coming. I’m sure that everyone who has been actively reading can see me running out of steam as the days packed with information regarding lots of different issues overwhelm my brain. In addition there has been stress on the home front, but I’m encouraged to know that when some people let you down, others are waiting to help lift you back up!
On Friday I attended a workshop hosted by UNIFEM on Economic literacy. I had been looking forward to it all week, and there are subsequent workshops building on the same theme. What I was disappointed with however is that the “economic” literacy aspect is focused on macro economics and inter country treatment of poverty.This results in the problem of “Poverty” being framed in terms of “North-South” relationships between countries, and the problem of poverty facing many people in the developed countries is not discussed.
I believe that if Canada and Australia had a stronger presence here at the CSW the discussion could be different, and I would be hearing things more relevant to my life.After a conversation with an Aussie from the Staticians conference, I came to hear that Canada has a strong delegation present for that event and that they are being impressively progressive on issues such as “China” and “India,” but I don’t know what the conversations are dealing with, so I can’t go into that.
However it was worthy of mention because while other countries have been quite active in promoting what they are doing within their own countries to implement “Gender Budgeting” and achieving the Millennium Development Goal 3 “Empower women and promote equality between women and men” our Country (with the exception of the NGOs) has been mute on the subject.Also among the conversational buzz is the lack of indigenous people at this conference. Should there have been more of a presence I believe that the poverty gap between “rural and urban” would have had a stronger buzz here. The Australian Statician also commented that much like he found I was lamenting Canada’s silence on the issues surrounding aboriginal populations and the extreme poverty they face, Australia is (in his experience) the same. He described it as this two faced hypocrisy where our respective government point to all kinds of help that they are giving to outside countries, while they repeatedly ignore the plight of marginalized populations within their own.
Following the fairly irrelevant (but interesting) UNIFEM presentation, that mainly focused on Latin America, and problems with the IMF and the world bank, and how richer countries have been able to avoid them, I moved onto a workshop hosted by the American Women’s Medical Association. This workshop went over the effort of many Universities across the US to include women in non-traditional fields of medicine. They spoke about Mentors and the difference between male mentors (providing assistance to young female med students) which often came in the form of practical and technical aspects of medicine, to the femal mentors who seem to provide mentorship around lifestyle issues associated with different fields of medicine.
It was really nice to see, especially because after I left the workshop Hillary Clinton was spouting election promises like “Lets make University Affordable for all our citizens!” and brought me back to the fact that I wish fervently that I could finish my degree quickly, and immerse myself in study, but the economic barrier is simply too great. Muriel Smith, a former Deputy Premier out of Manitoba provided me (kindly) with economic literacy workbooks that I plan to use in the territory when I get back. I’ve noticed that they are very relevant to Manitoba specifically, but I’m sure that with help from Statistics Canada, I can kind of modify them to reflect Territorial reality, and that as a result it could provide women who participate in the workshops with an additional picture of how economic policy plays out in the different provinces.
12 Wednesday Mar 2008
Posted Oxfam, Women and politics
inRobert Fox, the Executive Director of Oxfam Canada, writes a great op-ed in the Chronicle Herald about the need for Canada to make progress on women’s gender equality. Here is just one short snippet… read the rest!
And there is much to be done in Canada itself. When Canada provides aid to governments in developing countries, the Canadian International Development Agency quite rightly demands that developing countries provide an analysis of how women and men will be affected by these funds. They realize the impact on women is likely to be different than it is for men.
Wouldn’t it be a good idea if that same lens were applied here in Canada to budgets at the federal, provincial and municipal levels? That, too, could be part of Canada’s contribution to women’s equality worldwide.
If women’s needs were taken into account in the budget process, Canada’s socio-economic landscape would be very different. Too often, government budgets are assumed to be a gender-neutral policy tool. But experience has shown that spending and tax cuts affect women and men differently based on the roles they play in society. A gender budget ensures the budget contributes to the broader societal goals of social justice, sharing the benefits and costs equitably.
If women’s needs were taken into account, there would be no question about privatizing health care; it would remain public and accessible to all. We would have a national child care program and greater support for affordable housing. Pay equity would be guaranteed and access to post-secondary training and education would be assured. Those accused of violence against women would be fully and fairly prosecuted and survivors of violence would receive the support and respect they need.
Just as we expect of the governments in the global South that receive Canadian aid, Canadians should demand that our governments commit to a budgetary process that addresses the needs of women.
12 Wednesday Mar 2008
So… we’re back from the UN… but I want ot continue with posting Mira Hall’s updates! Here we are with Day Six:
UN day 6: The poverty frame North and south versus rural and urbanI’m sorry that this too has been late in coming. I’m sure that everyone who has been actively reading can see me running out of steam as the days packed with information regarding lots of different issues overwhelm my brain. In addition there has been stress on the home front, but I’m encouraged to know that when some people let you down, others are waiting to help lift you back up!
On Friday I attended a workshop hosted by UNIFEM on Economic literacy. I had been looking forward to it all week, and there are subsequent workshops building on the same theme. What I was disappointed with however is that the “economic” literacy aspect is focused on macro economics and inter country treatment of poverty.This results in the problem of “Poverty” being framed in terms of “North-South” relationships between countries, and the problem of poverty facing many people in the developed countries is not discussed.
I believe that if Canada and Australia had a stronger presence here at the CSW the discussion could be different, and I would be hearing things more relevant to my life.After a conversation with an Aussie from the Staticians conference, I came to hear that Canada has a strong delegation present for that event and that they are being impressively progressive on issues such as “China” and “India,” but I don’t know what the conversations are dealing with, so I can’t go into that.
However it was worthy of mention because while other countries have been quite active in promoting what they are doing within their own countries to implement “Gender Budgeting” and achieving the Millennium Development Goal 3 “Empower women and promote equality between women and men” our Country (with the exception of the NGOs) has been mute on the subject.Also among the conversational buzz is the lack of indigenous people at this conference. Should there have been more of a presence I believe that the poverty gap between “rural and urban” would have had a stronger buzz here. The Australian Statician also commented that much like he found I was lamenting Canada’s silence on the issues surrounding aboriginal populations and the extreme poverty they face, Australia is (in his experience) the same. He described it as this two faced hypocrisy where our respective government point to all kinds of help that they are giving to outside countries, while they repeatedly ignore the plight of marginalized populations within their own.
Following the fairly irrelevant (but interesting) UNIFEM presentation, that mainly focused on Latin America, and problems with the IMF and the world bank, and how richer countries have been able to avoid them, I moved onto a workshop hosted by the American Women’s Medical Association. This workshop went over the effort of many Universities across the US to include women in non-traditional fields of medicine. They spoke about Mentors and the difference between male mentors (providing assistance to young female med students) which often came in the form of practical and technical aspects of medicine, to the femal mentors who seem to provide mentorship around lifestyle issues associated with different fields of medicine.
It was really nice to see, especially because after I left the workshop Hillary Clinton was spouting election promises like “Lets make University Affordable for all our citizens!” and brought me back to the fact that I wish fervently that I could finish my degree quickly, and immerse myself in study, but the economic barrier is simply too great. Muriel Smith, a former Deputy Premier out of Manitoba provided me (kindly) with economic literacy workbooks that I plan to use in the territory when I get back. I’ve noticed that they are very relevant to Manitoba specifically, but I’m sure that with help from Statistics Canada, I can kind of modify them to reflect Territorial reality, and that as a result it could provide women who participate in the workshops with an additional picture of how economic policy plays out in the different provinces.
12 Wednesday Mar 2008
Posted film, Gay Rights, Queer Issues, UBC, women's issues
inTags
UBC’s Critical Studies in Sexuality Program presents Susan Stryker (internationally recognized scholar of sexuality and gender) presents her movie “Screaming Queens”.
March 26th @ 4pm
BUCH A 205, UBC Point Grey Campus
On a hot summer’s night in 1966 in the city’s Tenderloin district, a group of transgendered women and gay street-hustlers fought back for the first time in history against everyday police harassment. This was a dramatic turning point for the transgendered community and the beginning of a new human rights struggle that continues to this day.
Come, see the move, talk with Susan!