Hot Tubbin' For Justice

BCNDP Women's Rights Committee Convention We started our BCNDP convention experience off by attending the Women's Rights Committee (WRC) convention which occurs prior to the opening plenary.  We were fortunate to have Rhiannon Bennett, from Delta, give the territorial acknowledgement. She started off by holding up a purse and a scarf, and acknowledged that both of which belonged to Maurine Karagianis. She asked "is it enough to acknowledge these items of Maurine's if I have them, for her to access the economy ?" Nope. We, the NDP need to do better - it's not about shame or guilt, but about acknowledging the privilege of what we've been given. She talked to us about the resilience of indigenous peoples and how they've been able to save their languages in the face of being being jailed for speaking their languages, having needles poked into their tongues in residential school, and other horrific things. Rhiannon brought humour and heart to her te...

The Power of Breaking Barriers: Systemic Change, Individual Gains Dr. Natalia Kenem, the Executive Director of the UN Population Fund introduced and set the context for this panel. She said that women belong at the centre of development. Population isn't just about numbers it's about people's lives. As we take global stock of what's happening in the world, when everyone awakens, mountains will move.  And there is movement, and we'll hear from the following panelists on how we are moving toward progress and change. Panel: Shahira Amin - Independent Journalist (moderator) Dr. Alvaro Bermejo - International Planned Parenthood Waneek Horn-Miller - Indigenous Olympian Hina Jilani - Supreme Court of Pakistan Musola Catherine Kaseketi - Vilole Images Productions Nancy Northrup - Centre for Reproductive Rights Lina Abirafeh, PhD - The Arab Institute for Women at the Lebanese American University Anoka Primrose - Social Entrepreneur Nancy Northrup from t...

The Power of Integration and Scale: Driving Big Global Social Change This plenary was opened by remarks from the President of the Republic of Kenya His Excellency Hon. Uhuru Kenyatta. Kenya is focusing their policies and legislation on women's rights. He said that good leadership is drawn from the aspirations of the population and it must include all in its population. There is an economic, political and moral imperative to centre women and girls in government policy. He ran through the list of things Kenya is doing: enact the first policy to that is focused on pre and post-natal care $480 million USD investment in maternity services and child immunizations reserve 30% of all government procurement for women, youth and the disabled (in the form of credit and training) moving towards the elimination of gender-based violence and female genital mutilation "gender mainstreaming" - to lift women out of poverty, improve illiteracy levels and cure diseases to st...

This session featured: Joan Timoney - Women's Refugee Commission (USA) - moderator Lina Abou-Habib - Women's Learning Partnership (Lebanon) Melanie Gallant - UN High Commissioner for Refugees (Canada) Zoreh Yasna Faizi - Women Refugee Route (Denmark) We started with some context setting by taking a global look at asylum, settlement and nationality laws. In 2016, the member states of the UN signed the New York Declaration for Migrants and Refugees where countries committed to save lives, protect rights on a global scale. A gender perspective would be used to look at the plight of migrant and refugee women and girls including their sexual and reproductive rights.  Our panelists were very different. We started with Zoreh Yasna Faizi is an Afghan refugee who settled in Denmark. She was born during the war in Afghanistan. Her father was a strong feminist and a politician of which she wanted to be as well. When she was 8 years old her school closed when the Taliban came t...

The Power of Agency: Changemakers on Surviving and preventing gender-based violence Ok it was pretty cool to walk back into a plenary session at a conference to see a special video message from Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern. She's so earnest. I became aware of her when she became the first woman in New Zealand to give birth in office and then like the rest of the world, was captivated by her leadership after the Christchurch massacre.  The thing that stuck with me the most (I was starving and wolfing down a burrito while she was talking) was her statement that women have the right to be themselves in politics. That we don't have to change who we are or how we play the game. That resonated with me and how I navigate union politics in all of the roles I have in the labour movement. Now it's time for the plenary to start. This time it's not a panel discussion but a series of speakers. I really am aware how intersectional and global the sessions at ...

The Power of Now: Taking stock of where we stand and what opportunities and challenges lie ahead  The morning started off with the Honourable Maryam Monsef, our Minister of International Development and Minister for Women and Gender Equality. She's the first Afghan-Canadian elected to parliament and the first Muslim to serve in the federal cabinet. She's relatively young too. I just wish as a speaker she was as interesting as her life story. That being said, she's new, and has time to grow. I will give her props for being accessible - every time I saw her around the conference she would stop and talk to people, danced with them at culture night and at no time did I ever see her not make the time for the people who wanted to talk to her. She had a very awkward intro for the PM - she said "achieving accelerated progress in for gender equity in the moment is because we have more men with us." Uh ok, yeah sure there are lots of male allies but it's ...