This journalism is made possible by the Future of Good editorial fellowship on women’s economic resilience, supported by Scotiabank. See our editorial ethics and standards here.

The release of Budget 2022 was met with anticipation — and followed largely with disappointment — among those working toward a feminist recovery from the pandemic. 

Since the federal budget came out, social impact leaders across the country have been sharing their perspectives on how they could be more responsive to the struggles of women, non-binary folks, trans folks, migrants, and people with disabilities. 

The day after the budget’s release, Oxfam Canada and the Canadian Women’s Foundation co-hosted a webinar of social impact leaders across the country to weigh in on the budget’s intersectionality. The Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexuality’s executive director Debbie Owusu-Akyeeah and Wisdom2Action’s executive director Fae Johnstone led a queer analysis of the budget. And other feminist organizations across the country shared statements and analyses, too. 

Some celebrated small wins, and others shared that there simply weren’t enough measures to advance women and non-binary people’s rights and economic resilience.

According to the federal government’s gender-based analysis report on the budget, 44 percent of Budget 2022 will benefit women and men in equal proportions. Meanwhile, 42 percent of measures will directly or indirectly benefit men more than women, and 14 percent will directly or indirectly benefit women more than men. 

The report acknowledges that men are overrepresented in sectors benefiting from many of Budget 2022’s climate, infrastructure, agriculture, and energy measures. “Although these measures will ultimately benefit all Canadians, the workforce in these sectors are predominantly men, who, in turn, will indirectly benefit from the increased economic opportunities associated with these investments,” the report reads. 

So – how could Budget 2022 have contributed to a stronger feminist economic recovery?

Investing in an inclusive workforce

At Oxfam and the Canadian Women’s Foundation’s feminist leaders’ Budget 2022 analysis webinar, Martha Jackman, executive director of the National Association of Women and the Law, pointed out a surprising gap in the budget: “There is no funding commitment to long-term care. The vast majority of workers and residents in long-term care are women.” Not to mention the vast majority of the sector’s workers, too.

The lack of support for facilities, at home care, and the employees doing the care work comes as a surprise following the concentration of COVID-19 cases in long-term care facilities, understaffing, and overrepresentation of racialized employees on the frontlines. 

“This omission has a huge impact on women in Canada,” said Jackman. 

Meanwhile, the childcare side of the care economy was not ignored, but the budget did not directly address the source of their economic insecurity. 

At the Oxfam Canada and Canadian Women’s Foundation webinar, Morna Ballantyne, executive director of Child Care Now, said it’ll be impossible to recruit and retain more early childhood educators without raising the low compensation in the sector. “None of the childcare agreements include proper strategies for doing this.”

Early childhood educators, 96 percent of whom are women, make an average of $35,582 per year.

The federal government’s $10-a-day child care agreement with all 13 provinces and territories has been bolstered by a proposed $625 million over four years to Employment and Social Development Canada for an Early Learning and Child Care Infrastructure Fund starting 2023 to 2024.

Ballantyne is concerned with the infrastructure: “Only a minority of mothers will have access to licenced programs and only a minority will benefit from the federal government’s remarkable $10-a day childcare policy.”

Currently, there are enough licenced childcare spaces for one in four Canadian children under six years old. There are even less spaces for children with special needs, rural families, and parents who work outside the typical nine-to-five workday. 

“How are we expected to build so many childcare spaces?” said Amar Nijhawan, policy and advocacy specialist at Oxfam Canada, who also spoke at the webinar. “There’s no workforce strategy to address the early childhood educators. And you can extend that to every part of the care economy in this budget itself.”

Nijhawan said the budget could have considered decent work for women in Canada — and how to support the care economy better as a whole. “Measures to support care workers and racialized women workers across the countries, who are often concentrated in low-income precarious jobs, were pretty minimal,” said Nijhawan. “The real crisis in the care economy that we’re seeing around wages, poor working conditions, burnout, labor shortages, [and] recruitment were not referenced in this budget document at all.”

Prioritizing Indigenous women’s economic participation

Budget 2022 proposes $15 million over five years to the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency to support Indigenous economic development in the North and $35 million over five years to Indigenous Services Canada to increase economic capacity supports, including specialized Indigenous-led training opportunities, both starting between 2022 and 2023. 

However, there are no provisions specifically for Indigenous women, whose 54.7 percent employment rate (as of August 2021) is nearing its pre-pandemic level of 54.9 percent. Indigenous men’s employment rate surpassed pre-pandemic rates and sits at 60.8 percent. 

While employment among Indigenous communities is rising, it’s nowhere near the rate among the population as a whole. As of March, the country’s overall unemployment rate is the lowest it has been since the pandemic, at 5.3 percent. 

Tamsin Fitzgerald, director of gender equality initiatives at Les Femmes Michif Otipemisiwak (Women of the Métis Nation), raised concerns over Budget 22’s focus on violence Indigenous women and girls endured instead of elevating opportunities for their economic prosperity.  

“Indigenous women are only mentioned in terms of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls crisis that is happening, which absolutely needs attention, which absolutely needs funding and investments in the resources. But Indigenous women are so much more than the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls,” said Fitzgerald, at the Oxfam Canada-Canadian Women’s Foundation feminist analysis webinar. 

“Women are contributing to society. They’re entrepreneurs, they’re pursuing their education. And I don’t see any of that reflected in this budget hearing.”

Indigenous women make up 40 percent of self-employed Indigenous people, while non-Indigenous women make up 36 percent of self-employed Canadians. Meanwhile, Indigenous women continue to face barriers to financing. Sixteen percent of Indigenous men-owned businesses secure business loans, compared to seven percent of Indigenous women-owned businesses

Social and institutional barriers to professional growth, and of course, the impact of the pandemic has also stunted their businesses growth – but the budget is without specific funding to address these hurdles.

The budget notes gaps in labour force participation, including people with disabilities, people with a high school level education or less, Indigenous people, recent immigrants, and women. The budget acknowledges “it will become critical to improve labour market participation of underrepresented segments of the population” but does not propose funding to address barriers to these identified groups. 

“Indigenous folks and people with disabilities are less likely to participate in the labour force,” said Nijhawan. “Immigrant and visible minority women continue to be less likely to participate in the labour market as well.”

Addressing the wage gaps Black, Indigenous and women of colour experience because of their race and gender  

“The budget did address anti-hate but the reality is, Canada continues to fail on its promises and its platitudes around anti racism,” said Shalini Konanur, executive director of the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario (SALCO) and Colour of Poverty-Colour of Change (COP-COC), representing both organizations at the Oxfam Canada-Canadian Women’s Foundation’s webinar. COP-COC is a network of social impact and legal organizations building initiatives and coordinated strategies to address structural and systematic ethno-racial inequality. 

Konaur listed the impacts of systemic racism on health, education, income, housing, and access to justice for Indigenous, Black and racialized communities – especially on women in these communities. 

Budget 2022 proposes $85 million over four years to the Department of Canadian Heritage to support the launch of a new Anti-Racism Strategy and National Action Plan on Combatting Hate. It will support community projects ensuring Black, racialized Canadians, and religious minorities have resources to support full participation in the economy starting between 2022 to 2023. It also proposes to provide $1.9 million to complete the Employment Equity Act Review to address inequality for workers facing barriers to employment, which will be publicized in fall 2022.

“We do want to welcome the announcement of approximately $1.9 million to complete the federal employment Equity Act review, but the truth is, it’s just not enough. The race-gender wage gap, the inequity to access and employment insurance, and the continued discrimination in the workforce, work together to simply create poor labor market outcomes for racialized women,” said Konanur. “They get paid less. They get hired to work in precarious work situations, and they make up a large population of low wage workers. We need budgeted action to strengthen the employment equity scheme – including enforcement. The truth is, we cannot assert a right to employment equity when a scheme is not enforced.”

Providing housing and living supports for criminalized women, nonbinary, and trans people

Budget 2022 proposes $1.5 billion over two years to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation to extend the Rapid Housing Initiative and create at least 6,000 new affordable housing units, starting 2022 to 2023. At least 25 percent of this funding is going towards women-focused housing projects.

“This housing money is always welcome. But we want to ensure that funding is available for everyone and for our network, who work with criminalized women specifically,” said Emily Coyle, executive director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies (CAEFS), speaking on behalf of its member organizations at the feminist analysis webinar. “It’s been hard to get some of that funding, especially in rural, remote and northern communities who have been underfunded in the program so far.”

CAEFS helps criminalized women and gender-diverse people by defending prisoner rights, advocating for reproductive justice while incarcerated, connecting families, and accessing services once they have finished their sentences. 

Coyle said the CAEFS member organizations’ work falls along the spectrum of the multiple budget interventions, and wants to ensure they all support post-incarceration life as well.

Coyle said the budget needs to fund interventions that specifically support criminalized women because of the stigma of criminal records making it even more difficult for people to access services and support. Studies show that following incarceration, women’s employment rate is 19 percent, compared to men’s 50 percent. 

Social determinants of health like housing, health, dental care, mental health supports employment opportunities, childcare, nutritious food, and basic income are all considerations the budget must take into account, according to Coyle.

“We need core funding for our organizations because our work is consistently frustrated by providing programming year over year that requires organizations like ours and others to spend our precious time writing funding proposals that don’t bring sustained or stable funding to our work,” said Coyle. 

Providing ongoing funding for LGBTQ2S+ organizations 

LGBTQ2S+ social impact organizations seek continual core funding to establish the national infrastructure to support the queer community, young and old.

Budget 2022 proposed a historic $100 million over five years to implement the Federal LGBTQ2 Action Plan, starting between 2022 and 2023.

“It is an unprecedented investment, but that doesn’t mean that it is quantified, substantive or sufficient in response to the degree of need or crisis in our communities,” said Fae Johnstone, executive director of Wisdom2Action (W2A). W2A is a social enterprise and consulting firm specializing in community engagement, research, knowledge mobilization, and equity, diversity, and inclusion. 

“We were really wanting to see a very clear queer lens on housing and poverty reduction in particular, given the impact of COVID-19 on low-income earners in particular,” said Johnstone. 

Statistics Canada reports 41 percent of LGBTQ2+ Canadians make less than $20,000 a year, whereas only 26 percent of non-LGBTQ2+ workers make less than that. 

The 519 cites 55 percent of trans people having difficulty meeting housing-related costs. 

“That pay gap is exacerbated particularly for queer and trans Black, Indigenous and racialized folks, for trans women, and for disabled queer and trans people,” said Johnstone. 

Johnstone said she would like to see the government dedicate specific funding to trans issues in particular because they are most disproportionately impacted of LGBTQ2S+ people. “Trans people experience unique barriers that are distinct and don’t always express themselves in the same way.

Despite this, Johnstone said she’s noticed some civil society organizations say their programs also serve trans people — and therefore get funding, but their projects don’t address the unique needs of trans people, leaving LGBTQ2S+ people out from truly benefiting from services. 

According to Johnstone, LGBTQ2S+ organizations lack the infrastructure to quantify evidence-based arguments for the issues they advocate for. Still, she said, “I know that investing in queer and trans communitiy services has a net benefit because it decreases the rate of queer and trans kids becoming homeless, going emergency rooms, living in poverty – that addressing trans and queer communities in in our economic best interest. This is in our economic interest.”

Investing in national disability benefit

Bonnie Brayton, executive director of DisAbled Women’s Network Canada said she is disappointed with Budget 2022. “There’s nothing about the national disability benefit in this budget.”

While Budget 2022 proposes $272.6 million over five years to Employment and Social Development Canada to support the implementation of an employment strategy for persons with disabilities through the Opportunities Fund, Brayton said the budget is siloed. 

Women with disabilities make up 24 percent of Canadians. According to Brayton, the rate of disabilities among Indigenous and Black women is higher than 30 percent. 

“This is another one of those budgets where you kind of see a little bit of this and that, and really no focus is going to make an impact,” said Brayton. “The employment strategy for people with disabilities was mentioned, but where’s the money for social development? We need to build the capacity of civil society.”

Budget 22’s Safe and Inclusive Communities proposals include doubling the Home Accessibility Tax Credit to offset some of the costs of home renovations to live safely at home – but what about outside the home? 

Education and employment are harder to acquire when living with disabilities. Statistics Canada reports that women with disabilities were less likely to attend a special education school or special education classes and have additional expenses for schooling. Barriers to women living with disabilities’ economic independence is finding adequate workplace accommodation. 

Twenty-three percent of women with disabilities live on low income (meaning they bring in under 50 percent of the country’s median income).

Brayton questioned if ramps and special training for women with disabilities are considered in the government’s plan to expand childcare centres. Centres need to be accessible for children with disabilities to attend — and for childcare workers with disabilities to teach. 

To have equal participation in the workplace, women, non-binary, and trans people with disabilities need workplace accommodation, opportunities for skill straining, and wage equity. 

While the budget’s proposed $5.3 billion to provide dental care for Canadians over five years is an accomplishment, Brayton raises the point that many dental clinics are not accessible for people with disabilities. Women from low-income groups already have higher rates of oral health issues compared to men in the same income groups, according to the gender-based analysis report.

However, the government’s gender-based analysis report says the new dental care program is expected to indirectly benefit dental professionals as demand for services increase, and women make up around eight of 10 people working in the dental sector. 

“In the case of this government, have they forgotten that it was all of us women, people with disabilities, paid and unpaid caregivers, who got us through the pandemic alongside you?” said Brayton. “Disability rights continue to be an afterthought, but we’re supposed to be grateful when we’re mentioned in a budget. We’re rights holders and in this context of intersectional budgeting, there has to be a stronger focus on disability.”

Tell us this made you smarter | Contact us | Report error