International Women's Day 2009

Statement from the Communist Party of Canada

March 8: A day to honour women's struggles

For 98 years, March 8 has been a day to honour women’s struggles, take stock of hard-won gains, and put forward demands to promote full equality. Communists have played a leading role since the inception of International Women’s Day, which was unanimously adopted by a Socialist International women’s conference in Copenhagen in 1910 and observed for the first time in 1911. The Communist Party of Canada is part of this historic tradition. We salute women who are struggling throughout the world for peace, justice and equality, whose full participation is essential for the success of all working class and democratic movements.

This year on IWD, the United Nations has chosen the slogan “Women and Men United to End Violence Against Women and Girls.” Violence takes many forms, from family abuse to rape to human trafficking to war. To truly address these issues requires a major commitment to both legal remedies and social development.

In Canada, we must reverse the under-funding of emergency shelters and support services for victims of family violence. We must address the shameful economic and social conditions of Aboriginal women and girls, who have been particularly vulnerable to racism and inequality – hundreds have been murdered or disappeared. Internationally, trillions of dollars are wasted on war instead of development efforts to provide women and girls with education and economic opportunities, clean water, adequate health care, and more human rights protection, including personal security, choice in marriage, and reproductive choice. Changing material conditions goes hand in hand with changing social attitudes.

Today it is more obvious than ever that war is the most terrible crime against humanity. In many countries, from the Middle East to Afghanistan to Congo to Colombia, wars increasingly target civilian populations. Women and children are casualties of bombardment from the air and atrocities on the ground, and also the most frequent victims of public health catastrophes arising from the destruction of power plants, water supply systems and hospitals.

The Communist Party expresses our full solidarity for the women who are involved in the struggle for survival under difficult conditions and for peaceful resolution of conflicts. Particularly, we single out the women of Gaza, subject to inhuman attack following a long period of economic blockade. We call on all governments to embargo arms to the state of Israel until it abandons its policy of territorial expansion, violence and economic strangulation of Palestinian communities.

International Women’s Day 2009 takes place during the most serious global economic crisis in decades. Fifty million layoffs are expected this year, destroying the livelihood of countless families around the world, and threatening much of the social infrastructure which has improved women’s lives.

In response to the crisis, the corporations, and the governments which serve them, are increasing economic disparity by cutting social programs and giving unconditional bailouts to wealthy shareholders and CEOs. Rather than pay for the crisis which their system created, the capitalists want to roll back workers’ gains and set the stage for ever-deepening exploitation.

Here in Canada, unemployment is rising quickly, and the corporations are pushing for wage cuts. The demand for a country-wide child care system, a key issue in election after election, has again been abandoned by the minority Harper government. Incredibly, pay equity is actually under attack, with plans to reduce the opportunity for complaints through the courts. The Tories have ignored calls to improve the Employment Insurance system paid for by all workers. As the majority of part-time and minimum wage workers, women are disproportionately under-protected; only three women out of ten in the workforce are eligible to collect EI. Even those who do meet the requirements can’t survive on benefit rates set at 55% of their low previous earnings.

Needed: A working class response to the crisis

The response to the economic crisis by working people, women and men, must be a massive campaign to build a People’s Coalition for a genuine alternative to corporate greed. Such a campaign, led by the labour movement and its allies, should fight to restructure the economy, to provide sustainable jobs and to improve social services such as health, education and universal child care, to provide increased opportunities for women in the work force. To protect jobless workers and their families, EI payments must be set at 90% of previous earnings for the full duration of unemployment. Evictions and utility cutoffs against all families affected by unemployment must be banned.

But as long as capitalism continues, it will continue to generate poverty, inequality, exploitation, environmental degradation and war. These are not accidental side-effects, they are necessary ingredients of a system designed to maximize profit in private hands. Under capitalism, the women of the world face tremendous struggles to win new progress, or to hold on to gains already won. Every step forward will be threatened by the next economic downturn, and the danger of war is never absent.

Only socialism, based on democratic, collective ownership and working class power, can permit the enormous creative and productive potential of the world’s workers to be used constructively for human needs. On IWD 2009, the Communist Party of Canada stands in solidarity with all those who struggle for peace, equality, democracy and social progress. A better world is both possible and necessary - the world of socialism, the only system which can guarantee full equality and a future for humanity!