Driven Apart: Women's Employment in Canadian Public Policy

Elaine G. Porter is an associate professor of sociology at Laurentian
University.

Timpson begins with the benchmark World War II period during which time
the importance of women’s labor force participation was acknowledged
with provision of public daycare. These two policy areas were quickly
unraveled in the immediate postwar era and their separation subsequently
institutionalized, despite the historic opportunities that various
governmental commissions and agencies have provided for their
recoupling. Daycare has been linked to welfare policies intended to
foster the employment of low-income women and more recently rationalized
in terms of the needs of the child and the future labor force.
Employment equality has been aimed at addressing discrimination using a
human-rights model. Given that Timpson’s book is based on her
dissertation, many of her data come from primary sources that include
interviews with key actors and commission and legislative documents. Her
meticulous scholarship gives us a wealth of quotations—some translated
and some in their original French—and many charts for comparison
purposes.

What is wrong with parallelism in these policy areas? Two major royal
commissions and various governmental committees and task forces have
provided submissions recognizing the importance of nonmaternal child
care as a requisite for employment equality. Despite these efforts of
the many and the determination of a few over a nearly 30-year period,
the work-citizenship agenda was still not addressed. The Royal
Commission on Equality in Employment gave the Liberal government the
best opportunity to adopt child-care policies as part of employment
equity, but the Conservatives had come to power by the time it was
presented. Political ideology, though, was only part of the explanation
for relative inattention to its recommendations; the Trudeau government
had previously taken only a narrow workplace-based view of the
recommendations of the report on the Royal Commission on the Status of
Women.

The reasons given for inattention to the expressed need to merge the
private and public lives of women fall into jurisdictional, fiscal, and
institutional categories. Timpson’s note of optimism about the role of
the royal commissions in engendering public discourse is valid only if
all those interested in employment equity read her book, which they
should do.