Nickle Galleries

“Solitude”

“Resilience”

Teresa Posyniak is a Calgary-based artist and activist who has been creating art for over 40 years, yet the full extent of her extraordinary practice was not understood until recently. It seems as if this 73-year-old artist was “discovered” in 2024. That June, her monumental painting “Grasslands Tapestry” was the showstopper among the hundreds of commissioned works in the new BMO Centre. A few months later the Nickle Galleries in Calgary presented Teresa Posyniak: Resilience, the most important exhibition of her long career. While not a retrospective, this exhibition was a curated selection of works demonstrating the major themes that have driven the artist’s work over four decades, primarily women’s issues and the environment.

What was striking to gallery visitors was the variety of styles, subjects and formats, ranging from a massive installation to paintings of great delicacy and intensity of feeling. Of note too was the number of media employed by the artist: steel, wood, concrete, handmade paper, felt and silk, as well as oil, acrylic, encaustic (hot wax) and cold wax. All of Posyniak’s works, in whatever material or format she uses, explore themes of vulnerability and resilience in her unique voice.

The exhibition was grounded by a dramatically lit installation entitled “Resilience,” set in a darkened gallery space evocative of ceremony and ritual. Its genesis can be traced to 1983, when Posyniak reacted viscerally to the sexual harassment she faced as a graduate student at the University of Calgary. Her response was to create a huge installation, effectively a metaphorical refuge she called “Sanctuary.” Over the years, elements harvested from “Sanctuary” were reused, remade and readapted in other works. One work of art begat another.

“Resilience” was the most recent iteration, comprised of fluted columns and strangely anthropomorphic vertical sculptures, like sentinels. In the gallery an altar-like frieze of splayed uprights silently beckoned. Although its parts are recycled from earlier works, every unique vertical bundle was a new entity. Several of the sculptures resonated with echoes of the artist’s heritage and childhood. Collaged doilies, crocheted fabrics and lace were sealed into their skins by coats of hot wax and painted with oil and cold wax. Layers of overlapping bindings both concealed and revealed, as apertures exposed open wounds while tightly bound surfaces restrained tension.

The artist’s focus on women and increasingly on motherhood continued as she transitioned to painting through the 1980s. Posyniak created haunting figurative works in which female nudes occupy indeterminate, unsettling spaces. In many works, an isolated woman reveals her pain and desperation through the bundle she clutches. When Posyniak became pregnant in 1986, she was overjoyed but also afraid. She expressed her feelings in powerful abstract paintings, such as the monumental triptych “Annunciation,” in which a sense of vitality and growth is conveyed through movement in sweeping lines, flowing shapes and high contrast. Here, the beginnings of life are intuited, expressed in fluid visual metaphors drawn in sinuous, overlapping and intertwined shapes.

In her art Posyniak strives to portray an interconnectedness between all life forms. Through a series undertaken over the past 15 years, represented in this exhibition by two stylistically different paintings, she explores the structure, shape and significance of microscopic plankton, which supply half of the world’s oxygen through photosynthesis and are under threat from climate change. In Posyniak’s hands, scientific fact is transmuted into a world of mystery and wonder. The exhibition included paintings that reflect not just the beauty of the patterns in nature but also its vulnerability. A case in point are her textured and coloured paintings that deal with the violence wrought by the mountain pine beetle on the ponderosa pine, an ecological disaster exacerbated by a warming planet.

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There was no shelter, either, from what came to pass. Teddy Poole was first: he died in a car accident in Grade 9, before I moved away. In his 30s, Billy Shandro shot himself. Johnny Crocket died later of cancer. The Pike girl, who was a ski racer, became a bag lady. One of those falls did something to her head, people said.

Mildred/Jennie’s sunny backyard faces west over the river; it is a beautiful spot, so different from my narrow, horizon-less townhouse garden in Toronto. She and her kids order pizza for dinner. I call Carol Marshall, with whom I used to draw architectural house plans. We’re going out for dinner. I say goodbye to Jennie, but before we leave the neighbourhood we drive past “our” house. Yes, the fence dad built is still standing. It’s a good fence.

Only as we fly in Carol’s car across the bridge to a restaurant, a safe, anonymous haunt, do I finally shake the feeling that I am dreaming.

It was a wonderful dream. I am so glad I had it. I feel envious of my own past, of myself, that favoured, happy childhood in that golden world. How did this lucky-ness happen and give me a lifelong sense of being blessed Women made that home, and women changed it. My mother, after all, sent me on that bus, while she—who would have loved to go places—stayed home. I mourn this place. I want the bus to stop longer. But the 10 minutes is up, and the bus sighs into motion.

To read the entire article, from the October 2005 issue, click here.

Govier revisits “A Trip Around the Bus Loop”:

“Women made that home, and women changed it.” This sentence stands out in the account of my return visit to the golden neighbourhood of my childhood.

I do remember the quiet expectancy of sitting on that bus heading off to ballet class and a discipline that linked me to far-off places for life. My mother put me on that bus. It was the ’50s. I was sent out into the world on an errand for my mother who was held back by the times. I doubt I will ever be extricated from that.

Then too, another day on the bus comes to mind. A smelly old man sat beside me and pushed his elbow into my crotch, harder and harder, grinning. I was too shy to scream or push him away but I knew to get myself out of there. I stood up, far before my stop, and got off the bus. I was in front of the Legislature building. I found my way back home by walking across the High Level Bridge. Long, dark and narrow, in the middle it stands 210 feet above the water, higher than Niagara Falls.

I say there is no shelter from the darkness when the world breaks through childhood’s aura. But I had more than most—my love of language, the optimism of the West, of my parents, of their parents, the belief in progress of that decade, the green youth of country. 

At 21, about to leave Edmonton forever, I walked back across that bridge, this time on the train track above the roadway. Probably hundreds of daredevils and nitwits have done the same. It was tracks and nothing else; there was no escape if a train came. And trains did, in 1971. My friend and I bet our lives on the fact that one wouldn’t. Why, I do not know: it was an exhilarating final gesture that seemed to come out of nowhere. I wrote my first short story about that walk.

Maybe the place was not so perfect after all. If I were to ride around the bus loop anywhere in the world, I would pass hundreds of homes where women wept. I would pass by war, famine, drought, corruption, neglect and suffering.

None of those truly clouded my horizons those days in Windsor Park, though we seemed to be in rehearsal for their eventual occurrence. Reading my words again today I am further amazed and humbled at my good fortune to have inhabited that “perfect place,” and also to have escaped it.

Katherine Govier is the author of 10 novels.

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In December at a rally in front of the Alberta legislature organized by Ezra Levant, the crowd reacted to comments about Rachel Notley by chanting, “Lock her up! Lock her up!”

In January the Alberta PC board suspended Alan Hallman’s membership in the party for a year for his offensive tweets. Board member Kim Krushell made the motion and then-party president Katherine O’Neill executed it. “By mid-week,” the Edmonton Journal reported, “both Krushell and O’Neill were dealing with a vicious, misogynist blow-back, the virulence of which has left both women, who are no strangers to the rough-and-tumble of politics in Alberta, shaken.” O’Neill resigned in April.

What is the source of the hostility and resistance to women in politics What deep-seated disturbances underlie our concepts of masculinity and femininity?

Hillary Clinton’s run for president of the most powerful country in the world provoked more than usual controversy about the role of women in politics. Americans were agog at the possibility of her shattering their last glass ceiling—though India had a woman prime minister, Indira Gandhi, as early as 1966; Israel, Golda Meir, from 1969 and Britain, Margaret Thatcher, from 1979. Canada too had a woman prime minister—Kim Campbell, though ever so briefly in 1993. Women lead the government in many countries: Theresa May (UK), Angela Merkel (Germany) and Michelle Bachelet (Chile), to name only a few.

But in some minds, connecting “woman” with power creates dissonance. How could such a powerful country as the US be led by a woman During the campaign last summer, popular Christian radio host Bryan Fischer, an influence on Republican policy, drew his arguments from the Bible: “The kings were all males, when you had a departure from that with Jezebel and Athaliah, it was not a good thing, it did not work out well. Leadership in the church is reserved for men, leadership in the home is reserved for men. In other words, in God’s economy, he has designed leadership and authority in society and in the church and in the home to be exercised by men… I don’t believe that women should be entrusted with high political office.”

Fischer’s convictions align with a certain kind of upbringing. Political commentators and analysts don’t usually talk about family formation, archetypes, symbols and how language works. But given objections such as Fischer’s, linguist George Lakoff says “it is imperative to bring these considerations into public political discourse.”

What is the source of the hostility and resistance to women in politics What deep-seated disturbances underlie our concepts of masculinity and femininity?

According to Lakoff political attitudes are shaped by the moral worldviews of two forms of family: “nurturant” and “strict father,” each with differing attitudes toward women. In the nurturant family, the mother and father are equal. The primary motivator of behaviour is affection. The strict-father family is hierarchical. The primary motivator of behaviour is fear of punishment and desire for approval. Lakoff says: “In the strict-father family, father knows best. He knows right from wrong and has the ultimate authority to make sure his children and his spouse do what he says.”

A man convinced of his moral superiority is outraged at the thought of a woman in a position of power over him. “There are at least tens of millions of conservatives in America who share strict-father morality and its moral hierarchy,” says Lakoff. “Many of them are poor or middle class and many are white men who see themselves as superior to immigrants, nonwhites, women, non-Christians, gays—and people who rely on public assistance. In other words, they are what liberals would call ‘bigots.’ ”

The strict father is an authoritarian. Sociologist Stanley Feldman developed a way to measure authoritarianism with four questions that seem to be about parenting:

1. Is it more important for a child to have independence or respect for elders?
2. to have self-reliance or obedience?
3. to be considerate or to be well-behaved?
4. to have curiosity or good manners?

Since 1992 the National Election Study, a large survey of US voters conducted in each national election year, has included these four questions to measure authoritarianism and assess how it aligns with demographic profiles and policy preferences. According to political scientists, people who score high in authoritarianism want a leader to impose order on a world they perceive as threatening, and to take any action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear. In a dangerous situation people would rather have someone vicious in charge than someone loving.

This may partly explain Trump’s victory and also the vitriol directed at women in politics in Alberta. For those who believe that God is male and the events in the Bible literally happened, the very order of the universe is threatened by the rise of women.

Yet rise women have. I have experienced the upheaval in my own life.

I was born and raised in Alberta, a place of paradox for a woman. In the male-dominated culture of the oil industry—and before that, ranching—we were told that here “men are men and women are glad of it,” whether we were glad of it or not. When I was growing up in Bowness in the ’50s, it was taken for granted that a man had a right to beat his wife. Yet Alberta was the first place in the British Empire to appoint a woman judge. After women won the right to vote in 1916, Albertans Louise McKinney and Roberta MacAdams became the first women in the British Empire to be elected to a legislature.

My mother, who was often the sole breadwinner in our family, was not eligible as a woman for a mortgage. My father owned our house though my mother made the payments. Men had the prerogative to go to the bar and cut loose, women never. Women were 100 per cent responsible for the children. We were Catholic. Women were not allowed on the altar except to clean it. God was male and all His representatives on earth had to be male. Women didn’t qualify. The possibilities for women seemed rather bleak.

But we did subscribe to Chatelaine magazine, and Doris Anderson was the editor. She was an Albertan, born in Medicine Hat like my dad, and a graduate of U of A. I started absorbing her ideas from around the age of 12. Doris was using Chatelaine to fight for the equality of men and women, to challenge the male dominance in Parliament and to expose women’s poverty. She increased the circulation of the magazine from 480,000 when she became editor in 1957 to 1.8 million by the late 1960s, making it the most profitable Maclean-Hunter publication. Still, her salary was $23,000 while Charles Templeton, editor at Maclean’s, made $53,000.

Anderson resigned as president of the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women in 1981 during the repatriation of our Constitution to protest the federal government’s reluctance to explicitly affirm women’s equality. Her action sparked an outcry—the catalyst of a movement to amend the Canadian Charter. Because of this, our Charter explicitly identifies men and women as equal under the law.

For me it’s significant that Anderson was raised by a single parent—her mother, who kept a boarding house to support them. She had a female model of independence and strength. My brothers and I too were raised in a single-parent family by my mother after she left my dad. Family structure and the roles played by men and women within the family certainly affect how we see our own possibilities, as well as our political attitudes.

Around the time I was graduating from Grade 12 in the mid ’60s, I read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a critique of the conventional role of women as housewives. Friedan argued that what was thought of as femininity was really immaturity. For women to achieve full human identity required them to develop their mental capacity, find meaningful work and be capable of self-reliance.

I decided I wanted full human identity and I was going to live my life the way a man lived his. I chose to go to university, to do work that was important to me and to make my own money. I determined to be independent and to make my own decisions.

Women were denied access to the professions—prevented from attending law or medical school—until the early 20th century, but even after regulations changed it took a long time for broad societal change. As John Stuart Mill remarks in his essay “On Liberty,” nothing oppresses us more than our customs.

Originally I had planned to study law, but after I got my first degree and interviewed for law school, the dean discouraged me. “It will be very difficult for you to find an articling position,” he said. “Law firms don’t want to take any chances on women getting pregnant.” At that time (1967) 97 per cent of lawyers were men. A survey of Toronto law firms found that 40 per cent of the firms openly admitted to a prejudiced attitude toward women applicants.

Before the pill—reliable birth control—biology was destiny for many women. The pill had been available in Canada since 1957 but could be prescribed legally only for purposes other than birth control (i.e., menstrual irregularity, menstrual cycle control). It wasn’t until 1969 that contraception was decriminalized.

So, rather than law, I went to graduate school and studied literature. Essentially it meant learning to read—which was fortunate for me. I discovered Joseph Campbell’s keys to Finnegan’s Wake and then his work on myth. Campbell’s study of world mythology reveals universal patterns and recurring motifs, for example, of virgin birth and death of the innocent. I learned how to understand events in sacred texts not as historical facts, but as metaphorical representations of spiritual realities. Also useful was the discovery that civilizations preceding the Judeo-Christian era conceived of their all-powerful divinity as female: Phoenician Astarte, Egyptian Isis, Babylonian Ishtar. The more profound view was that God is neither man nor woman, of course, but quite beyond gender.

For those who believe that God is male and the events in the Bible literally happened, the very order of the universe is threatened by the rise of women.

This was my liberation as a woman, enabling me to break free of the male dominant “mind-forg’d manacles” without losing the essence of my faith. I completed two more degrees and began my career teaching literature. When I married I kept my own name (controversial at the time—Maureen McTeer caused a scandal when she didn’t take Joe Clark’s name in 1973). I worked as an English instructor at Mount Royal College. I could choose not to have children because of the recent availability of the birth control pill.

Over my lifetime many opportunities have opened up for women in law, medicine, engineering, the military, senior management and politics. Today around 40 per cent of lawyers are women, and women make up half the student body at many law schools. Universities today graduate more women than men. In 2014 several women moved into prominent positions traditionally held by men. Libby Lane became the first female Church of England bishop, Mary Barra the first female CEO of General Motors and Michelle J. Howard of the US Navy the first female four-star admiral. Three provinces—Ontario, BC and Alberta—are led by women: Kathleen Wynne, Christy Clark and Rachel Notley.

In 2015 Justin Trudeau appointed women to half his cabinet positions. In Alberta half the NDP caucus are women and, as in the federal government, half the provincial cabinet positions are held by women, two appointed when pregnant. Stephanie McLean, minister in the new portfolio for Status of Women, is Canada’s second cabinet minister to deliver a child while in office. (Christy Clark was BC’s Minister of Education when her son was born in 2001. Pauline Marois, elected to the Quebec National Assembly in 1981, was appointed Minister for the Status of Women a week after her second child was born.) McLean assumed the job mere days before she gave birth, and brought weeks-old baby Patrick strapped to her body for the spring 2016 session of the legislature. This is a credit to McLean’s strength and courage, and a triumph for women in overthrowing another limitation, another false idea of what a woman can and cannot do.

Nonetheless, remembering my exhaustion after the birth of my first child, I had a visceral reaction to the sight of a newly delivered mother and infant standing to speak in the legislative assembly.

Was this really the intended aim of the long struggle for the rights of women?

In conventional thinking within our culture, masculinity and femininity are taken to be opposites: strong, aggressive and dominant versus vulnerable, receptive and submissive.

The terms “Man” and “Woman” can be seen as archetypes: Woman is the nurturer, staying put in the home tending the hearth, concerned with domestic matters and the private, personal and emotional. Man is the provider, going out to hunt or work or speak in the forum, concerned with public matters and the civic, critical and analytical.

However in other societies the qualities associated with males and females are quite different. Margaret Mead found that the Tchambuli woman was dominant and the man dependent, the Mundugumor woman was violent and aggressive and the Arapesh man was nurturing and gentle. Mead concluded that “many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called masculine and feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of headdress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex.”

“Woman” as gentle nurturer and “Man” as strong leader are symbols of forces in our own psyches or unconscious minds perhaps derived at a prelinguistic age from the characteristics of our original caretakers. The archetypes Woman and Man do not refer to flesh and blood human beings. Actual living human beings share the full range of human characteristics from strength and aggression to kindness and submission, whether they are male or female. The differences in intelligence, say, between any two men or any two women are much greater than the differences between men and women. That is, intrasex variation is greater than intersex variation.

As we differentiate mythical events from historical facts, so we distinguish archetypes of Woman and Man from living human beings who manifest on a full gender continuum. A human being, whether male or female, has the potential for a range of qualities from tough to tender, nurturing to independent. And individuals become more whole by developing both the so-called male and female sides of themselves—from emotional and critical intelligence to the capacity to be strong and vulnerable.

Flesh and blood women, knowing they had full human capacities, pushed to break free of the constraints of the Woman archetype. They fought for the right to vote and to hold public office, to attend university, to qualify for every job. They wanted to do everything that a man does. And why not.

Unfortunately our institutions—parliaments, the church, the military, the courts, corporations—were created by men for men. Man-made institutions are hierarchical, adversarial and polarizing. In parliamentary debate it is the right argument versus the wrong; in the church, good versus evil; in the courts, guilt versus innocence; in the corporate world, success versus failure; and in the military, allies against enemies. In a debate, a trial or a war, there is always a winner and a loser.

Over my lifetime, as opportunities opened up, women made themselves interchangeable with men. They twisted themselves out of shape to fit into a man’s world. But what does gender equality really mean Not sameness. The word “equal” does not mean “identical.” Equality can affirm the equal value of both men and women and still recognize differences between them. Gender is not entirely a social construct: females everywhere conceive and bear children while men do not. Our institutions do not recognize that men have families. Until recently, the assumption in the world of work seemed to be that a man’s responsibility for raising his children was fulfilled by his financial contribution without his having to spend any actual time with them. When women entered the workforce the same assumption was made about them. But for women child-rearing is not so easily left behind.

The advancement of society may not be a matter of women fitting into male institutions, but rather of institutions transforming to accommodate not just women but parents—mothers and fathers alike. Work schedules for both men and women could be restructured more flexibly to accommodate childcare and family life. Minister McLean had to bring her baby to the legislature because MLAs are not eligible for maternity leave. The greater triumph for women might have been for her to have been able to go on maternity leave.

There came a time when I felt I had sacrificed some part of myself to live my life the way a man lived his. I had accommodated to the world as it was. The better world is not one where women become like men, but where the entire system changes to accommodate differences. Where people regardless of their gender are able to participate and contribute as who they are, out of their own lived experience. 

Jackie Flanagan was born in Calgary and grew up in Bowness. She is the founding editor of Alberta Views.

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In this case McLean was standing in the Legislature rotunda with her infant son nestled in a baby carrier that pressed his body against her chest. In that moment after the throne speech on March 8, 2016, McLean was both acting as mom to a newborn and symbol for why the Ministry of Status of Women, which she had recently been tapped to lead, was necessary.

After all, some had paused to reflect when McLean, only days before giving birth, was named to Premier Rachel Notley’s cabinet. Such positions are demanding and all-encompassing. Is it realistic or ideal to take on such work while also caring for a newborn?

As McLean herself says, that kind of question is not unique to cabinet ministers. Working mothers across the province face tough choices associated with childcare, return-to-work schedules and personal and societal expectations. That’s part of the reason the NDP government formed a ministry for the status of women, the province’s first.

For as much as women and men are constitutionally guaranteed equal rights in Canada, women still confront issues and barriers not faced by men. “In Alberta we’re still far from the goal of equality for women,” McLean says. “We got the vote 100 years ago but that wasn’t the end of the story. Rates of violence against women are high, the gendered wage gap is larger than in most jurisdictions, and women are still the majority of responsible caregivers, whether for children or other family members.”

“We’re still far from the goal of equality. Women got the vote 100 years ago but that wasn’t the end of the story.” —Stephanie McLean, Status of Women Minister

Alberta’s Status of Women is one of nine such provincial ministries across Canada, and the newest among them. But as with many things in those early days of NDP power, the work was tentative. The ministry initially had a tiny budget of just over $1-million and lacked a mandate. In what seemed an attempt to highlight women’s ability to multitask, Shannon Phillips had been expected to head the new ministry while simultaneously running the most controversial portfolio in government, Environment and Parks.

At the time, the Notley government said it wished to hear from women on what they wanted from the ministry before committing to a firm direction. Eight months later, in February 2016, McLean took over the Status of Women portfolio from Phillips. She told the Edmonton Journal the government’s survey found women wanted the ministry to “be bold, be courageous and take a stance for women and girls across the province.”

That direction remained vague. But with a budget increase to $7.6-million for 2016–2017, the ministry under McLean set out a mandate to work on three areas: helping women enter leadership roles, eliminating and preventing violence against women and girls, and initiatives to get women out of poverty.

To get Alberta women into leadership roles, the province has some work to do. In photographs of Edmonton’s city council, for example, you sometimes have to look twice to find a woman—Bev Esslinger is the only one sitting among 12 councillors and one mayor. She’s not an anomaly in Alberta, where women hold just 26 per cent of elected municipal positions.

Move from city halls to Alberta’s public boards and corporate offices and the story repeats itself. Women comprised 30 per cent of the membership of provincial public agencies, boards and commissions (ABCs) when the NDP came to power in 2015. Women held only 9 per cent of board positions on Alberta-based TSX-listed companies.

These statistics are part of the reason McLean has a mandate to reduce barriers that keep women from leadership positions or running for office.

“Our work around women in leadership is probably where we’ve made the biggest strides,” she says. “Some of that was by example, with premier Notley deciding to have the first gender-balanced cabinet in the country.” McLean notes that the Alberta Securities Commission late last year adopted a rule requiring Alberta companies to disclose the number of women on their boards and in management and to create targets for female representation—or to explain their reasons for not doing so.

The province’s ABC system governs everything from post-secondary institutions to provincial recycling programs and Alberta–Ukraine relations. During 44 years of PC rule, ABC positions became landing pads for Tory patronage appointments. The NDP has attempted to blow up the ABC system as it existed and, in the process, to balance the gender breakdown in its leadership roles.

Some of the initiatives have been simple: creating a single website listing all ABCs, the positions available and the compensation. Some of the work by McLean’s ministry has been persuasive, such as asking qualified women to seek positions. “The ask” is considered a significant step to get women involved in leadership roles, as studies show that men will step up and run on their own while women often need to be asked more than once.

The Notley government wants to see 50 per cent of Alberta’s ABC appointments filled by women by the next election. There’s no official quota, but Status of Women has been working with the executive council to ensure gender is considered when roles are filled. Previously when appointments came to cabinet, “no breakdown was provided for the gender balance on any of these boards,” McLean says. “That was one of the things we required… to consider that and look at unconscious bias and try to correct the balance.”

Last May, j’Amey Holroyd was appointed by Advanced Education minister Marlin Schmidt as the first female to chair the Alberta Apprenticeship and Industry Training Board in the organization’s 71-year history. When five members were appointed in September to the board of governors for Athabasca University, three were women: Debby Kronewitt-Martin, Cheryl Hunter-Loewen and Lynn Hamilton.

Women now hold about 40 per cent of ABC appointments in Alberta—a one-third increase in just two years.

On the municipal government front, McLean visited Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge and Medicine Hat as part of a campaign to encourage women to run in 2017’s municipal elections. Women in these cities asked McLean, Esslinger and Morinville mayor Lisa Holmes about everything from what it’s like to run a campaign to what they thought of Hillary Clinton’s treatment by male voters and by Donald Trump. Based on feedback, the Status of Women ministry launched a webpage full of resources for Alberta women considering a municipal run (“Ready for Her”). Another such provincial tour is slated for later this year.

Meanwhile, data on domestic and sexual violence is elusive. Such crimes are considered vastly under-reported, and the direct surveys that best gauge such offences are not frequently conducted. In the 2014 General Social Survey on Victimization, Alberta ranked third among the provinces for rates of self-reported spousal abuse. A 2012 study commissioned by the Canadian Women’s Foundation found that nearly three-quarters of Albertans say they know a woman who has been physically or sexually abused—the worst rate among the provinces.

The underlying causes of domestic violence are complex and numerous. Stopping such violence is an equally complex challenge. “The more we can advance women’s equality, the more women can fully participate, the more that policies are reviewed from the perspective of women’s needs, the safer our communities become for women and children,” says Jan Reimer, director of the Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters.

Reimer was thrilled when the NDP government announced a stand-alone ministry for the status of women. She hopes it is encouraging other departments to look at policies through the lens of gender. The government often has “a poverty initiative, a housing initiative, a violence against women initiative,” she says. “But these issues are interrelated. With a status of women office, we start looking at things from the perspective of how they impact women—and it makes a huge difference. No one’s been asking those questions in the past.”

Reimer points to housing-first strategies, for example, which focus on putting the chronically homeless into apartments before dealing with their addictions and mental health needs. While widely applauded, this strategy nonetheless disproportionately helps men. Reimer notes that homeless women tend to couch-surf or work in the sex trade as a means to find a place to stay. They’re less likely to sleep on the street.

The ministry has been tasked to ensure government departments do exactly what Reimer proposes, through a tool called gender-based analysis. The technique is now being taught widely through the MLA and civil service ranks so that all government policies are analyzed for how they specifically affect women.

Since the ministry was formed, other departments have pumped $3.5-million into violence prevention programs and announced $15-million in enhanced supports for women and children affected by violence. The government also provided support to Deborah Drever, who as an independent MLA championed a private member’s bill that permitted victims of family violence to end a tenancy agreement early, without financial penalty. But a comprehensive plan to combat sexual violence that was supposed to be released in 2016 has yet to be completed.

McLean says the previous, PC government announced such an anti-violence plan but tasked only a couple of staff with implementing it. Civil servants “didn’t have the power and the drive of a stand-alone ministry and a dedicated deputy minister to go around and get buy-in from other departments,” she says. “There’s been a cultural shift in our government within the top levels because we’re constantly, as ministers, asking for metrics.” As a result, “there’s a lot more buy-in across all government departments when we’re talking about gendered issues.”

The ministry’s final priority is to help get women out of poverty. Alberta has the largest gender income gap in Canada, with the average after-tax income of women amounting to just 60 per cent of their male counterparts, according to a 2016 Parkland Institute report by Kathleen Lahey, a Queen’s University professor.

In a province still dominated by the oil and gas sector, gendered employment gaps sometimes stare us in the face—as in boom times, when men head to work “in the patch,” often for earnings reaching six figures for physical labour or driving a truck. In such a work environment, fewer women enter the labour force. They are also more likely, writes Lahey, to take on childcare duties. Add to this Alberta’s lack of affordable childcare options, and women are not only deterred from seeking work but less likely to return to full-time work.

How can one government ministry tackle the entire socioeconomic setup of a province McLean said her ministry is encouraging more women to enter the trades as electricians, crane operators or construction workers—an effort that could be helped by Holroyd’s chairing the Alberta Apprenticeship and Industry Training Board. Trades in Alberta tend to be unionized, McLean added, which can help standardize women’s and men’s wages.

It may benefit Alberta women that premier Notley is emphasizing diversifying the provincial economy—for example, by incentivizing the energy industry to create more downstream jobs in upgrading rather than focusing on extraction and exporting raw goods, a field which continues to be dominated by men.

The NDP government has also introduced a $25-a-day daycare pilot, beginning this year, in which 1,000 publicly subsidized spaces will be created at 22 centres across the province. Daycare spaces are currently at a premium in Alberta, and “improving access to child care will support more women to remain in or enter the workforce, [moving] us one step closer to equality,” McLean said in a press release last November when announcing the pilot.

But perhaps the NDP government’s most significant move to improve the economic position of women in this province has been to raise the minimum wage. Despite the best efforts of a seemingly on-the-verge-of-broke employer lobby, Alberta will have a $15 per hour minimum wage by 2018. It’s a move that will disproportionately help women, who make up 61 per cent of the province’s 350,500 workers earning less than that $15 threshold.

Minimum wage is a women’s issue. McLean’s ministry was active on the file, the minister says, despite the fact it was her counterpart at Alberta Labour, Christina Gray, who eventually introduced the new minimum wage legislation. In the same way, the Minister of Community and Social Services, Irfan Sabir, and premier Notley herself are often credited with championing the $25-a-day daycare pilot, though Status of Women was intimately involved in its creation.

“Looking at things from the perspective of how they impact women… makes a huge difference.” —Jan Reimer, director, Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters

Stephanie McLean suggests her ministry’s determination that all policies be viewed through a gendered lens has contributed to a deeper understanding of issues such as poverty and wage disparity—and how to fix them. This might ultimately result in even more “women’s issues” coming to the fore, including the lack of funding for maternal health services such as midwifery.

In this way, the minister’s main contribution may be to put ideas in motion that result in other ministries creating (and getting credit for) initiatives that ultimately benefit women.

McLean’s job may be made easier by the fact that so many of Alberta’s other ministries are now run by women, and by her caucus being almost at gender parity. Following the NDP’s landslide victory in 2015, the face of our government itself has changed. It seems obvious (and research agrees) that having more women at government tables changes conversations, leading legislators to consider policies more inclusive of women. In creating a stand-alone ministry for the status of women, the NDP has taken matters one step further. 

Reporter and podcaster Alexandra Zabjek lives in Edmonton.

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 Lukaszuk froze the minimum wage at $8.80 instead of allowing it to continue to rise with the cost of living, which would have brought it to $8.92 this year. When wages lose ground to inflation, workers effectively receive a pay cut. Over two-thirds of Alberta’s 20,000 minimum-wage earners are women. More than half of them are over 25 years of age.

A few voices spoke out against the minister’s move—the usual chorus of “heartless” and “hypocritical.” MLA salaries, after all, get a cost-of-living increase every year. But few people really picked up on how the decision disproportionately hurts Alberta’s women. Unlike every other province in Canada, Alberta doesn’t have a ministry for the status of women, a women’s secretariat or even an advisory council to the minister—in short, any capacity for women to challenge Lukaszuk’s decision from within government.

What Alberta does have is the biggest pay gap in Canada: women who work full time in Alberta earn a median 63 per cent of what men earn, while the national average is 73 per cent. This isn’t due to high-paid male construction or oilsands workers skewing the statistics: Alberta’s female university graduates who work full time earned a median 67 per cent of what male university grads earned in 2007—the same ratio as in 1986. Alberta has the stingiest family leave policies, the lowest social assistance rates for female single parents and among the highest childcare fees (as well as the fewest number of regulated spots) in Canada. Alberta’s female single parents are more likely to live in poverty than other Canadians: half of our province’s women earn what qualify as “poverty wages.”

But despite the facts, an attitude persists in our society that women have “arrived,” that there’s no longer any need for women’s advocacy or—gasp—feminism. 

University of Alberta president Indira Samarasekera generated headlines in 2009 when she told the Edmonton Journal of her concern about the declining number of men enrolling in Canadian universities. “I’m going to become an advocate for young, white males,” she said. “No one will question me when I say we have a problem.” But if Samarasekera’s claim that “in 20 years, we won’t have any men as the heads of companies” had been challenged, readers might have learned that women went from 55 per cent of the Alberta undergraduate population in 1993 to 58 per cent in 2007, while the number of women in management jobs in Alberta dropped by one percentage point (from 35 per cent to 34 per cent) in the same 14-year period. As for the top jobs—CEOs—the reality is likewise sobering: a comprehensive study of women heading large Canadian companies shows that the number of female CEOs went from all of 4 per cent to 6 per cent in the past five years.

If one of Alberta’s highest-profile female academics isn’t too concerned about women’s actual economic position, it’s no wonder that local newspapers and coffee shops are abuzz with chatter about women taking over the world. Clearly, it’s time for a reality check.

The ability to work outside the home in a gratifying, successful professional position is one of the measures of economic equality. And on some measures, Alberta women are not faring too badly. Alberta two-income families are the highest earners in Canada. 

But simply having a job is not the whole picture, as any stressed-out, time-crunched, guilt-ridden professional woman will attest. Our workplaces and education system are built on the assumption that someone is usually at home. Women, working or not, still take on most of the child-rearing and housework. Meeting the competing demands of work and family is what leads many women to earn less than men, as they opt for part-time hours or take extra time away from the workforce.

Jackie Rice is a professor of computer science at the University of Lethbridge and a mother of three. Her biggest source of stress is how she’s viewed by colleagues when she leaves early or misses faculty meetings because of family duties.

“In workplace culture, there’s no allowance for your family growing up happy and healthy,” she says. “There’s an expectation that someone else takes care of that. There’s no taking into account our important commitments to our children.” 

Working in a non-traditional field for women, Rice feels pressure to keep up with research and publications—all the after-hours work that faculty are expected to do. That evening work, says Rice, is easier for people without family, without the extra tasks that usually fall to women—making lunches, scheduling appointments, doing laundry—the little things that add up to hours. “Most of my male counterparts get [an extra] 20 minutes, or two hours,” she says. “With three kids, I get—if I’m lucky—five-minute increments in the evenings.”

Professional women with children and housework are stressed-out, time-crunched and guilt-ridden.

 Rice says she’s amazed at the difference between her situation and that of previous generations, in that non-traditional fields are today far more accepting of women with families. But in highly competitive professions such as hers, she also sees younger women taking steps backward. “There’s a stigma against taking maternity leave, because women want to remain competitive,” she says. “There’s a stigma against men taking leave. And so the inflexibility leads to people making decisions they don’t want to make—going back to work immediately after having a baby, for example. A narrowing of choices is not really progress.”

Nicole Rosen, a professor of modern languages at the U of L, says the biggest challenge is finding flexibility in work arrangements. “If one little thing goes wrong, then the whole system breaks down, and it’s usually the woman’s job that suffers,” she says. “For example, if your kid is sick, then your whole day can fall down around you. There’s no wiggle room, no fallback.”

Rosen adds that the only men she knows who took parental leave work in the public sector. “Because men are often the higher-earning spouse, the only way they can take leave is if EI benefits are topped up, like for teachers or people who work for the federal government,” she says. “Union benefits allow for flexibility other people don’t have.”

Through the labour code, Alberta could legislate more flexibility in working arrangements. We are among the only provinces that don’t have any allowance for family leave to care for sick kids. Our combination of maternity and parental leave benefits is the bare minimum allowed under federal law; all provinces except Alberta, PEI and New Brunswick allow both parents leave upon the birth of a child, which can be taken consecutively—allowing a child the benefit of a parent at home for the first two years of its life.

Rosen says women’s equality is not about women replicating the way men dominated the workplace, but about thinking more broadly about workforce participation. “Work-sharing, four-day workweeks, telecommuting, all of those things,” she says. “Otherwise, the work, the kids—you just go around feeling guilty all the time. Everything needs just that little bit more of me.”

It’s been eight years since Kat Smith left her abusive husband, and she’s just now starting to get her feet under her. Since she left, she’s been on social assistance, fought a custody battle and finally secured supports for her youngest daughter, who has disabilities. Now she’s got a job and things are beginning to turn around. 

“I can remember my lowest point,” she says. “We had nothing. There was no way to survive on social assistance given the cost of living in Calgary. I couldn’t let the kids see me so desperate. I lived in fear of the eviction notice. But when we came to Lethbridge, with subsidized low-income housing, things were better immediately. It was just that one little thing that made it possible for me to start rebuilding my life.”

If the province had a more flexible system for female lone-parent families, Smith says it wouldn’t have taken her so long. “You’d be able to live in dignity with better social assistance,” she says. But she adds that people like her need to be able to work more while maintaining health and dental benefits and social assistance income. Those benefits are key—especially low-cost counselling, vital for women and children that have witnessed or been victims of abuse. 

“My child support counts against my social assistance,” explains Smith. “Which is fine. But as soon as I got a very modest part-time job—earning less than $100 a week—I made too much to get any of the supplemental benefits. Because my daughter has health issues, it was a powerful disincentive to work.”

For a lone parent with one child, Alberta provides only 65 per cent of the market basket measure (the amount it costs to live) for social assistance recipients, by far the lowest level of support in Canada. There’s a $7,444 per year gap between what it costs to live and what a single mother receives in community supports. It’s a recipe for debt and depression. 

At the height of the boom, Alberta women were doing quite well by some measures. Full-time earnings growth actually caught up to the growth in men’s wages; women’s median earnings grew 11 per cent between 1993 and 2007 (from $33,300 to $39,000), the same percentage point growth as for men (from $49,000 to $60,000). But the story was much different for single working mothers, who saw their median market income (what they earn from employment) drop during the boom. In 2001, female lone-parent median income was $36,000. By 2007, it was $34,800.

Single moms who work are more likely to live in poverty in Alberta (24 per cent) than in the rest of Canada (16 per cent). They also pay higher taxes than in BC and Ontario. Alberta also privatized, deregulated and downsized public services to a greater degree than other provinces, so more costs are borne by individuals. Albertans spend more on utilities, childcare, education and healthcare than other Canadians. 

Alberta is one of the only provinces without a provincial child benefit or a provincial strategy to combat poverty. Even Ontario, which lost a huge amount of its corporate tax base during the recession, continues to enhance their provincial child benefit, putting more money in the hands of low-income parents. 

In New Brunswick, the government introduced a variety of anti-poverty measures over the last two years, including an enhanced child benefit. The province launched a Wage Gap Action Plan to reduce the gulf between men’s and women’s earnings, arguing that government and the private sector have a responsibility to improve women’s wages for the sake of overall economic growth and productivity.

Monica Lambert Leong is not a hard-luck case. She grew up in a close-knit, supportive family, has a university degree and worked as a professional for over a decade before having a baby. Leong loves staying home and doesn’t really miss the workforce—but hasn’t gone back only because she can’t find quality childcare for her son (he has severe allergies). 

Unlike every other province, Alberta doesn’t have a ministry for the status of women or women’s secretariat.

“If I could find dependable childcare, I’d work part time in a heartbeat,” says Leong. She says she’s losing ground, missing professional development and advancement. “I love the idea of being at home and not missing out on these formative years. But I’d be more balanced if I worked part time. A part of me wants to be in the professional world.”

She’s not alone. Even while many skilled jobs went unfilled during the 2004–2008 boom, Alberta had the lowest number of women (with children aged 0–5) participating in the workforce in Canada. While some women with children chose to exempt themselves, some also just gave up looking for affordable, high-quality childcare. 

Leong says that flexible family policies would create better outcomes. “Government’s family policies don’t just affect low-income women,” she says. “Policies guide my decisions. If there were better family policies, I could be a more balanced person.”

In December 2008, UNICEF ranked 27 industrialized countries on their early learning and childcare policies and outcomes. Canada ranked last. And Alberta ranks last in Canada on a number of childcare indicators.

Alberta does not fund childcare centres directly, but instead gives low-income families subsidies and cuts cheques to for-profit centres to improve wages. This approach is easily discredited by the outcomes it achieves: Alberta’s total number of regulated childcare spaces has hardly grown since 1992, though the population and economy have grown exponentially. Only 17 per cent of children aged 0–5 in Alberta have access to a regulated childcare space; this rate is in the bottom three in Canada. At $700–$900 per child per month, fees paid by Alberta parents are among the highest in the country. By contrast, Quebec funds childcare centres directly. Fees are $7 per day (about $140 per month) and more spaces are available. Not coincidentally, Quebec women earn a median 81 per cent of what men earn, a much smaller pay gap than Alberta’s.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD) reflects a global consensus about free markets, free trade and small governments. A growing body of OECD research shows the link between women’s economic equality and childcare. Comparing over 30 industrialized countries, the OECD shows the pay gap between women and men is smallest in countries that invest in early childhood education and daycare (France, the Nordic countries) and largest in places that don’t (Canada, USA, Japan). Improving women’s wages by providing quality and accessible childcare is cheaper in the long run for governments and employers alike, argues the OECD. Governments save on the social costs of poverty and employers retain skilled female workers. 

The OECD also argues that family-friendly policies have a direct impact upon economic growth, poverty reduction and greater labour force participation. These policies include “financial support for children, arrangements that allow working parents to take leave to care for children, and flexible workplace practices that allow a better reconciliation of work and care commitments.” Alberta does little of this—but the country as a whole is barely any better. Of the 30 countries examined by the OECD, Canada is 25th in government spending on family benefits, tied with Mexico and Turkey.

Yet another explanation for women’s inequality in Alberta lies in our provincial economy. Relative to other provinces, we spend far less of our economic pie on public services such as healthcare, education and social services. Everywhere in Canada, women form the majority of public sector employees, and this is also true in Alberta. But Alberta spends only 13 per cent of its GDP on public services, while the rest of Canada hovers around 20 per cent. Union jobs tend to pay higher wages for women, so with only a fifth of our provincial workforce unionized (compared to a national average closer to 30 per cent), women’s wages as a percentage of men’s end up lower in Alberta. This is why women’s wages stagnated in the 1990s as premier Ralph Klein gutted the public sector. While men’s median earnings grew by 11 per cent between 1993 and 1997, women’s dropped by 3 per cent, and didn’t recover to 1993 levels until 2003.

Alberta’s economy is also less diversified than ever. One-third of the Alberta economy is directly energy-related—10 per cent more than during the oilpatch crash in the mid-1980s. And the oilpatch is not kind to female workers. Women are barely a quarter of the total Canadian energy sector workforce, compared to almost half of Canada’s total labour force. Of women employed in the petroleum sector, 60 per cent are clustered in support, sales and service jobs, which tend to be lower paying.

Alberta has built its economy and social policies around a one-breadwinner model, but this doesn’t reflect the modern world. The stress women feel when they’re running to pick up sick kids from school, begging time off for kids’ doctors appointments, or feeling guilty about not “doing it all” reveals the gap between the one-breadwinner ideal and the pressure on families to have at least two incomes in order to keep up with the cost of living.

The one-breadwinner model is the subject of aggressive pining on the part of Alberta Conservatives. Just last year, then-Finance Minister Iris Evans argued that in order to raise children “properly,” one parent should be at home. While that view tends to pervade right-wing circles, conservatives rarely propose social policies that facilitate one parent taking more time out of the workforce, such as enhanced family leave, provincial child benefits, or writing job-sharing, flex-time and other changes into our labour laws.

Instead, conservatives rely on pure fantasy: the notion that every family in Alberta can get by on one income. Since the 1970s, men’s purchasing power throughout the industrialized world has essentially stagnated. Growth in family incomes has come almost entirely from women’s participation in the workforce. For most families, women’s participation is not a question of chasing “frills”—it’s about not falling behind the rising cost of daily life. In Alberta, 73 per cent of women with children under 5 years old participate in the workforce. That’s an awful lot of families that aren’t, according to Iris Evans, raising their children “properly.”

Part of the challenge for Alberta’s women is the lack of dialogue about their issues. Here, Alberta women have an advocacy problem. The deafening silence around women’s issues is not benign. When there’s little political conversation about the reality of women’s lives, there is a tacit acceptance of the status quo—even a growing sense that we’ve reached the end of progress, the end of women’s equality-seeking history. 

When we don’t talk about material realities—such as number of women living in poverty, the gap between women and men’s wages, or the risk of severe poverty in old age for women without male spouses—we acquiesce to Alberta’s peculiar type of economic model, where high-paying jobs are men’s jobs (short-term, dependent on non-renewable resources) and women’s work is concentrated either in the constantly besieged public sector or the non-unionized, lower-paid, non-pensioned, no-benefits, mostly part-time private sector. 

Alberta has the biggest pay gap in Canada: omen earn an average of 63 per cent of what men earn.

It might be fashionable to argue that women are now equal because people such as Sarah Palin and Danielle Smith dominate our TV screens, but the real story is that Alberta women are about as equal in 2010 as they were when Margaret Thatcher was the world’s most famous female politician. And it is, quite frankly, easier to point to out-of-context superficialities (number of women in the workforce or enrolled at universities) and declare the work of feminism a fait accompli. 

That’s because feminist action is difficult. There’s little funding for NGOs dedicated to women’s equality. While some political parties pay lip service to women’s committees, most leaders and backroom operators show little interest in actually presenting women’s interests in party platforms. It’s also difficult on a personal level: bring up the topic of feminism at your next dinner party, and watch your friends squirm.

But any Albertan committed to moving our society ever closer to equality needs to ask themselves if they want to live in an easy land of make-believe, where equality is measured in superficialities, or if they want equitable economic and social policies grounded in reality. If they want the latter, they need to start naming the problems, proposing real solutions, and—once again, like women and men have done for generations before ours—begin working together for change. 

Shannon Phillips is an independent journalist. She also works part time with low-income women at Womanspace Lethbridge.

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