1 In this article, I will focus mainly on the actions of the Alberta government, because I am most familiar with those. While Alberta has pursued a program of divestiture of government authority/responsibility more vigorously than have some other Canadian provinces, it has set the model for Ontario and has been followed in spirit by many other provinces. The federal government's reduction in transfer payments to the provinces and its moves toward greater decentralization are in keeping with the pattern of reduced government responsibilities that I outline here.

2 There is a tentative ministerial proposal to re-invest in elementary education, targeted to adding some kindergarten hours, reducing class sizes in early grades, adding some ESL programs, and offsetting parent fund-raising for essential learning materials. It is a long way from being approved.

3 The social, political, and ideological implications of reshaping the boundaries between the public and the private in social life are the subject of an extremely interesting set of articles in Challenging the Public/Private Divide: Feminism, Law and Public Policy, edited by Boyd, Susan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996)Google Scholar. Pat Armstrong, in “Restructuring Public and Private: Women's Paid and Unpaid Work” (pp. 37–62), details how postwar rapid expansion of government action in the areas of education, health, unemployment insurance, and welfare helped to stabilize and protect the movement of women into the full-time labour force and how some of these gains have been lost in the current retreat from government involvement in these areas. Katherine Teghtsoonian, in “Who Pays for Caring for Children? Public Policy and the Devaluation of Women's Work” (pp. 113–43), considers how social conservatism and economic conservatism have together reinforced the idea that caring for children is mainly a private responsibility of women in families. And Marlee Kline, in “Blue Meanies in Alberta: Tory Tactics and the Privatization of Child Welfare” (pp. 330–59), criticizes the Alberta government's plan to relocate child welfare activities in the private domain, bringing out its detrimental consequences for women's liberty and equality.

4 Both the Reform Party of Canada and the Alberta government have supported this approach in recent official documents. See Party, Reform, Blue Sheet: Principles—Policies (Calgary, 1995)Google Scholar, and The Taxpayers Budget (Calgary, 1995)Google Scholar, and the Alberta Plan for delivery of child care services, Focus on Children: A Plan for Effective, Integrated Community Services for Children and their Families (Edmonton: Commissioner of Services for Children, 1994)Google Scholar, and Finding a Better Way: The Consultations and Research Leading to the Redesign of Children's Services in Alberta (Edmonton: Commissioner of Services for Children, 1994).Google Scholar

5 Some measures, such as linking welfare payments with job training or educational upgrading, may break patterns of welfare dependency for some, but at the cost of reducing the quality of life for those who are unable to take advantage of them. See Simpson, Jeffrey, “What Happened to Albertans Who Went Off the Welfare Rolls?” in The Globe and Mail, November 12, 1997.Google Scholar

6 As noted above, Alberta Family and Social Services also selectively allocates funds and subsidies to community welfare projects.

7 Perhaps because of the primary orientation of the government, there has been no clear public commitment to equal respect for all citizens, and a shaky treatment of human rights in Alberta. The gap has recently been filled by conservative moral populism promoting traditional family values, heterosexuality as the only acceptable norm of sexuality, anti-Charter sentiments, and greater retribution for criminals.

8 This was brought home vividly in Alberta during the most recent provincial election campaign, when the Premier responded to many citizen worries about health care by saying that such decisions were not in the hands of the government but were the responsibility of the Alberta Regional Health Care boards. The boards are unelected and unaccountable to the public.

9 Constitution Act, 1982, Part 1, Section 15(1).

10 Section 15(1) says: “Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.”

Section 15 (2) says: “Subsection (1) does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age, or mental or physical disability.”

11 Armstrong, “Restructuring Public and Private,” pp. 38–49.

12 Alberta News Release, November 30, 1994.

13 Focus on Children, p. 35.

14 McIntyre in Law Society of British Columbia et al v. Andrews et al. [1989] 1 S.C.R. 143. Case citations are from Canadian Cases in the Philosophy of Law, edited by Bickenbach, J., 2nd ed. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1993). Quoted on p. 108.Google Scholar

15 Catharine MacKinnon is correct in saying that the fundamental questions about equality and inequality are not about sameness and difference, or about the similar or dissimilar treatment of similars, but rather about “dominance and subordination” or advantage and disadvantage. Many disadvantages that are experienced almost exclusively by women because of their distinctive biological capacities or social roles are simply ignored by the “sameness and difference” approach. MacKinnon's analysis says that the crucial equality issues are about securing greater equality for those who are less advantaged. As she puts it, they are about “the lesser access to resources, privileges, credibility, legitimacy, authority, pay, bodily integrity, security and protection that is effective for you: less of what is valued in society.” See “Difference and Dominance: On Sex Discrimination,” in Feminism Unmodified (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, chap. 2, and “Making Sex Equality Real” in Righting the Balance: Canada's New Equality Rights, edited by Smith, L., Cote-Harper, G., Elliot, R., and Seydegart, M. (Saskatoon: The Canadian Human Rights Reporter, 1986), p. 41.Google Scholar

16 McIntyre in Andrews, quoted from Bickenbach, ed., Canadian Cases, p. 109.

17 See Re Ontario Human Rights Commission et al. and Simpsons-Sears Ltd. [1985] 2 S.C.R. 536. Excerpted in Bickenbach, ed., Canadian Cases, pp. 116–17.

18 Smith, Lynn, “A New Paradigm for Equality Rights,” p. 368Google Scholar. Smith argues that any interpretation of Section 15, equality rights, must remember that the equality projects on the social and political agenda when the Charter was developed involved women, the aged, children, native people, and the disabled (not just race), and must emphasize results rather than motivation. Therefore, it must consider not just the wordings of legislation, but their actual and potential effects.

19 Also known as Conway v. The Queen [1993] 2 S.C.R. 872.

20 The Globe and Mail, November 17, 1997. The Canadian Council on Social Development's 1997 report on part-time work indicates that part-time workers over twenty-five years of age, about half of whom are women, are clustered in clerical and service occupations, and these workers have largely been unable to take advantage of job opportunities in the growing highly skilled technology fields.

21 Several features of Canada's tax system, such as its use of tax credits and its largely income-based allowances for personal pension savings, disadvantage low- or no-income earners more than higher-income earners.

22 Not all women experience these disadvantages. But for adverse effects to fall disproportionately on a group, it is not necessary that all members of the group experience these effects, but only that significant numbers of the group do so. Also, some feminists think that work in the private sphere brings certain social benefits. Yet most would agree that women are disadvantaged by not having the choice to work in the public labour force.

23 This argument depends on a more basic liberal egalitarian argument that differences in income and wealth are acceptable provided they reflect individual choices about desirable life-forms and life-courses, but are unacceptable insofar as they involve the coërcion of individuals into unremunerated work that meets a social need and from which society benefits. Governments do not respect these principles insofar as they devolve what should be a society's responsibilities on “volunteers” or unpaid workers without their full and truly voluntary consent.

24 This is not to deny that many men as well as women have had their situations worsened as a result of government withdrawal from the public service sectors.

25 [1989] 1 S.C.R. 1219. See excerpt in Bickenbach, ed., Canadian Cases, pp. 121–25.

26 Some government actions, such as the Ontario government's cancellation of employment equity legislation, directly undermine measures designed to promote greater sexual equality.

27 Finding a Better Way, pp. 6, 18.

28 [1994] 124 D.L.R. (4^th) 449 (S.C.C.). See excerpt in Equality and the Charter: Ten Years of Feminist Advocacy Before the Supreme Court of Canada (Emond Montgomery Publications, 1996), pp. 391–412, and especially dissents of McLaghlin and L'Heureux-Dubé, pp. 408–12. Cf. Symes v. Canada [1993] 4 S.C.R. 695.

29 Ibid., p. 412.

30 Emphasis added.

31 One reviewer of this paper wondered whether reduction of services is really the sort of policy that can be challenged by Charter protections. It may be that a careful exploration of this question would show that the analogy I propose is not as close as I suggest. It would be good if this article stimulates further investigations of this sort.

32 Constitution Act, 1982, Part I, Section 1.

33 R v. Oakes [1986] 1 S.C.R. 103, and R. v. Big M Drug Mart Ltd. [1985] 1 S.C.R. 295.

34 R. v. Oakes. See excerpt in Bickenbach, ed., Canadian Cases, pp. 45–49.

35 See note 4 above.

36 However, insofar as both families and communities engage in caring work, that work is usually performed by individual women or groups of women, and is often unremunerated.

37 It is only fair to add that the man's role in the traditional family, with its duties as provider, often prevented the realization of men's autonomy and fully developed agency, despite the fact that it was recognized economically and secured some participation in a public life.

38 Kline, “Blue Meanies in Alberta,” p. 337.

39 Waldron, Jeremy, “When Justice Replaces Affection: The Need for Rights,” in Liberal Rights, edited by Waldron, J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 370–91.Google Scholar

40 Ibid., p. 376.

41 Okin, Susan, Justice, Gender and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), p. 176Google Scholar. Okin holds that a just or fair allocation of responsibilities within the family would need to be undertaken from an “original position” where the deliberators did not know their genders, in order to ensure that that knowledge did not bias their judgements. She argues persuasively that, since child bearing can be conceptually separated from child rearing, the initial position would be that a fair division of parental responsibilities for unpaid child care would be equally divided between the parents. Okin is concerned with the conditions needed for a sound contractarian justification of the family, whereas my concern is about the social recognition that needs to be given to individual rights and sex equality if challenges to established social forms are to be heard with respect in that society.

42 This is the gist of Okin's criticism of the family, as outlined in the opening chapter of her book. Ronald Dworkin also gives an account of obligation which requires that conditions of reciprocity and equality be satisfied, and may intend it to apply to family obligations. We can have, he says, associative or communal obligations in virtue of having some role in some social practice even where these roles are not consented to. But such obligations are contingent on appropriate reciprocation, and also depend on the members of the practice believing that the practice shows an equal concern for its members. See Dworkin, Ronald, “Obligations of Community,” in Law's Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, chap. 6. These conditions might be satisfied by families under specific favourable social or cultural conditions, but they are certainly often not satisfied.