No place for womenina Tory country by Heidi Modro The Link

There’s a political hit list in Canada and if you’rea woman, your name is on it.

The Conservatives were barely in power in 1984 when they announced their first round of social spending cuts.

They started with senior citizens, worked their way through Native friendship associations and media organizations right through to the current attacks on many of the gains women have made since the end of World War II.

Their first target: senior citizens and their right to have their old-age security pension increases pro- tected from inflation.

Thousands of senior citizens from across the country rallied together, rented buses and drove to Parliament Hill with their placards, wheelchairs and canes to shame Prime Minister Brian Mulroney into not deindexing pensions.

Later that day, TV cameras picked up Mulroney, chin sagging and arms flapping, attempting to explain how going after pensions would help keep the country’s then $25 billion deficit under control.

But the Tories eventually backed down and decided that the elderly weren’t, at least for the time being, fair game in their lust for budget-slashing.

Instead, the government turned to health care, educa- tion and unemployment insurance. It began the proc- ess of unloading the burden of social spending onto the provinces.

Critics say the Conservatives have systematically been rolling back whatever women have achieved in the past 50 years, whether it be through cutbacks, high interest rates, economic policies or their unsuc- cessful attempt at recriminalizing abortion.

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April 1, 1992

And women are increasingly forced to pick up where! the government has left off by fulfilling their tradi- | tional roles of caretakers of the aged, sick, and youn)

“‘T don’t know if they (the Conservatives) are doing, unconsciously orconsciously,’’ said Alice de Wolfe. executive coordinator for the National Action Com- | mittee on The Status of Women (NAC).

ec “49 . 3 “< But whether it’s conscious or not, their plan is to

have women go back to the home and that’s explicitly anti-women.”’

But Federal Health Minister Benoit Bouchard was definitely conscious of what he was doing last week when he said that he had ‘‘the privilege ... to be the killer’’ of the federal government’s multibillion dollar, eight-year old electoral promise to create a national daycare program.

Bouchard explained the government’s decision by pitting two issues against each other: Child abuse versus a national daycare programme. Bouchard said that a series of obscure government polls and studies indicated that Canadians would ratherhelp abused ~ kids than other kids needing daycare. ;

‘*T think it was pretty offensive of them to throw around numbers and to compare which of the two issues are the most important,’’ said Daniell Hebert, spokeswoman for the Confederation des Syndicats Nationaux (CSN) Status of Women’s Committee.

‘It (the daycare plan) was an electoral promise that _ they had actually done quite a lotof work on and tha had already gotten to the planning and policy stage. — ‘*T think this decision is going to backfire on them,” said Laurell Ritchie, a spokesperson for the Confer=

_ ence of Canadian Unions. 5

‘‘They’ re not going to con anyone with their statis- tics. Womenneed universal daycareandthey’re going to see through the government's cheap and dit

political trick.”

That same week, the federal government also scrapp