THANK YOU! THANK YOU!
THANK YOU!
Everything you wanted to know about MMP but were afraid to ask:
September 20, 2007
Catherine
Baquero
Alumna, The Ontario Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform
Catherine Baquero was the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly
member from Toronto’s Beaches-East York riding. She is a recent graduate of the
University of Toronto’s Peace and Conflict Studies Program and currently works
as a therapist for autistic children - a job that she finds very rewarding. She
also interns at Scarborough Conflict Resolution Service as a program assistant
and community mediator.
Catherine’s interests include alternative dispute resolution, citizen engagement
in the political process, learning to play guitar and spending time with her
friends and family.
Louisa Moya
Marketing Communications Specialist & Youth Chair, Equal Voice
Louisa is a board
member of Equal Voice, a multi-partisan organization committed to increasing the
number of women elected in Canada. In this role Louisa has the opportunity to
speak to many young people about the importance of being involved in the
political system - from exercising your right to vote, all the way to
considering running for elected office.
Louisa is a strong advocate of MMP as she believes that it will help to make
electoral politics more representative – including electing more women. Louisa
made a presentation to the Ontario Citizen’s Assembly on Electoral Reform to
voice her support for MMP. Louisa is actively involved in politics as the
Vice-President of the Riding Association for a downtown Toronto riding and has
worked on numerous election campaigns at the Municipal, Provincial and Federal
level.
Paulette Senior
Paulette is
currently CEO of the YWCA Canada.
Paulette began her professional career after completion of an Honours Bachelor
Degree in Psychology and Urban Studies from York University.
After a number of years as a front-line worker within various social service
programs, Paulette joined the management staff of the YWCA Toronto to lend her
expertise to the enhancement of programs that serve women and children. She
managed diverse portfolios such as: Access, Equity and Social Justice; women’s
shelters and housing ventures, employment programs and Director of Housing,
specifically for women, children and families.
Paulette has many volunteer affiliations: Malvern Family Resource Centre,
College of Occupational Therapists, Police Race Relations Monitoring Board,
Black Business & Professional Association, and the Centre for Social Justice.
Paulette’s proudest achievement is the success of her 20-year old son, Jermayne,
who is at Dalhousie University. She resides in Scarborough.
Source: www.rougevalley.ca
WOMEN AND MONEY: April 28, 2007
Armine
Yalnizyan
laid out a brutal picture of where women stand in the Canadian economy based on
her research and her ground-breaking report on income inequality in Canada - The
Growing Gap. She handed out a paper she wrote called The Ask which
further infuriated many of us when we got home to read it!
Emanuela
Heyninck, Pay Equity Commissioner, described the current state of pay equity
in Ontario and the lack of attention being paid to it.
Elizabeth
Shilton, co-author of Redefining Retirement: New Realities for Boomer
Women, provided insights into the rosy – NOT! - picture facing women in
retirement.
Margaret
Kende talked about her life at the other end of the spectrum, i.e. in
retirement, with particular focus on her volunteer work for the Canadian
Executive Service Organization (CESO).
Armine
Yalnizyan
Economist and
media commentator Armine Yalnizyan has been writing for 20 years about trends in
labour markets, and shifts in social and budgetary policy. She has advised
governments at the federal, provincial and local levels, taught economics at
York University, and worked with international NGOs and community-based
organizations and coalitions. After 10 years as program director with the
Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, she authored a ground-breaking
report in 1998 on income inequality in Canada, entitled The Growing Gap. In 2002
she became the honoured first recipient of the Atkinson Foundation Award for
Economic Justice and received the Morley Gunderson Prize from the University of
Toronto in 2003. In 2006 Armine returned to the Social Planning Council of
Toronto as its Director of Research. Source http://www.growinggap.ca/about
Elizabeth
Shilton
Elizabeth is a
lawyer who was a founding and managing partner of one of Canada's leading labour
and employment law firms. She practiced law for 25 years, focusing on
women's equality rights, education law, and pension & benefits law. She is
currently working on pension policy research, and is a member of the Ontario
Financial Services Tribunal. She is co-author with Dr. Margaret Hovanec of
Redefining Retirement - New Realities for Boomer Women that launched on May
10, 2007.
VISIONING
EQUALITY: March 3, 2007
Three dynamic
young speakers led the way and inspired us all with their visions of equality at
the local, national and international levels. The recurring theme for the
evening was that politicians want women’s votes and to be seen to be supportive
of women, however, they do not tend to listen to what women want once they get
into power.
Chi Nguyen,
Toronto Women’s City Alliance (formerly Toronto Women’s Call to Action),
provided the relevant and critical issues for women and children at the local
level. Transportation, environmental sustainability, poverty,
homelessness, slum landlords, un- and under-employment, precarious work, racism,
domestic violence and sexual abuse continue to be overwhelming realities for
many girls and women in Toronto.
Michelle
Dagnino from the Youth Action Network gave us insights into working with
young women – make it fun for them, not tokenism, and then deconstruct something
they enjoy like rap songs … and that makes them really angry!
Nancy
Peckford arrived from Ottawa after the snowstorm, and explained Canada’s
international commitments under CEDAW (the ONLY United Nations treaty that deals
specifically with women). She also inspired us with the message that
Canada wants to be seen as a human rights leader, but we do not necessarily
practice what we preach here at home!
Lorraine
Segato was brilliant as moderator, and even managed to tame two men in the
audience who seemed to think that they were the only ones in the room!
Michelle
Dagnino
Michelle
Dagnino, MA, LLB, is a well-known expert on youth leadership and community
engagement. Michelle is currently the Executive Director at
Youth Action Network (YAN),
a national organization dedicated to youth activism and empowerment. Michelle
has been a social justice advocate since her teen years, when she first founded
ASPIRE, a community mentorship group that pairs young women with community
leaders to promote healthy self-esteem and to establish strong role models.
Since then she has continued to be a forceful voice for the marginalized,
including a year spent abroad as the ICFTU Child Labour Campaign Coordinator and
as founder of Where is the Love? a media literacy program for elementary and
high school students.
Nancy Peckford
Nancy Peckford
is currently the program director at the
Canadian Feminist Alliance
for International Action
(FAFIA).
FAFIA is dedicated to improving governments' compliance with its international
human rights obligations to women in Canada. Nancy has cultivated her feminist
leanings through her work with the St. John's Women's Centre (in Newfoundland
and Labrador), as National Lobby Coordinator for the Canadian Women's March
Committee to End Poverty and Violence Against Women (2000), researcher with the
National Association of Women and the Law (2001), provincial coordinator of the
Ontario Women's Network on Child Custody and Access (2002), and program officer
with the Canadian Labour Congress' Women's and Human Rights Department (2003).
She also served as a Canadian Parliamentary Intern in Ottawa in 1999 - 2000, which
strengthened her resolve to bang down the doors of Parliament. Nancy remains
very connected to her roots on the island of Newfoundland and Labrador,
especially with her two very tenacious grandmothers, her own mother and six
aunts.
THE H*WORD –
HIStory? HERstory?
Is it relevant to
women?: October 14, 2006
We celebrated
Person's Day and Women's History Month with an illustrious panel that included
Dr. Ursula M. Franklin - who is totally inspiring - warned us to be wary
of “patriarchal feminists”. Ursula told us about the battles that women
have faced over the years, and encouraged us not to give up, especially given
the funding cuts at Status of Women Canada! Franca Iacovetta
started the evening with the importance of women’s stories in the grander scheme
of our stories. She placed particular emphasis on the stories of immigrant
women here in Canada. Fay Faraday described her work as a lawyer,
and more specifically, her work at LEAF (Women’s Legal Education & Action Fund)
with Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the
book that she edited entitled Making Equality Rights Real.
Dilani Mohan
and The Miss G_ Project for Equity in Education are on a mission to develop a
Women’s and Gender Studies course in the high school curriculum. Just over
20% of students enrol in universities, and a small fraction of university
students enrol in Women’s Studies, therefore, it makes sense to provide access
in the high school curriculum. Kairi Williams was our wonderful
moderator for the evening; she described the Women’s Power Cocktail Hour™ as
being “fresh”.
Dr. Ursula M.
Franklin
Ursula is an
experimental physicist, University Professor Emeritus at the University of
Toronto, a former board member of the National Research Council and the Science
Council of Canada, and a companion of the Order of Canada. She has been awarded
honorary degrees by more than ten Canadian universities.
Dr. Ursula
Martius Franklin, CC, O.Ont, Ph.D, FRSC (born September 16, 1921 in Munich,
Germany) is a German-Canadian metallurgist and research physicist. She has also
been active in promoting pacifist and feminist causes.
Franklin began
her career during World War II, but was imprisoned in a Nazi work camp because
her mother was Jewish. She spent the rest of the war repairing bombed buildings.
She received
her Ph.D. in experimental physics at the Technical University of Berlin in 1948,
and emigrated to Canada the following year. In Canada, she worked for 15 years
at the Ontario Research Foundation.
Franklin was a
pioneer in the field of archaeometry, which applies modern materials analysis to
archaeology. In the early 1960s, she investigated levels of strontium 90 -- a
radioactive isotope in fallout from nuclear weapons testing -- in children's
teeth. Her research was instrumental in the cessation of atmospheric weapons
testing.
In 1967,
Franklin joined the University of Toronto's Department of Metallurgy and
Materials Science. In 1984 she became the first woman at the school to be named
University Professor, a special title which is the highest honour given by the
university.
Franklin
continues to be actively involved in numerous humanitarian activities such as
encouraging young women to pursue careers in science, promoting peace and social
justice, and speaking and writing on the social impacts of science and
technology.
She is a
companion of the Order of Canada, Ph.D, and is the recipient of the 2001 Pearson
Medal of Peace for her work in human rights. She also has a Toronto high school
named after her, Ursula Franklin Academy. She has a strong association with
Massey College in the University of Toronto, where she is a Senior Fellow and
was honoured in 2004 as one of the first Clarkson Laureateships, which
recognizes outstanding achievement in public service.
Source:
www.anansi.ca... and from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin
Fay Faraday
Fay is a
partner at Cavalluzzo Hayes Shilton McIntyre & Cornish LLP, a Toronto labour and
human rights law firm well-known for its representation of unions, employees,
professional associations and equity-seeking groups.
Fay graduated
as the gold medalist from Osgoode Hall Law School in 1993 and worked as a law
clerk to Justice Peter Cory of the Supreme Court of Canada.
Her law
practice focuses on constitutional and appellate litigation, policy and
strategic advice, and written advocacy. She has a particular focus in the areas
of constitutional and administrative law, labour, human rights, pay equity and
education law. She has worked with a range of labour groups, community groups
and non-governmental organizations on Charter rights and has litigated Charter
equality rights before all levels of court, including the Supreme Court of
Canada. Fay has been a member of the National Legal Committee of LEAF B the
Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund. She is also a long-time member of the
National Association of Women and the Law and a former member of NAWL’s National
Steering Committee. She has published numerous articles on equality rights and
workplace discrimination and edited a book on Section 15 Charter rights called
Making Equality Rights Real which was published by Irwin Law in 2006.
Franca
Iacovetta
Franca
is a
professor of history at the University of Toronto who teaches Canadian and North
American immigration, women/gender, and Cold War history, and transnational
labour migration and radicalism (including feminist ethnic radicals). Her recent
books include
-
Gatekeepers: The Politics of Citizenship in Cold War Canada (Toronto:
Between the Lines, 2006);
-
Sisters or
Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic and Racialized Women in Canadian History
(Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2004);
-
Enemies
Within: Italian and Other Wartime Internees in Canada and Beyond (Toronto,
University of Toronto Press, 2003)
-
Women,
Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World (Toronto, UTP
2002).
A feminist
historian who regularly takes her research back to the communities she studies,
she was historical consultant, with Karen Dubinsky, on a recent feature-length
film, Looking for Angelina, based on an article they published on
Angelina Napolitano, an immigrant woman in Northern Ontario who was sentenced to
be executed for murdering her abusive husband in 1911 until an international
clemency campaign led by first-wave feminists saved her life.
Ms. Iacovetta
is a founding member of the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton,
Ontario, a centre devoted to showcasing workers' history and culture, and acted
as chief researcher/curation on a major project on immigrant workers.
A feminist
academic, she has mentored many students, worked hard to build bridges across
the generations, and to racially diversify the historical profession. She was a
co-chair of the international conference "Labouring Feminism and Feminist
Working Class History in North America and Beyond" held at the University of
Toronto in Fall 2005, which brought together a diversity of feminist scholars to
debate across theories, methodologies, and generations.
Her current
intellectual projects include a team project on Italian radicals in Canada; a
team project in CAnadian food history; a book on social workers and immigrant
clients in postwar Canada; and an on-going group project on Italian radical
women exiled from Fascist Italy to parts around the globe and their role in
radical anti-fascist struggles.
She is academic
co-editor of Studies in Gender and History, at University of Toronto Press, and
co-editor of Atlantis: A Woman's Studies Journal.
Dilani Mohan
Dilani is one
of the founding members of The Miss G__ Project for Equity in Education, a
grassroots organization devoted to the elimination of sexism and the promotion
of active citizenship among youth. The Miss G__ Project is currently trying to
get Women's and Gender Studies added to the Ontario Secondary School Curriculum.
Dilani recently
graduated from Huron University College at the University of Western Ontario
with a degree in Business Management and Organizational Studies, specializing in
International and Comparative Studies.
Born in Sri
Lanka, Dilani lived in Zambia for two years before moving to Mississauga, Canada
where she currently resides.
THE F*WORD: April
29, 2006 (our first event!)
L'Espresso Bar
Mercurio was abuzz with discussion about The F*word. Over seventy women
(and men!) of all ages and backgrounds ate, drank, and chatted about the role of
feminism in their lives.
Panel members told poignant stories about their personal journeys. Women -
young and old - connected while celebrating their differences, challenges, and
achievements. Veteran feminist Michele Landsberg anchored the
discussion with a frank talk about her new role as Chair of the Women's College
Hospital Board of Directors and the misconception of feminists as “man-haters.”
Discussion centred around: being “closet feminists” in workplaces; not feeling
comfortable about using the word “feminist” with colleagues/friends; and,
admiring our elders - especially our grandmothers, mothers and aunts - for their
teachings and our learnings. Other panel members included: May Cheng,
Daya Lye, Harmony Rice, and Kairi Williams. Moderator
for our first event was Lorraine Segato.
A number of
community organizations participated including: The Miss G_ Project; Nightwood
Theatre; Power Camp National; The F*word Zine; Sistering; Toronto Women’s Call
to Action; Working Skills Centre; Toronto Business & Professional Women’s Club;
Women’s College Hospital; and the Women’s Future Fund.
Special Thank
You:
Kathleen Loftus at the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario for student
tickets and child care contributions!
May Cheng
May is a
partner with the law firm
Fasken Martineau,
and is certified as a specialist by the Law Society in intellectual property law
(trademark and copyright). She has been called to the bar in Ontario since
1993 and in British Columbia in 1997. She obtained her law degree from the
University of Ottawa's bilingual common law program, graduating cum laude.
May is a past
President of the Chinese Canadian National Council and has also served as
President of the Toronto chapter. In her role as President, she was the
national spokesperson for the head tax redress campaign and led the organization
during the class action challenge for head tax reparations from 2001 to 2003.
She has organized conferences and spoken on the issue of reparations for
historic wrongs.
May has also
been a frequent speaker for the equity initiatives program at the Law Society of
Upper Canada, speaking on the topic of working in private practice as a woman
and visible minority, as well as on the passing of the first Chinese lawyer and
election of the first Chinese bencher. She currently mentors students
assigned by the Law Society's equity initiatives program.
Michele Landsberg
Michele, an
award-winning columnist with The Toronto Star - the largest circulation daily in
Canada - retired from that paper in November 2003. In her years at The
Star, she won two National Newspaper Awards, including the first one ever
awarded for column-writing, and was among the top-read columnists. She
wrote about feminist issues, media, women's health, politics, the environment,
education, urban life and gardening - all with equal measures of passion,
insight and humour.
Michele is a
regular guest on CBC Radio discussing children's literature. An activist
in progressive causes as well as a journalist, Michele has served on the boards
of a number of agencies and volunteer organizations for assaulted women, global
feminism and the cause of peace in the Middle East.
Other awards
include, The Robertine Barry Prize for journalism, from CRIAW; the Dodi Robb
Award from MediaWatch; the YWCA Women of Distinction; The Florence Bird Award
from ICHRDD (Rights and Democracy) and the Governor General's Medal in
Commemoration of the Persons' Case, 2000.
Michele is
currently Chair of the Board of Directors for Women's College Hospital. Two of
Michele's three children were born at Women's College.
(source:
WCH website)
Daya Lye
Daya is the
Executive Assistant of the
Women's Future Fund,
and an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, completing an Honours
B.A. in Women's Studies and Political Science. Her work experience is in social
marketing and administration for programming to promote cycling.
These skills
and her knowledge of sustainable transportation were developed while working for
the City of Toronto for four years.
She has been a
contributor to the F*word, the University of Toronto's equity, feminist and
lifestyle magazine, and has worked with the Women's Studies Student Union to
present a workshop on menstruation in popular culture and alternative menstrual
care products. She is planning to pursue a Bachelor of Health Sciences in
Midwifery.
Harmony Rice
Harmony is an
Anishnaabe woman from Wasauksing First Nation of Potawotomi, Ukrainian and
Cayuga descent. A mother, multi-media artist and media builder, Harmony is a
dynamic and passionate woman who currently leads SPIRIT Magazine (spiritmag.ca)
and the Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts (www.andpva.com)
Lorraine Segato
Lorraine is a
great supporter of community initiatives. The co-founder and lead singer of The
Parachute Club, Lorraine is a Musician, Songwriter, Filmmaker, Event Producer,
Artistic Director, Speechwriter, Lecturer and Social Justice activist.
More information about Lorraine can be found at:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/getoffmydress/
Kairi Williams
Kairi is
currently Marketing Manager, Community Campaigns, at
the Heart & Stroke Foundation of Ontario.
Kairi was raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and has lived in Toronto for the past
seven years. Since starting her career in marketing, she has worked for
both public and charitable organizations including St. Francis Xavier
University, the Canadian Women's Foundation and the Heart and Stroke Foundation.
Kairi has held a number of volunteer positions with women's organizations.
She recently completed a term on the Board of Directors for the Women's Funding
Network - an international membership organization of women's foundations, and
is currently on the Board of Directors for Sistering - a direct service agency
for poor and homeless women in Toronto.
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