The implementation of the Convention is monitored by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). The Committee is composed of 23 experts nominated by their Governments and elected by the States parties as individuals “of high moral standing and competence in the field covered by the Convention.”
State parties are expected to submit a national report to the Committee within one year after the entry into force for the State concerned and thereafter at least every four years, “indicating the measures they have adopted to give effect to the provisions of the Convention. During its annual session, the Committee members discuss these reports with the Government representatives and explore with them areas for further action by the specific country. The Committee also makes general comments (including recommendations) to the States parties on matters concerning the elimination of discrimination against women.”
Canada submitted combined sixth and seventh periodic reports in May 2007. The reports covered the period from April 1999 to March 2006. A draft outline for the combined eighth and ninth periodic reports (presumably for the period from 2006 to 2013) was circulated by the Department of Canadian Heritage in January 2014 to a limited number of Non-Governmental Organizations for comments, but to date there is no record that the new Canadian reports have been submitted to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.
In November 2008, the Committee provided its concluding observations with respect to the sixth and seventh periodic reports. The Committee welcomed efforts by Canada to combat trafficking in people and to make available parental leave for fathers and its proactive attitude towards the implementation of the Convention in international forums and “through its international cooperation with other countries in the field of women’s rights.”
The Committee identified several areas of concern, including that
- there have been “reports of cuts in social assistance schemes in many provinces” and “resulting negative impact on the rights of vulnerable groups of women, such as single mothers, aboriginal women, Afro-Canadian women, immigrant women, elderly women and disabled women, who rely on social assistance for an adequate standard of living”;
- “the Convention has not been fully incorporated into domestic law and that discriminatory legislation still exists”, [i]n particular … the fact that the Indian Act continues to discriminate between descendants of Indian women who married non-Indian men and descendants of Indian men who married non-Indian women with respect to their equal right to transmit Indian status to their children and grandchildren”;
- “hundreds of cases involving aboriginal women who have gone missing or been murdered in the past two decades have neither been fully investigated nor attracted priority attention, with the perpetrators remaining unpunished”;
- “poverty is widespread among women, in particular aboriginal women, minority women and single mothers” and there is a lack of affordable childcare and affordable housing for low-income women with families;
- “Aboriginal women and women of various ethnic and minority communities continue to suffer from multiple forms of discrimination, particularly in terms of access to employment, housing, education and health care” and “women from ethnic and minority communities are also exposed to a high level of violence and are significantly underrepresented in political and public life”;
- “a disproportionate number of aboriginal women are incarcerated; this is true also of Afro-Canadian women and other women of colour”;
- “domestic violence continues to be a significant problem” and that there are “high levels of violence against adolescent girls in the family and society”;
- “financial support for civil legal aid has diminished and that access to it has become increasingly restricted” and Canada’s “Court Challenges Programme, which facilitated women’s access to procedures to review alleged violations of their right to equality, was cancelled”;
- “no temporary special measures are in place to accelerate de facto equality between men and women or to improve the situation of women’s rights” in Canada, “in particular with regard to women in the workplace and the participation of women in politics”; and
- “under the new guidelines for NGO funding by the SWC (Status of Women Canada) Women’s Programme, women’s organizations cannot receive funding for domestic advocacy activities, lobbying or research” and “the resulting lack of funding has forced a number of women’s NGOs to shut down or to severely restrict their work.”
The Committee made recommendations as to how Canada could address these concerns. It also requested that Canada provide written information within one year on:
- the steps taken to address a recommendation made with respect to establishing “minimum standards for the provision of funding to social assistance programmes, applicable at the federal, provincial and territorial levels, and a monitoring mechanism to ensure the accountability of provincial and territorial governments for the use of such funds so as to ensure that funding decisions meet the needs of the most vulnerable groups of women and do not result in discrimination against women”; and
- “the reasons for the failure to investigate the cases of missing or murdered aboriginal women and to take the necessary steps to remedy the deficiencies in the system” and “to urgently carry out thorough investigations of the cases of aboriginal women who have gone missing or been murdered in recent decades.”
Canada provided an Interim Report in February 2010 to address these two recommendations and supplemental information on the latter in November 2010.
The Committee also invited Canada to submit its eighth and ninth combined periodic reports in December 2014.
Complaint under the Optional Protocol
The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women received a complaint against Canada in 2008 from Cecelia Kell. The complainant had been involved in a property dispute and had fought to regain her property rights through the Canadian legal system over a period of ten years. “In 2008, contending that she had exhausted all domestic remedies, Kell filed an individual complaint against Canada through the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, claiming to be the victim of violations of a number of articles of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.”
In 2012 the “Committee established that Canada, as party to the Convention and its Optional Protocol, had failed to fulfil its obligations under articles 1, 2 and 16 and that it should provide monetary compensation and housing matching what Kell was deprived of. The Committee also recommended recruiting and training more aboriginal women to provide legal assistance, as well as review Canada’s legal system to ensure that aboriginal women victim of domestic violence have effective access to justice.”