McLeod Group blog by Laura Macdonald, February 11, 2021
This is the last of three blogs that the McLeod Group is publishing this week on the topic of the Canadian government’s Feminist Foreign Policy, which is currently being drafted.
In recent years, governments around the world have begun to recognize that the impacts of international trade relations are gendered. Over 120 countries have signed the World Trade Organization’s Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment, which was launched in 2017. At the same time, trade economists are paying increasing attention to the impacts of trade liberalization on economic inequality between and within countries. All but the most orthodox now recognize that the gendered and distributional effects of trade cannot be ignored or assumed away.
Since promoting trade and signing trade agreements have been major elements of Canadian foreign and economic policy over the last few decades, measures to address the disparities in impact on gender relations in global trade should be integrated into any truly feminist foreign policy (FFP). Even though the “scene-setter” document prepared by Global Affairs Canada (GAC) for public and internal consultations claims that the FFP is a “whole of government” exercise, it pays minimal attention to trade relations.
The document mentions that Canada has policies on gender and trade in only two sentences: “As part of Canada’s Trade Diversification Strategy, Canada is pursuing an inclusive approach to trade that aims to ensure that the benefits of trade are more widely shared. Canada seeks to remove barriers to trade while mainstreaming gender-responsive provisions across our free trade agreements (FTAs), including stand-alone Trade and Gender chapters in FTAs with willing parties”.
The document, however, does not identify trade and economic policy in any of the items for discussion or the substantive areas flagged for policy development and consultation. The government seems to be hiving off to the trade division the responsibility for integrating gender into trade policy, while the FFP process focuses only on issues that fall squarely under the purview of the foreign affairs minister: enhanced diplomatic engagement; Women, Peace and Security; responding to evolving vulnerabilities; and inclusive digital transformation. This approach contradicts the goal of policy coherence that was used to justify the 2013 merger of trade, development and foreign policy under the GAC umbrella.
It’s true that, under the Trudeau government, the trade division of GAC has been actively working on developing new approaches to addressing the unequal impact of trade relations, both at the international level and in its own bilateral and multilateral agreements. For example, the government has pledged to promote gender equity in trade policy through stand-alone gender chapters in trade agreements and mainstreaming gender through other aspects of trade agreements. Trade officials are being trained in Gender-Based Analysis Plus (GBA+), and the trade division in GAC has displayed considerable leadership and ingenuity in devising new methods to study the differential impact of trade on women and men and policy measures to address this.
So far, however, its approaches have not adequately responded to many of the critiques made by feminist activists and scholars regarding the gender biases in the global trading system. Civil society organizations have raised concerns about the impacts liberalized trade may have on women in the informal sector, small-scale women farmers, caregivers, and racialized and working-class women in both the Global North and Global South.
The gender chapter in the “modernized” Canada-Chile Free Trade Agreement (2017) claims, for example, that “improving women’s access to opportunities and removing barriers in their countries enhances their participation in national and international economies”. It commits both countries to carrying out cooperation activities to promote women’s inclusion in trade opportunities. These activities, however, focus on promoting the inclusion of women professionals and entrepreneurs, and largely ignore the problems faced by poor and marginalized women (see previous blog). Moreover, this gender chapter is largely aspirational and contains no measures for enforcement.
In addition to stand-alone chapters, Canadian trade officials are attempting to develop ways to “mainstream” gender into other aspects of trade agreements, for instance in chapters regarding labour standards, trade in services, and procurement. The trade division also established a Gender and Trade Advisory Group in fall 2020 to promote more information-sharing and consultation with stakeholders.
Nevertheless, thus far, all of these efforts have significant weaknesses. GAC still tends to see more inclusive policies and evaluation as a way of identifying the possible benefits of trade for women and other marginalized groups, not the costs or risks. Despite the inclusion of the “plus” in GBA+, data and analysis are still based on gender binaries. The department’s economic analysis of the potential benefits of new or existing trade agreements focuses on benefits to Canadian women, and fails to take into account the impacts of women around the world.
For example, this analysis doesn’t consider the impact of global and regional value chains on women in developing countries. And insofar as they concentrate on boosting relatively privileged women, recent Canadian policies may do little to address deeply entrenched inequalities between different groups of women both inside Canada and abroad.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgency of the issues described above and of paying attention to women and other marginalized groups in the global trading system. The World Bank and the World Trade Organization report, for example, that “women account for 60 to 80 percent of the workforce in the global value chain for apparel, which has been severely affected by the pandemic”.
As in so many other areas, COVID has revealed the weaknesses in both our domestic policies and in the way the global economy functions. Civil society groups are telling the government to “Be Brave Be Bold” and embrace policy coherence and transformational objectives. The government needs to move beyond entrenched silos in policy making and incorporate considerations of international economic policy into its Feminist Foreign Policy.
Laura Macdonald is Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. Photo: Sam Tarling/Oxfam.
The first two McLeod Group blogs on Canada’s Feminist Foreign Policy are available here and here.