AGE

By the year 2000, twenty-eight percent of all Canadians will be over fifty years old. A combination of societal aging and competitive claims on the public purse tends to pit one generation against another and in the process may encourage age discrimination of various sorts. From the standpoint of human rights, the question is what governments can and should do to alleviate age-related discrimination. In this regard, three matters are of particular interest to us: the opportunity to work; the opportunity to retire from work with some degree of financial security; and the possibility for our children to be free from poverty, exploitation or any of the other abuses or privations that diminish their chances in life.

DWINDLING OPPORTUNITIES

Older workers are demonstrably more vulnerable to discrimination based on misconceptions about their abilities. One initiative funded by the Department of Human Resources Development has consciously targeted this problem. The OPTIONS 45+ Program aims to deal with the work-related needs of older unemployed or underemployed Canadians. Its activities include a public education campaign to sell the skills of older workers who, because of their experience, may offer an employer greater reliability, loyalty and judgement. Employers are also encouraged to review their policies on recruitment, promotion, training, redundancy and retirement to weed out discriminatory biases based on "ageist" assumptions.

The first OPTIONS newsletter, published in January, reported that thousands of men and women aged forty and over face economic hardship because of their difficulties in getting or holding a job. And once unemployed, older workers remain so significantly longer than younger ones. As the Chairman of the Canadian Network for Experienced Workers writes, "older unemployed workers also have to deal with additional obstacles, such as lack of marketable skills, barriers to upgrading, and myths about the value and abilities of older workers". Perhaps the most damaging myth is that older unemployed workers do not really need the work. In point of fact, many older workers simply cannot afford to be thrust into retirement earlier than they had planned. A hardly less serious misconception is that hiring or training older workers is not a good investment. If anything, the evidence suggests the contrary: one recent report indicates that newly-hired fifty-year-old workers can be expected to stay with a company for an average of fifteen years, significantly longer than the average for those hired at a younger age.

MANDATORY RETIREMENT

Our repeated request that the Human Rights Act be amended to remove provisions allowing employers to retire employees at a predetermined age, regardless of ability, remains in legislative limbo. Mandatory retirement is particularly unfair to those who have taken time out of the workforce because of child care responsibilities or who have experienced extensive periods of unemployment. They may well have difficulty building up enough pension credits to live comfortably if forced into retirement. The irony of this becomes more striking when one considers the changing ratios between workers and retirees. As The Economist noted recently, "if people are living longer, they will have to work longer too". Indeed, one of the bonuses of our own situation may be that Canadians are now "younger longer". No doubt there are various ways to adapt ourselves to an aging society, but mandatory retirement hardly seems one of them. It may be that most people do not want to work beyond the "normal retirement age" for their occupation, but compulsory retirement clearly discriminates against those who are capable of working and want to do so. It is high time this form of discrimination ceased to be protected by the Canadian Human Rights Act.

The Commission was again involved in several mandatory retirement cases this year. One involved two airline pilots who filed a complaint of age discrimination in 1990 after they were forced to retire at age sixty. When the Commission decided not to bring their case to a tribunal, the complainants appealed. In November, the Supreme Court dismissed their appeal, essentially on the grounds that the Human Rights Commission had no choice but to apply its own law (see Case Work: Resolution of Complaints for details). A second long-running case concerns twenty-six airline pilots and flight attendants who complained of age discrimination when they were laid off as part of the transfer of the Executive Flight Service from Transport Canada to the Department of National Defence in 1985. The Canadian Forces claim that the complainants' then average age of fifty-one was only four years short of their mandatory retirement age, making it impractical to integrate them into the new service. After a number of legal challenges this case was again heard by a human rights tribunal in August. (In January, 1997 the tribunal found that the Department of National Defence and Transport had discriminated against the complainants.) A third case relates to ten members of the Forces who were obliged to retire at various ages predetermined by their rank. The Forces have always conceded that this policy discriminates on the basis of age, but justify it as a reasonable occupational requirement. A human rights tribunal and the Federal Court, Trial Division both found that the CAF have no legitimate need for this policy. This decision has been appealed, however, and the matter will be heard by the Federal Court of Appeal in 1997.

THE WELFARE OF CHILDREN

Canada was one of over a hundred countries represented at the World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in Sweden in August. It is estimated that every year some one million children are forced into prostitution, sold for sexual purposes or used in child pornography. Addressing the Congress, the Minister of Foreign Affairs acknowledged that child prostitution and child pornography still exist in this country. He also pointed out that poverty "makes children, particularly girls, more vulnerable to sexual exploitation", and that children exploited in this way are especially vulnerable to AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. While such exploitation might never be completely eradicated, it should be possible, in his words, to "demolish the systems and schemes of exploiters, and give countless children a brighter and better future". Towards that end, a bill was tabled in Parliament in April to criminalize so-called "sex tourism", whether practised by Canadian citizens or by permanent residents, wherever the crime may be committed. With this legislation Canada joins a number of other countries that have taken measures to outlaw practices that are, if anything, encouraged by the phenomenon of globalization.

Legislation was also introduced to deal more effectively with child prostitution in our own country. It provides for a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison for those convicted of profiting from juvenile prostitution and includes steps to make it easier for child prostitutes to testify against their pimps. Canada is also involved in drafting an optional protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that would require countries to criminalize the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, and to extend their jurisdiction in these areas by way of extra-territoriality provisions such as those referred to above.

CHILD LABOUR

A 1996 International Labour Organization study found that there are approximately two hundred and fifty million children in developing countries between the ages of five and fourteen who are compelled to work. This is nearly double the previous estimate. Some of the complexities of dealing with this issue were brought out by a Parliamentary Sub-Committee this fall. The Minister for International Cooperation pointed out that the principal rationale for child labour is poverty, which, "deepened in many places by cuts to social programs, forces children to work for survival, while offering no other alternative, such as access to education". Simply requiring the withdrawal from work of under-age children is manifestly not a solution to the underlying problem; indeed, it could work against their welfare by forcing them into ways of making ends meet that are even more dangerous. The focus has to be on creating more attractive alternatives, whether they be in the form of vocational training facilities or income replacement for families who depend on the meagre wages earned by their children.

In February, the Minister of Foreign Affairs announced that Canada will support a global effort by the International Labour Organization to stop the exploitation of child workers under thirteen through the International Program on the Elimination of Child Labour established in 1991. This program encourages governments to adopt legislation that conforms with international standards by setting minimum age requirement for workers. It also provides funds to protect and assist exploited children and to raise awareness of child labour issues. Priority targets include children working under forced labour conditions and in bondage, children working in hazardous occupations, and very young working children. This year, a substantial portion of Canada's multi-million dollar expenditure in support of children was directed toward the elimination of child labour.

VULNERABLE CHILDREN

In August, Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board brought out guidelines dealing with unaccompanied child refugee claimants. While not lowering the standard of proof required for a child to be a Convention refugee, these recognize that children may not be able to put forward their claims in the same way as adults and suggest ways of overcoming problems that may arise in processing children's claims and assessing the evidence they present. To our knowledge, these are the first guidelines of the sort to have been adopted by any country.

The United Nations declared 1996 the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. The discriminatory effects of poverty can readily be seen in the ways that inadequate family income handicaps many Canadian children. This issue was raised in February by the National Anti-Poverty Organization as part of a submission to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. It noted that in 1994 almost twenty percent of Canadian children lived below the low-income cut-off that is our best official measure of what the word 'poverty' means in this country. A number of areas were identified in which the Government was not adhering to the UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, among them the alleged failure to respect "the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to continuous improvement of living conditions."

In November, a report released by the Canadian Council on Social Development concluded that, while the vast majority of Canadian children are healthy and are being raised by caring families, a substantial number are effectively excluded by the straitened conditions in which they live and the want of opportunity that results. The Council described Canada as "one of the lowest spenders on income security programs among advanced industrialized countries" and estimated our child poverty rate to be among the highest in all the industrialized countries. In the words of the Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF, Canada is "still short-changing too many of its children."

One way of coming to grips with this problem would be to reform our child support system. Over the past twenty years, families headed by a single parent have almost doubled in number. There are now well over a million such families in Canada and more than half of those headed by women live below the low-income cut-off. In March, the Minister of Justice unveiled some long-awaited reforms in this area. They include guidelines for determining child support payments, better enforcement procedures, and changes to the tax treatment of support payments. At present, the courts determine child support levels on a case-by-case basis. In May, legislation was tabled that will require the use of child support guidelines when dealing with support applications under the Divorce Act. Payments will become more consistent as schedules are established for each province and territory, based on factors such as the number of children involved and the income of the parent who receives the support. It is no less critical to ensure that payments are made on time and in full. Many support-paying fathers are conscientious about paying regularly, but wilful defaulters not only cheat their children, they force other Canadians to take up the slack. The proposed legislation aims to complement the efforts of other levels of government. It would permit the suspension of federal licences and certificates such as passports in cases of persistent default and give the provinces access to the database of Revenue Canada to trace such defaulters.

Government action in the area of child support has been generally positive, as was the 1996 budget announcement that the Working Income Supplement for low-income families would be doubled to $1,000 over the next two years. Child poverty was also identified as a priority by the powerful Commons Finance Committee in December. It recommended increased allocations to low-income working parents and identified a need to deal with the rising costs of higher education, particularly for students with parental responsibilities. Campaign 2000, a coalition of groups monitoring a 1989 Commons resolution to eliminate child poverty by the end of the century, has proposed other measures. These include a basic child benefit to assist all poor families, funding for child care services, and an endowment fund for young people from low-income families who have the ability but not the means to attend university. We are beginning to see several hopeful signs that Canadian governments are determined to tackle child poverty in a coordinated way.

Return to Table of Contents