DINNER ADDRESS: MADELEINE LEBLANC

TITLE: AN ADVISORY COUNCIL: WHAT CAN BE DONE?

I have probably been asked to talk about the work going on at the New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women because it is still, even after three years, the youngest council of its kind in Canada. We must admit that the gestation period for such an organization is usually somewhat long. In New Brunswick, we will have managed to get the government to adopt, in one year, the law establishing the advisory council, beating the all time record, maybe because 1975 happened to be the International Year of Women.

Our Advisory Council holds a double mandate: we have a responsibility - to advise the government, and a mission - to distribute information to the public so as to encourage a change of attitude towards women. One can't go without the other and we must ther fore work on these two levels simultaneously. As Claire Bonenfant, from the Quebec Council, would say, "It won't be the first time women have been asked to do more than two things at the same time". Our New Brunswick Council has discovered that the government speaks only one language, that of public pressure, the language of the electorate. We had to start by distributing much information and by educating the public. We talked about such subjects as violence in the home, sexual harassment and numerous other injustices done to women.

The Council publicized the role it was intent on playing and started listening to the women of the province, first by organizing a toll free hot line for their use, and by holding public meetings in all corners of the province. We made sure we were highly visible from the start and thus created a climate of confidence that encouraged women to break the silence. The Council earned respect with regard to the quality and good timing of its public interventions and the press, both regional and national, demonstrated quite a bit of sympathy towards our cause.

In the past three years, we have discussed the equal sharing of matrimonial wealth, the family services law, the employment regulations, and we have talked about battered women, women alcoholics, drug addicts, women and sports, sexism within the educational system, police ethics and numerous other subjects. We had a lot of success with a self-fulfillment program set up through a make-work project. We organized two provincial conferences, in 1978 and 1980, that respectively brought together 250 and 350 women and resulted in the creation of a whole network of awareness groups and political action groups.

Our first responsibility is to advise the government on issues having to do with the condition of women. We advised or tried to advise on all the subjects mentioned above and realized that, to be heard, we needed more force of persuasion than that of a small Council with a staff of twelve. Since no intra-governmental organization supervises the enforcement of recommendations, the Council must constantly put pressure on the authorities. We have not, for the moment, asked for such an organization, choosing for now to deal directly with the different departments.

To prove our efficiency, we must also prove that the changes we advocate have great support. In New Brunswick, we can count on the help of numerous groups and individuals. One only has to think about our awareness campaign on the condition of battered women, a campaign that, with great publicity and enormous backing from the women and the media, finally convinced the government to finance a pilot project to create a half-way house. Of course, we don't always have this much luck. But many other projects proved successful, like the one on ethics within the police force and the one on the development of services for alcoholic women. We have met with many setbacks. For example, the action plan on the condition of women presented to the government last June met with no success and led finally to a public denunciation by the Council. We know that many politicians would love to muzzle us. We also know that the serious ones realize that it is our duty to denounce abuse and to bring to the attention of the government and the people all questions that worry women. Our Councils have nothing but an advisory capacity, of course, and they do need the support of women if they are to survive.