Persons Day Lunch Virtual Success
by Pat Carl
Seventy-Five women joined organizer Lisbeth (Betty) Donaldson and the Persons Day Lunch Committee with co-host Heather Ney and the Transition Society (CVTS) for an online celebration commemorating important milestones reached by Canadian women in the early 20th century.
Five local Comox Valley women leaders and change-makers shared their experiences during the pandemic.
Alex Bissinger, a Comox Councillor and a mother with a 9-month-old just beginning to crawl, described how her professional trajectory has been upended by becoming a mother and how mothers desperately need access to child care as well as early childhood education. “What do mothers like me do who don’t want to stay at home (24/7) when there’s no care for their children available?”
Speaking next was Rachel Jancowski, an Early Childhood Education student at North Island College and peer facilitator at CVTS. She acknowledged that she has a safe place to live, while other women face financial instability and have partners whom they fear.
Jesse Ketler, a Cumberland Councillor and the current Chair of the CVRD, commented that women are still working within systems structured centuries ago by men (that are not responsive to women’s needs). She’s awoken to the challenges of the pandemic because she and her son are immuno-compromised and her step-father recently died in care, without family support.
Dianne Hawkins, the CEO of the CV Chamber of Commerce, said she’s naturally an extrovert who is finding the collapse of community activities challenging. “I suffer from Zoom-fatigue,” she said, “and I’m helping elderly people in my family, so I’m missing work.” She mentioned how the isolation experienced by the elderly was profound since many of them do not know how to use computers, cellphones, or ATMs.
Picking-up on the theme of social isolation, Hegus (Chief) Nicole Rempel of the K’omoks First Nation discussed how First Nations elders were immersed in a socially connected community pre-COVID. “The pandemic has been especially traumatizing for elders,” she said. “It’s been emotionally and culturally difficult” because the Band must practice social distancing which means “no potlatches, feasts, or even funerals that are (extended) family and community events.”
The final speaker, Dr. Charmaine Enns, Chief Medical Officer at VIHA, was concerned that incorrect information and anxiety is being spread about COVID on social media. “Screen time is up especially for young people by 89 percent (since the start of the pandemic),” she said, as well as indications that “impaired learning” is increasing. Additionally, according to Enns, “young families are suffering the most,” especially ones with low incomes and unstable housing. She suggested that we should all spend less time on social media and that when we do go online, we need to “maintain our own and others’ wellbeing by being positive.”
Persons Day normally is a remembrance of the day Canadian women were legally declared persons. The right to vote and own property followed - for White women. As with so many Colonial institutions, Indigenous women and women of colour had to wait considerably longer for the same rights. The COVID pandemic is, in some ways, reversing gains women have made over decades. It is women who have disproportionately lost their jobs due to COVID. It is women who disproportionately stay at home with children or elders. It is women who are disproportionately affected by the lack of available child care.
