Recommendations
Respond comprehensively to COVID-19
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Safeguard public health care for all by increasing the Canada Health Transfer escalator by at least 5.2% to match higher delivery costs.
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Establish a public, universal, single payer pharmacare plan with a national formulary that includes the full range of sexual and reproductive medicines, commodities, and devices that includes a fully-funded cost-coverage strategy for the full range of contraceptive supplies for all people in Canada which will empower 7 million women and adolescents at a cost of approximately $157 per person per year.
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Address the gendered economic impacts of COVID-19 through a comprehensive national framework on childcare.
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Regularize everyone in the country without permanent resident status and ensure permanent resident status to facilitate access to health care for all. In the interim, ensure immediate access to sexual and reproductive health services to uninsured patients.
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Develop and implement a regular national survey on sexual and reproductive health to collect data on a comprehensive set of indicators in line with other G7 economies.
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Establish a national guiding program to collect and share disaggregated data with effective privacy measures and consistent with provincial Human Rights Codes.
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Allocate a minimum of 1% of Canada’s pandemic response (approximately $2 billion) to international assistance as an emergency and medium-term global response to COVID-19. This should be part of a larger increase to Official Development Assistance (ODA).
Improve access to abortion
- Withhold the transfer of federal health contributions to the provinces and territories that fail to ensure the availability and accessibility of abortion services and initiate dispute resolution procedures under the Canada Health Act.
- Engage all provinces and territories to create telemedicine billing codes for medication abortion (Mifegymiso) in line with existing billing codes.
- Allocate resources for the establishment of a national strategy, in consultation with the provinces, territories, and Indigenous Services Canada, to address fully-covered and timely access to out-of-country abortion access.
- Allocate funds to support Health Canada to publish accurate, evidence-based information regarding abortion access, including information to directly counter misinformation disseminated by Crisis Pregnancy Centres.
Increase access to comprehensive sexuality education
- Launch a $20 million, 5-year national awareness raising campaign in support of quality, evidence-based comprehensive sexuality education and training program for professional sexual health educators.
- Establish a national, fully-funded implementation plan in consultation and collaboration with provinces, territories, Indigenous Services, and other stakeholders towards strengthening curriculum development, delivery, and accountability of sexuality education everywhere in Canada.
- Allocate resources to the Public Health Agency of Canada, Health Canada, Department for Women and Gender Equality, and Indigenous Services Canada to actively promote the 2019 Canadian Guidelines on Sexual Education.
Global SRHR
- Double ODA within five years, as part of a plan towards a just, equitable and green recovery, and meeting 0.7% GNI to ODA. New funding should include increased support for the neglected areas of SRHR (abortion care, contraceptive care, adolescent SRHR, and advocacy for SRHR).
- Establish and fund a Canadian Global SRHR policy and accountability framework, grounded in human rights and feminist principals, to guide development assistance efforts and foreign policy.