Bio:
Elizabeth is currently the Law Foundation of Ontario Senior Fellow, Queen's Centre for the Law in the Contemporary Workplace, Faculty of Law, Queen's University. She is also an Adjunct Professor at Queen's, and a member of Ontario's Financial Services Tribunal. Dr. Shilton practiced labour and employment law for many years with the Toronto firm of Cavalluzzo Hayes Shilton McIntyre & Cornish. Her practice included significant cases involving workplace human rights and constitutional equality issues. She co-chaired LEAF's National Legal Committee for a number of years, and represented equality-seeking groups before the Supreme Court of Canada in such noteworthy cases as R. v. Seaboyer and Gayme, and Auton v. British Columbia (Attorney General). She holds an LLM from Harvard and recently completed an SJD at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, where her doctoral thesis focused on the legal history of employment pension plans in Canada. Her current research interests focus on workplace human rights and domestic and comparative employment pension policy, including issues of gender and pension reform. She is co-author (with Dr. Margret Hovanec) of Redefining Retirement: New Realities for Boomer Women (Toronto: Second Story Press, 2007). Her article, "Insuring Inequality: Sex-Based Mortality Tables and Women's Retirement Income" will be published in the spring 2012 issue of the Queen's Law Journal.
Title of paper:
'Women, Pensions, and Economic Equality'
Abstract:
Elizabeth will address the role played by law and legal institutions in constructing and reinforcing gender inequality in Canada's retirement income systems. She will outline the gendered nature of Canada's overall retirement income system, which is heavily dependent on market-based pension instruments, and explain how employment-based pensions historically privileged 'male pattern' full-time career employment and continue to do so. She will then situate current government proposals for pension reform (e.g. the proposed new Pooled Registered Pension Plan) within the overall context of Canada's retirement income system, explaining how trends towards increased pension privatization, deregulation and 'individuation' exemplified by such proposals disadvantage women, in view of their current patterns of engagement with the paid labour force and family over the life course. She will then demonstrate why substantive pension equality for women depends on developing and strengthening collective retirement income instruments that have the capacity both to account for women's labour market disadvantage and to recognize the value of unpaid reproductive work. Such instruments will not evolve within the market; there will be a significant role for state action in both their design and on-going regulation.