Social Policy in Ontario

Periods! Many girls (as young as 9 or 10) and women (often well into their 50s) and people get them. They can be regular or irregular. They can start with spotting or they can start like your water breaking. You can be late, you can be early. They can even suddenly stop for a few months and start back up again with no notice.

They can come with advance symptoms, they can come with little other change, they can be lived through with little effort, or you can be in complete pain from the cramps for days on end. They can last two days, they can last eight days. You can have medical conditions that make them worse. The variations are as diverse as people with active uteruses themselves.

Periods mean that for upwards of 40 to 45 years of a person’s life with their active uterus, they will need to sop up the flow. (Did you know that women are one of the few mammals that continue to live after the reproductive years end? Mostly, female mammals just die when they stop being reproductively useful. So there is that.)

And yet talking about periods is still considered taboo. Whenever they come, we are forced into the Red Tent. We have to skulk around work and school with tampons and pads stuffed up our sleeve, we have to whisper to our friends, asking if they can hook us up.

We have laws that mandate toilet paper, soap and related products in washrooms, but there is no such thing for a product that many people with an active uterus need.

If a machine is even present in a washroom, we are required to put in a quarter or more (I’ve seen as much as $2 needed) to pay the cost of being a menstruating person.

There has, however, been a growing movement around period products. In 2015, the tampon tax movement culminated in the federal government (Conservatives, nonetheless) removing the GST/HST from menstrual products. Many provincial PST systems already had removed it or have since removed it.

Even with the products being tax exempt, they are unaffordable and inaccessible to some. Affordability and access need to be separately considered.

Not all people can afford these products on a regular basis, not all people can access these products when they need them, and a person should not have to reveal private information about their body to obtain access to a needed product at the exact moment they need them. Imagine having to go to the security desk at work or the office at school asking for a wad of toilet paper and having to say, “Can you double that, because you know.”

And so, enter the United Way Period Promise Research Project. This project is looking at ways to best provide services and products to people who menstruate. The men, yes, men, in the B.C. legislature in March had an amazingly respectful conversation about period poverty in the province that led to a commitment from the B.C. government to provide startup funds to help all B.C. public schools provide free pads and tampons to their students by the end of 2019. It was, as it should be, a fairly uncontroversial act.

Enter the federal government, which recently committed to a regulatory process to make free menstrual products available in federally regulated workplaces. It will help about 500,000 people who are employed in the federal labour force. The federal Labour Code already requires that employers provide toilet paper, soap, warm water and a means to dry one’s hands. This would simply add menstrual products. The audacity.

What the federal government is addressing is not some sort of communist hand-out line for government-grade pads (you know, like the ones you get in the hospital). It is about, if you will, a federal backstop. Despite hoarding menstrual products in every nook and cranny possible, we all get caught from time to time without access to products. This is about helping women who are caught be able to finish their day without bleeding through their pants. It is about dignity.

There have been other interesting reactions, such as: Won’t women steal them? Is this a problem with toilet paper? Soap? Paper towels? No, and anyone stealing these items probably really needs them. Is this just about virtue signalling and vote getting? Should we just leave well enough alone? After all, employers can offer these products if they wish. Here is the problem: They don’t and they seem in no rush to do so.

Will this be the end of the debate? Not bloody likely.

Lindsay Tedds is an associate professor at the school of public policy at the University of Calgary.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2019/05/28/lets-end-the-period-taboo-making-menstrual-products-available-is-about-dignity-nothing-less.html