Status of Women Minister Patricia Hajdu has just indicated it is open to funding women’s advocacy groups from a diversity of perspectives—as long as they are all pro-abortion.
Hajdu said in an interview that, “I think that’s a very clear indication of our government’s willingness to hear from sometimes opposing voices — people that push us towards more progressive policy, people that are not afraid to criticize the government or criticize our approaches.”
But when asked if this openness to “opposing” perspectives extended to those of pro-life women, she beat a hasty retreat. “The work still has to happen within values and evidence and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, so what we want at Status of Women is to empower women and to ensure the protection of women’s right to choose,” she said. “So, it would have to still fall within the realm of feminism.”
This is pretty funny for a number of reasons. First of all, opposing voices? Really? Come on. Yeah, yeah, I understand—Stephen Harper forced a number of feminist franchises off the public teat because they were lobby groups primarily lobbying against his government, and now Justin Trudeau, Canada’s First Feminist Prime Minister, is going to refund them. None of that is surprising, of course. It’s just the way politics goes.
But it is funny because this whole diversity thing keeps on tripping them up. Obviously, the over sixty percent of Canadians who support some kind of restriction on abortion would not be welcome to apply for funding, even those who fall “within the realm of feminism”—keep in mind, many feminist supporters of legal abortion do not support it throughout all nine months of pregnancy. That is the territory of wild-eyed extremists like Vancouver’s own Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada. I presume that the ongoing brawls between old guard feminists like Germaine Greer, who find the idea that men who have decided they are women without experiencing pregnancy or menstruation or any other female experiences offensive for obvious reasons, and the transgender movement would also not fall under the “realm of feminism,” even though women like Greer actually defined feminism. Too much diversity there, too.
But most amusing part of this is the revelation that our hip, post-modern, selfie-taking overlords don’t realize that the vast majority of Canadian women are thoroughly disinterested in feminism. In fact, Chatelaine reported last year to widespread shock and outrage surfacing on blogs nobody reads that a full 68% of Canadian women don’t call themselves a feminist! So this leaves a whopping 32% of Canadian women “within the realm of feminism” that Miz Hajdu would give money to. However, Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, did chime in to tell us all that we should care way more about something that very few of us apparently care about at all. “More of us, men and women, should proudly call ourselves feminists,” she lectured solemnly. “We should be proud of the movement—past and present—and ambitious about its future.”
