Feds need real feminist bonafides now to prevent backsliding later

OTTAWA—Two months before he became prime minister in 2015, Justin Trudeau declared: “I am a feminist. I’m proud to be a feminist.” He was widely ridiculed by right-wing groups and mocked by members of the Conservative Party. Thanks to Trudeau’s persistence, however, Canada is now regarded as a world leader for the feminist agenda. Gender-balanced cabinets, which Trudeau first introduced in 2015, are now an aspirational goal the world over; and the list of countries committed to implementing a feminist foreign policy is steadily growing: Mexico, Germany, France, Israel, and Rwanda have all joined in. The bad news is that the agenda is moving at a snail’s pace. According to data gathered by the United Nations, as of Sept. 19, 2022, there are only 28 countries where women serve as head of state and/or government. At this rate, gender equality in the topmost positions of political power will take another 130 years. Even at lower levels, only 26 per cent of all national Parliamentarians are women, up from 11 per cent in 1995, but still way too low. Only five countries in the world have 50 per cent or more women in their parliaments: Rwanda (61 per cent), Cuba (53 per cent), Nicaragua (51 per cent), Mexico (50 per cent) and the United Arab Emirates (50 per cent). With the exception of the Emirates—where its then-president, the late Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, simply issued an outright decree in 2019 that women must occupy 50 per cent of the Federal National Council seats—all the other countries have had to make deep fundamental changes in the systems and structures of their societies. Interestingly, none of these countries are in Europe nor do they include the Americans or us in Canada. To put it another way, none of them are “white.” The obvious question is: what are they doing that we are not. For one, they have prioritized the elimination of social barriers, racism, income equality, and oppressive institutions in order to create the conditions for women to succeed. We have opted to only pursue gender-equity. It is what Black feminists like professor Angela Davis of UC Berkeley have termed “glass-ceiling” feminism. It targets equal representation, not the dismantling of obstacles that prevented representation in the first place. The beneficiaries are, almost always, the privileged classes. We should learn from a country like Cuba. Article 44 of the Cuban Constitution is unequivocal about the feminist agenda: “The state guarantees women the same opportunities and possibilities as men in order to achieve woman’s full participation in the development of the country.” In 2015, while Trudeau was tweeting about being a feminist, Cuba’s National Assembly was already at 48.9 per cent women, many of them from the historically marginalized Afro-Cuban community. Cuba has also made a fundamental shift in its foreign policy by moving away from militarism to promoting health care, education, and internationalism. Cuban doctors, nurses, and teachers working across the globe are a good testament to this. By contrast, in Canada we have only tweaked things around the edges. Our singular achievement is the Feminist International Assistance Policy. It was launched in 2017, mostly as a rebranding of existing defence policy and reproductive rights. Aside from that, we are still doing what we have always done, except more women are doing it now. Consider Chrystia Freeland. In May 2018, as then-minister of foreign affairs, she vowed to pursue “an unabashedly feminist foreign policy that integrates gender equality into our diplomacy, trade, security, and development efforts.” Immediately thereafter, she led the Lima Group in its ill-fated attempts to destabilize the governments she didn’t like, including the one in Nicaragua, which, as noted above, has the third-highest number of women Parliamentarians in the world. There is nothing feminist about Freeland’s muscle flexing in South America. Notwithstanding Freeland and her ideological freewheeling, Trudeau should not let the feminist foreign policy lie dormant. Quite the opposite, he should initiate a new national conversation that outlines its principles and potential to solve the world’s most pressing problems of inequality, militarization, and climate change. Countries like Cuba and Mexico have long understood that the international system is rooted in conflict, racism, and the colonial legacies. They are doing something about it—so should we, before those who oppose the feminist agenda start showing up. On Oct. 6, Global News reported that Pierre Poilievre’s 50 most recent YouTube videos, including those made after he won the leadership of the Conservative Party, had used a misogynistic hashtag to attract “anti-feminists.” Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was a slip-up made by a political staffer. Let’s go a step further and assume that deep down, Poilievre even supports the idea of a feminist foreign policy. Just to be safe though, let’s not take any chances. Trudeau needs to crank up the feminist agenda to a pitch from which it can never be rolled back, by anyone. Bhagwant Sandhu is Canadian foreign policy commentator and author. He retired as director general from the federal public service. The Hill Times

Feds need real feminist bonafides now to prevent backsliding later

The Liberals should not let the feminist foreign policy lie dormant, but rather initiate a new national conversation that outlines its principles and potential to solve the world’s most pressing problems of inequality, militarization, and climate change.

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Feds need real feminist bonafides now to prevent backsliding later

The Liberals should not let the feminist foreign policy lie dormant, but rather initiate a new national conversation that outlines its principles and potential to solve the world’s most pressing problems of inequality, militarization, and climate change.

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