RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is no surprise that the new budget tabled by Justin Trudeau’s Liberals is permeated through and through by the feminist mentality. Writing on LifeSiteNews, Lianne Laurence argues that Trudeau’s federal budget “institutionalizes feminism, panders to left-wing interest groups, patronizes women, and is long on ideology and bureaucratic meddling, but short on economics.” It includes, among other spending measures, a “feminist foreign aid agenda,” as well as “billions to boost women in the workforce,” as the Toronto Star reports. One recalls the late Senator Everett Dirksen, who reportedly joked: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

Indeed, so pronounced is its feminist bent that the budget “appears to have been written out of Status of Women Canada … or perhaps a campus gender studies course: this is surely the world’s first ‘intersectional’ budget,” wrote National Post columnist Andrew Coyne. It is, in his words, merely a “mix of ideological cant and bureaucratic busywork known as ‘gender-based analysis,’” rendering us graphically uncompetitive with the U.S. and “any other OECD country.”

As I pointed out in an earlier article, Trudeau has assigned his minister of foreign affairs, the ineffable Chrystia Freeland (of “100 years ago pretty much all women were beaten by their husbands” fame), to represent the country in the ongoing NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) talks with the United States. Freeland wants to expand the agreement to include gender and social justice goals. This is not going to work for Canada. Moreover, Freeland, a card-carrying feminist prone to tears when trade talks are about to collapse, is simply no match for a tower-building business-minded tycoon like Donald Trump. Rebel Media host Ezra Levant had it exactly right: Freeland, “an emotional-wreck quota-token,” did not much impress the tough European negotiators at CETA (Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) with her brand of lachrymose naiveté. Unless we get lucky, Freeland will succeed at doing what she does best: harm.

The embarrassments continue to mount up. Canada’s minister of environment and climate change, Catherine McKenna (aka “Climate Barbie”), instructs us to “consider the gendered impacts of climate change on women, girls and children.” Presumably the rest of the natural creation, including men, is of no account. Moreover, the possible relation that might exist between climate change and gender has baffled most observers, apart from the fact that the hypothesis of man-made climate change has been pretty well discredited.

But Climate Barbie is not to be deterred and is proud, she posts, “that Canada is training up women negotiators so that we have more female voices around the table.” Bad idea. The real “climate change” we are confronting today has nothing to do with temperatures and atmospherics, and everything to do with gender politics. It is the cultural climate that has changed, subject to the ravages of FGW (Feminogenic Global Warming) that has led to the growing concentration of women in the universities, corporations and the political world — “more female voices around the table” — where their influence is not always benign. It is not rising sea levels we need to fear but the rising level of the feminist wave on our shores.

Political women tend to understand conflict in locally gendered terms, accusing Judeo-Christian civilization of patriarchal tyranny, yet are soft on Islam, a male-dominated civilization in which women are routinely oppressed. The vaunted sisterhood, it seems, is a restricted association. Feminists lobby for status in traditionally masculine fields, such as commerce and science, where they complain of being under-represented, yet are distinctly averse to representation in the blue-collar, physically challenging and hazardous occupations. The Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2015, in which the top 20 most dangerous occupations are canvassed, reveals a male-to-female fatality incidence of between 76.1% (farmers and ranchers) and 99.9% (mining).

The girls obviously don’t want to go there despite their protestation of equal ability and the clamor for equal representation in a man’s world. The “voices around the table” are fundamentally interested in power and privilege, not in gender equality as they disingenuously assert. No more and perhaps even less skilled in the craft of human betterment than are men, they have no more claim to virtue than the men they wish to replace and lack consistency as well as honesty in the arguments they advance.

Sometimes the arguments are downright silly. Leonor Flores, a female engineer and project executive who works for the construction firm responsible for the Sweetwater Bridge that collapsed in Florida, with six fatalities, averred two days before the disaster: “I think women have a different perspective. We’re able to put in an artistic touch and we’re able to build, too.” Typically, she has her priorities reversed. You build first, then you put in the artistic touches, “too.” The mindset is all wrong. We’re not talking individual scientific luminaries like a Hypatia or a Fabiola Gianotti, but what seems to be a collective attitude, a preoccupation with embroidery rather than substance. Clearly, the only viable principles of job and professional selection, regardless of whatever identity group one belongs to, have to be ability and merit, not identity politics. Anything else is both a literal peril and a moral hazard.

To return. There are obviously extraordinary women currently working in culture and politics, for example, Nikki Haley, Betsy DeVos and Gina Haspel in the U.S., Anne Cools, Lauren Southern and Valerie Price in Canada, to cite just a few among a glittering continental sorority. But as a controlling bloc, women in positions of authority or influence are dragging the culture in the direction of irrational emotionality and illusory convictions. The U.S. has had its problems with Hillary and Huma and Fauxcahontas and Susan Rice and Samantha Power and Pelosi and Waters — the list goes on and on. Europe is reeling under the SJW influence of Elizabeth May, Isabella Lövin, Erna Solberg and especially Angela Merkel, whose petticoat compassion for the world’s disinherited is leading to the ruination of her country. Trudeau’s cabinet, in which as of January 10, 2016, women outnumber men, includes the likes of Patty Hajdu (minister of employment and labour), Maryam Monsef (minister of status of women), Karina Gould (minister of democratic institutions), Jodi-Wilson Raybould (minister of justice) and, of course, Freeland and McKenna, among a thoroughly undistinguished roster. They will do their “Social Justice” sabotage in defiance of common sense and in the absence of parental oversight.

I worry about my country. These women are very good at touting their caring natures, buying wholly into the social justice fetish, striving to make Canada more “inclusive,” and billing taxpayers with indiscriminate relish to further their agendas. This is what a Social Justice cabinet founded on the axiom of “gender parity” looks and acts like — though the term “gender parity” is somewhat moot since the other approximate half consists mainly of plutocratic manginas, including a prime minister devoid of economic savvy, political and business experience, and the slightest shred of intellectual accomplishment.

As Dave Ainsworth, who runs Ontario’s Need to Know speaker series, writes, “The problem we have is two more years of Liberal government during which time Trudeau’s feminist controllers will inflict as much damage as possible through social justice policy and regulations” (personal communication). The costs will be prohibitive.

But we should expect nothing less of a gaffe-prone dandiprat who believes Confederation is one hundred years old (shades of Obama’s 57 states) or that Canada has no core identity or that returning ISIS fighters are like Italian families that settled once in Montreal or that we should rethink space and time or that boys should be raised to “escape the pressure to be a particular kind of masculine” or that the human race should be referred to as “peoplekind” or that wearing rainbow socks at a Gay Pride parade, emblazoned (of all things!) with a Muslim greeting, is serious diplomacy or that budgets mysteriously balance themselves. He is the stuff of legend.

His most recent blunder, after the disastrous India trip, is one for the ages: he missed the state visit of the Belgian royal couple in favor of a spring-break vacation while his esteemed public service rolled out the German rather than the Belgian flag to commemorate the liberation of Belgium during World War One. As Arthur Weinreb writes in Canada Free Press, “Trudeau is just so bereft of functioning brain cells, he is unable to appreciate the consequences of his words and actions.”

His cabinet choices bear out Weinreb’s lament. Most politicians will play the feminist game, governed by what they view as electoral advantage rather than principle. But Trudeau is a special case, a tongue-tied perpetual adolescent who really believes the hype. His rationale for his original gynesic selections is characteristically puerile: “Because it’s 2015.” True to form, Justin has blessed us with a now gender-imbalanced cabinet, very much a reflection of his own misgendered sensibility. And, whether fiscally or culturally, we are going to have to keep paying for it.