A Question For Linda

Can she provide the figures showing how many single mothers are members of these feminist advocacy groups? IMO these groups have over the years become elitists and a haven for women who burned their bras back in the 60s and reluctant to go out in the new millenium.

In PM's world, girls will be herded back to the kitchen, and gays back to the closet, says Linda McQuaig
Oct. 15, 2006. 01:00 AM
LINDA MCQUAIG

When it comes to equality for women, Stephen Harper is all for it — as long as the women are in Afghanistan.

Last May, the Prime Minister told Parliament that ensuring equality rights for women was one of the key reasons Canada is waging war in Afghanistan.

Certainly Harper's claims of championing the rights of burqa-clad women have helped him sell that unpopular war to Canadians.

But when there's no war to peddle, Harper doesn't give a piffle about women's equality. Indeed, he seems downright opposed to it.

In a recent move that got relatively little attention, the Harper government actually removed the word "equality" from the list of goals of Status of Women Canada, ending decades of advocacy for equality on the part of that federal agency.

Such advocacy itself is now under attack. The Harper government has cut off funding for advocacy done by women's organizations, which have fought hard to overcome discrimination that has, for instance, left women earning substantially less than men, regardless of occupation, age or education. Canadian women earn 72 cents for every dollar a man earns.

This pay gap exists despite federal and provincial pay equity laws, and would undoubtedly be bigger if it weren't for women's groups pressuring governments to enforce and strengthen these laws, despite opposition from business.

The Conservatives have also stopped funding women's groups that carry out research about women's status. Evidently, the less women know about their inferior status, the better. These moves are aimed at appealing to Harper's base of social conservatives and religious right wingers, but are wildly out of sync with the Canadian mainstream.

Pollster Michael Adams notes that, while Americans have become more deferential to patriarchal authority in recent years, Canadians have gone dramatically in the opposite direction. As Adams writes in his book, Fire and Ice: "Canadians' more egalitarian views regarding the status of women and the structure of the family ... seem to lead them to a more relaxed view of what constitutes a family."

No wonder the Harper crowd is apoplectic. This "more relaxed view of the structure of the family" implies the very things they oppose — single-parent families, working mothers and gay marriage.

Hence Harper's decision to cancel the national child-care plan, created by the Liberals last year after decades of advocacy by women's groups.

It's hard to explain this cancellation — Canada is flush with a $13 billion surplus and there are more than 1 million preschool children with working mothers — other than as an attempt to drive working women back into the home.

In Harper's world, it looks like girls will be herded back to the kitchen, just as gays are herded back to the closet.

Once we all get our roles straight again, in some sort of 1950s Father Knows Best rerun, everything will be fine.

So, for women, the good news is — burqas are out. The bad news is — so are careers.

Linda McQuaig is a Toronto-based author and commentator. lmcquaig@sympatico.ca.

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Linda McQuaig is a Toronto-based author and commentator. lmcquaig@sympatico.ca.