This International Women’s Day, women and gender diverse people are looking at a future of greater poverty, struggle and repression as critical social, economic and political gains have come under attack and our political and economic sovereignty is directly threatened by our erstwhile friend and ally, the United States.
Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous quotation, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” once offered hope and inspiration to generations that freedom, equality and justice is our shared destiny.
But it turns out the arc of the moral universe is anything but. The first months of the Trump presidency has brought this reality forcefully home—institutional guardrails and protections giving way before a malevolent and capricious administration.
We’ve been watching in horror the fallout of the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022—the legacy of the first Trump presidency. Forty-one American states now have total or partial bans on abortions services. Clinics are closing or scaling back services, including the provision of contraception, as health care providers face draconian legal penalties. Pregnant women desperately seeking emergency care for miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies are being turned away from hospitals.
Eliminating the constitutional right to abortion was just the beginning. Trump rode a wave of escalating attacks on women and 2SLGBTQI rights to a second presidency, bolstered by a hateful entourage of male supremacists intent on imposing deeply conservative gender norms and regressive legislation on the U.S. and beyond.
Trump 2.0 immediately signed executive orders terminating all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and suspending public servants in those offices, threatening all government organizations and private contractors to abandon initiatives or programs that promote equity and remedy systemic discrimination.
Likewise, the new administration has taken action to defend women “from gender ideology extremism” by eliminating the use of the term “gender” in all government language and policy and stating its intent to only recognize women as “biologically female” and men as “biologically male”. With this action, the government is attempting to define transgender people and all who do not identify as “male” or “female” out of existence.
These and other orders gutting the federal government and cutting foreign aid are part of a coordinated campaign to reverse progressive legislation and human rights guarantees won by progressive movements over the past 100 years.
Patriarchy and authoritarianism are two sides of the same coin
In Canada, we tend to think of ourselves as somewhat protected from the conflicts roiling other countries. More reasonable, more progressive, more open-minded, less racist. Let’s not fool ourselves. The attack on gender equality is underway here, supported by home-grown, well-funded and well-organized social conservatives and far right agitators.
The campaign against feminism is a central pillar in the far-right’s “culture war” playbook designed to polarize communities, tap into social and economic grievances (especially among men), undermine democratic institutions, and lay the ground for authoritarian government.
It also works to divert attention from rising inequality and the ongoing economic plunder by the oligarchs and super-rich. The wealthy made out like bandits during the pandemic when their share of wealth hit record highs. The top 100 CEOs in Canada now make over 200 times the average worker’s wage, more than double the gap in 1998.
The “culture war” narrative appeals to many who are struggling in this economic moment, forgotten by the economic elites in their unfettered drive for profits the last 40 years and disillusioned with the state of our public services. While the wealthy happily pay to access private health clinics (indeed share in their profits), many of the rest of us wait for service in our stretched public system.
Families are struggling—and it’s likely to get worse, at least in the short term. It’s against this background of anxiety and fear that “gender” is portrayed as a destructive force, destabilizing the traditional family, threatening community identity and national solidarity.
Far-right and antifeminist movements are successfully exploiting these fears, building coalitions with social conservatives to elevate the “traditional family,” uphold racial hierarchies, restrict immigration, eliminate DEI programs, and diminish—more generally—the role of public services in our lives.
These movements are organized to appeal to, and reinforce, male dominance and misogyny—what has been called the authoritarian manosphere—the networks and ideas fuelling the global backlash against feminism and our democratic institutions.
It’s important to understand, as Robert Reich argues, that the embrace of authoritarianism that we are seeing around the world is linked to “a deep distrust, bordering on hate, of people who seem weak or feminine—people who were born as, or have become, women.”
The attack on gender equality and “woke” politics in Canada
The backlash against gender equality takes many forms. It channels its political voice through different conservative parties at the federal and provincial levels.
Federally, social conservatives make up a powerful faction in the Conservative Party of Canada and have for years. Under Stephen Harper’s government, women’s programs were decimated, violence against Indigenous women and girls steadfastly ignored, and vital supports and services eliminated through a multi-year program of spending cuts and privatization.
In those years, the government re-oriented family policy to privilege “traditional” nuclear families through “cash-for-care” policies and tax reforms like income splitting that benefited the wealthy. In a move that would signal the Conservative government’s approach to feminist issues, the word “equality” was removed from the mandate of Status of Women Canada in 2006 because, as Minister Bev Oda argued at the time, the focus on gender equality was no longer needed.
More recently, the attacks on gender equality have become louder as Pierre Poilievre has trained his sights on “woke” policies aimed at alleviating inequality. He’s called on Canadians to “put aside race, this obsession with race that wokeism has inserted.” He has thrown his support behind so-called “parental rights” policies and legislation in several provinces and recently stated that “female spaces should be exclusively for females, not for biological males.”
The Conservative Party has yet to release a platform for the next election but have indicated that a government under its direction would impose the notwithstanding clause to push through their criminal justice agenda. Eliminating bail? Establishing mandatory minimums?
Where does it end? Eliminating 2SLGBTQI rights? Restricting reproductive choice? Throwing out labour protections and pay equity? Shutting down media outlets?
Corporate elites and right-wing politicians united on tax cuts and austerity
The far-right agenda has moved from the extreme fringes to political centre stage in what seems to be a blink of an eye—unfolding in real time for the world to see. We need to acknowledge the enormity of the challenge in front of us—and the profound consequences of inaction.
The public conversation is taken up with the potentially devastating effects of Trump’s tariffs—yet policymakers have yet to direct their attention to the inevitable impacts on those with the fewest resources to confront the crisis, already struggling under the weight of exorbitant rents and the cost of essentials.
Federal and provincial governments are promising to work collaboratively to “ensure readiness to respond to immediate workforce impacts” while the business community—not a group to waste a crisis—is aggressively making the case for lower taxes and regulatory harmonization across the country to offset the tariff hit.
Does anyone think that being able to buy B.C. wine in Nova Scotia—as enticing as that prospect is— is going to generate the revenue necessary to offset Canada’s economic losses?
The Conservative Party, for its part, is proposing a “Bring It Home Tax Cut…on work, investment, energy, homebuilding and making stuff at home” to boost the economy and Canada’s military, to be financed by cuts to existing programs and departments.
Canada’s carbon levy tops the list. Leader Pierre Poilievre has also said he will cut investments in housing, defund the CBC, take a scythe to the federal workforce, and “dramatically” reduce foreign aid. He plans to target so-called “identity-based” programs for cuts. Women and Gender Equality (WAGE) Canada is most certainly on the chopping block. The fate of the national child care program and pharmacare? I am not holding my breath.
It all begs the question—is this the time to hamstring the federal government? Is this the time to drive a truck through federal revenues—unless your goal is to privatize the lot?
As my colleague, Marc Lee, wrote recently, “there is no reason to believe that cutting taxes for the wealthy or large corporations will stimulate broad-based economic growth. If anything, the benefit of these tax cuts will flow to the wealthiest Canadians, while households struggling to get by will be faced with the burden of public spending cuts needed to pay for upper-income tax cuts.”
Who is standing up for gender equality?
Debra Thompson has argued that the organized backlash against DEI programs is a Trojan horse for regressive policies of all kinds. It’s an attack on women’s reproductive rights, civil rights, Indigenous peoples, the social safety net, immigrants, climate change and our democracy. The attack on Canada and marginalized communities is all of a piece.
In this moment of economic crisis, all eyes are on Canada’s response to the United States. Governments need to be prepared to support workers and communities impacted by the crisis head on.
This must include emergency benefits and supports for affected workers, businesses and communities—taking the lessons of COVID-19 into account—and effective strategies for mitigating the potentially devastating impact of rising inflation as part of a comprehensive and radical approach that transforms the Canadian economy.
To this end, it’s critical that these policies apply an intersectional feminist lens to effectively respond to economic fallout on women, people with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, migrant workers and youth— to center their needs and perspectives in our fight to build a better future for everyone.
The response to the crisis can’t be a raft of workforce programs focused solely on displaced male workers in the oil patch. It must take an inclusive approach that builds out essential community infrastructure—including the care economy where millions of women work. We must demand better.
We must also name and challenge the vitriolic attack on women and gender diverse people for what it is—a key plank in the authoritarian playbook. It’s no accident that the current wave of democratic erosion and rising illiberalism is coinciding with a broader attack on gender equality and the rights of women and 2SLGBTQI people.
Back in 1968, Dr. King also said “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”
The arc of the moral universe is most certainly long, but it doesn’t bend towards justice on its own. That’s on us. We must stand together for justice and security for all, as women did more than one hundred years ago on the first International Women’s Day.
