Essay award shows it’s time for change

Dear editor,

Hey folks when it comes to bumbling politicians and waffling bureaucrats you just cannot make up these stories of incompetence, ineptness and plain idiocy. Alberta’s associate minister of status of women, Jackie Armstrong Homeniuk, awarded a third prize award for literature to another women who wrote that women should stay home and have babies or Alberta will commit social suicide by importing foreign workers to replace the kids.

The associate minister was supported in this pantomime by three other nameless female MLAs. I quote, “While it is sadly popular nowadays to think that the world would be better off without humans, or that Alberta children are unnecessary as we can import foreigners to replace ourselves, this is a sick mentality that amounts to a drive for cultural suicide.”

So, a female politician is awarding a prize to a female writer who says women should not do men’s work. I really do wonder if anyone actually read the essay? The back pedalling started with, “As the minister for the status of women, I want to emphasize that I do not support rhetoric that in any way diminishes the importance and contributions of more than half of Alberta’s population.”

UCP leadership candidate Leela Aheer, who was ejected as status of women minister after she criticized Kenney, thought the essay was a joke at first.

“It was just hard to believe this was serious,” she said, but if anything like it had got past her, “I would severely question my own ability to do the job.”

You think? Time for a change folks.

Ian Parkinson Medicine Hat