Status of women panel in limbo during standoff over chair

MIA RABSON OTTAWA • The House of Commons status of women committee appears stuck in limbo while the Liberals and Conservatives battle over who gets to chair it.

“I predict a standoff for some time,” one committee member said Wednesday, 24 hours after Liberal and NDP MPs walked out to stop a vote to install Conservative MP Rachael Harder as chair.

The committee was scheduled to meet Thursday, but the Conservatives asked that the meeting be put off because two of its MPs couldn’t attend. It was rescheduled to next Tuesday.

That meeting is unlikely to go ahead unless the Liberals back down from their opposition to Harder or the Conservatives agree to nominate someone else.

Harder, the Liberals and NDP said, is not qualified to chair the committee because she holds anti-abortion views.

“It’s not that we can’t work with a Conservative as chair of the committee, but the spokesperson for Canadian women should be someone who is representative of the Supreme Court decision that was made in 1988,” said Liberal MP Pam Damoff, who is one of the vice-chairs.

Harder wouldn’t speak to The Canadian Press on Wednesday but she told the Lethbridge Herald the Liberal walkout was “grandstanding.”

She also said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is being intolerant of a young, Conservative female MP, since he’s been silent about Liberal MPs who share her antiabortion views.

Trudeau said Tuesday the Liberal committee members acted on their own but he supported their decision because “quite frankly, one would hope that the committee for the status of women would have a spokesperson who would be able to stand up and unequivocally defend women’s rights.”

“That’s sort of the point of the status of women committee.”

Those comments came just moments after he said Liberals “believe in free speech” when asked how he felt about American professional athletes taking a knee during the national anthem to protest racism.

His spokesman said the prime minister’s comments were clear when asked how he squared believing in free speech with blocking a committee chair nomination because of someone’s views.

Insiders said if the Liberals were surprised by Harder’s nomination, the Conservatives were equally taken aback by the response to it.

A party spokesman for Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer said Harder’s nomination came specifically because she was the shadow minister for the status of women.