Social futzing via Mr. Duclos

An exhausting exercise in social engineering

I went to a Service Ontario office in downtown Toronto Wednesday to renew my driver’s licence.

It was everything a customer/taxpayer could want: Swift service from an employee who was polite and capable. I was in and out within 15 minutes, just as I usually am when I go to such an office every year or two to do business.

That’s pretty much all I want, not only from this particular department, but also from any and all arms of government: In my freaking dreams, of course.

While the front-line Service Ontario employees were serving me and a Starbuckslike line of customers with trademark efficiency, their federal counterparts were busying themselves with social engineering upon the marching orders of their minister, Jean-Yves Duclos, and his master, that self-described proud feminist, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

As Radio-Canada first reported this week, Service Canada bosses have been given a directive telling them to use gender-neutral language to avoid “portraying a perceived bias toward a particular sex or gender.”

Instead of using the tried-and-true Mr., Mrs., or Ms., for instance, employees were told to either use a client’s full name or to ask how they’d prefer to be addressed. Similarly, according to the memo obtained by Radio-Canada, workers were also told to avoid such gender-specific terms as “father” and “mother,” and to use “parent” instead.

No sooner than the directive became public — it’s already in effect, according to one Radio-Canada source, and already causing employees grief, having to inquire of bewildered patrons if he/ she is “parent 1” or “parent 2” — Families Minister Duclos was furiously backpedalling, tweeting that Service Canada would of course “continue to use Mr/Ms when interacting with Canadians.”

“We are only confirming how people want to be addressed as a matter of respect,” Duclos tweeted.

Then why did he tell his people to stop using those particular honorifics?

This government’s insistence on viewing the world through an “equity lens” is pervasive and exhausting, not to mention distorting.

Whether the PM is hectoring rich guys about the joys of hiring women at the World Economic Forum in Davos as he did in January (to a crowd, as Rachel Giese wrote in Chatelaine, that would be described by the less genteel as a “sausagefest”) or bragging that Canada’s new peacekeeping effort as part of the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali will include plenty of women in uniform because of Canada’s unabashedly feminist foreign policy, he’s relentless and wearing, as are his ministers.

Mostly, it’s also unnecessary. If there are women in the aviation task force and support troops being sent to Mali, then of course they should go. If there aren’t, then so be it.

But of course for this government, that’s never enough.

Thus, when the mission was announced, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, surely the smartest and most capable of Trudeau’s ministers, was obliged to remind the planet of the Elsie Initiative for Women in Peace Operations.

It’s apparently a Canadaled project, named after a Second World War mechanical engineer named Elsie McGill, “to test new ways of eliminating barriers to the participation of women police and military in peace operations.” I quote directly from the government’s press release of the day, because I’ve no real idea what on Earth it actually means. And though it was mentioned in conjunction with the Mali mission announcement, it’s unclear if it will be part of that. In this regard, Freeland’s speech earlier this month to the UN didn’t much help.

It’s not as though women, born or made, in Canada are systematically oppressed or subjugated. Women who want to serve in the military can, and do; equality of opportunity is all that can be reasonably asked of a country, and that exists. And it’s not as though most people have time or inclination to worry about their pronoun of choice, least of all to demand that they be addressed by it.

This may not be a perfect country, but for women, it comes close enough that evolution, not revolution, is all that’s needed.

Most of us muddle along just fine, as indeed do the people who run the Service Ontario and Service Canada desks. The last thing they, or the rest of us, need or want is more gendered language instruction or social engineering from this strangely obsessed government. Singh has recently had to defend his appearances at events that promoted the idea of Sikh independence, including one in which he is seen sitting quietly beside a Sikh leader in England who says his vision of Sikhism endorses “violence as a legitimate source of resistance and survival.”

Last week, Singh issued a blanket condemnation of terrorist acts following media reports about his attendance at a California rally three years ago that sang the praises of Sikh separatism and a violent religious leader killed during the 1984 invasion of India’s Golden Temple.