Leaders face credibility gap on topic of ‘new feminism’

When all was said and done, Conservative party leader Stephen Harper might’ve been wise not to show his face at the University of Toronto Monday night.

Within two minutes of the start of the ‘Up for Debate’ event on women’s issues in the federal election, the crowd was booing his name, following a roast by comedian host Jess Beaulieu.

Harper had refused an invitation to the event, which would have been the first on women’s issues during an election campaign since 1984. And because he refused, NDP leader Tom Mulcair declined too.

So instead of a debate, the 175 organizations gathered under the ‘Up for Debate’ banner were treated to a series of sketchy video clips in which each leader promised to make good on affordable childcare, to create a national strategy to combat violence against women, to boost representation of women in politics.

All things Canadian women — 54 per cent of the population which out-voted men in the last federal election — have heard before. But these calls have taken on a new urgency in a year marked by repeated pleas for an inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, a series of high-profile sexual harassment and assault scandals, not to mention continued shifts in family structure that see parental roles no longer defined solely by gender.

Organizers positioned the event — a packed 500-capacity hall before a panel broadcast nationwide on social media — as the beginning of a final push to bring women front and centre before Oct 19. There’s a reason Mulcair and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau didn’t blink when proclaiming in the interviews that they are proud feminists — a word their voting base would also wear with pride.

That these leaders engaged in a focused discussion on these issues “is a sign that something’s happening again in terms of women’s issues,” said journalist Francine Pelletier, who interviewed each of the leaders. “That’s why we have the campaign now as opposed to five years ago. We just have to keep the pressure on.”

In the mid-1990s, Canada was ranked first by the United Nations for its record on gender equality, but has slipped to the low teens, said panellist Kate McInturff, senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. “Not only (do) we have an issue of gender equality in 2015, but we’re seeing the progress slow down and, in fact, in some cases go backwards ... it’s all the more urgent right now to make sure we’re having a public conversation about this.”

But there are clear signs the dial has shifted on what constitutes a women’s issue in this election, certainly compared to the mid 1990s — a point made incredibly clear during a discussion of the leaders’ responses that bounced from the violence against women file to

It makes my heart glad to see two leaders try to out-compete themselves on issues of childcare. That’s something. KATE MCINTURFF

proportional representation (the NDP, Liberals and Greens are for it — pointing to Germany’s election of Angela Merkel as an example of how greater representation of women has changed the tenor of politics and the issues covered).

“It makes my heart glad to see two leaders try to out-compete themselves on issues of childcare,” McInturff said. “That’s something.”

Indigenous lawyer and panellist Katherine Hensel disagreed. “This is not a women’s issue. To characterize it as a women’s issue is a form of sexism,” she said. Nor have the parties this time around been explicitly treating it as such. But beyond suggesting national strategies to address complex, multilayered issues such as violence against women, the leaders were largely at a loss for why no one has fixed them already. “There’s a lot of misogyny in certain types of music,” Trudeau offered when asked about why violence against women persists. “There are issues around pornography.” On female representation in politics, Mulcair said “My party president is a woman, national director and caucus chair is a woman, and if you look at the NDP’s front bench in the house of commons, 10 of them are women.”

The challenge these leaders seemed to have was responding in a credible way not just to “new feminism,” which panellist Alejandra Bravo of the Maytree Foundation identified as one interested in “intersectionality” — how issues of gender and race are intertwined — but to women and men interested in the bottom line. Violence against women costs the Canadian economy an estimated $12 billion each year. Yet, for all the tangible examples of how attitudes toward women can carry real costs, the responses of leaders were less concrete, while Harper opted out entirely.

As media panellist and Huffington Post journalist Althia Raj put it, in reference to Harper’s absence: “It’s not like people on the right don’t think about women’s issues,” she said. “They just think about them differently.”