Freeland needs to exercise powers for all

It's getting more than a little dated, in the Western precincts of this globe at least, to pretend it's a milestone when a woman is presiding over some office or organization. And it was hardly scaling a new peak that in the male-feminist government of Justin Trudeau, Chrystia Freeland was placed as deputy prime minister and offered the finance portfolio as well.

As for the fabled glass ceiling, apostrophized to infinity by aspiring female politicos — famously by Hillary Clinton, who claimed to have administered many cracks to its surprisingly durable surface — surely it is time to retire that threadbare phrase.

Let me go a little further. Having a female finance minister is not so much another progressive milestone, but just another routine illustration that women — and most certainly professional women — sit easily at the highest altitudes in law, journalism, medicine and finance. It is commonplace in fact, and a signature of the new status quo.

Virtue signalling over the gender of a finance minister might be thought of as a small thing, unless it signals a relationship to the nature and substance of the document itself. A feminist budget is a ridiculous concept. Always, it should be a Canadian budget, and not — I'm choosing a word here — a handmaiden to any particular preoccupation or ideology. Even outside the culture wars, that category — Canadian — admits of both sexes and is the only description a national budget should wear.

We have had the COVID-19 economic ravage described, and energetically so, by both the prime minister, who is a male feminist, and his finance minister, as a she-session, indicating it has been particularly hard on the female half of the population. As rhetoric, this has the sole virtue of being trendy.

Let us pull up a particular case. There is a small shop, owned by one person, perhaps employing two or three other persons. Because of these damn lockdowns it is finished; it is bankrupt, the life-dream of its owner is crushed and the realization is harrowing. Its employees share the pain and burden.

Is the disappointment and suffering of owners or employees any lesser or greater if they are all women or all men, or a mix of both? Hurt doesn't check the chromosomes.

Let me be more explicit: when we say the recession has been harder on women than on men, we should be particular. It may be harder on some women than on some men. But equally so, it may well be, if we look more closely and particularly, harder on some men than on some women.

However this perspective is only possible if we avoid “group” identifications, which are necessarily overgeneralized, laden with political intent, and far too wide to accommodate the huge variations of experience within and between group categories. The story and experience of no human life can be sketched under the huge outlines of group identity.

And of course there are sets beyond men and women. Why gender in particular is seen as a dividing line worthy of political accommodation and validation is very curious. People are very much more than their genders. And to reduce the whole human being, in the full range of his or her experience and situation, to the X and Y borders, is insultingly reductive.

So I find it depressingly off-key to see the most consequential public document of any government, a nation's budget, so proudly hailed as a “feminist” budget. As I would if it was proclaimed an “environmentalist” budget. Or a Bay Street budget. Or a religious budget.

This is a sad subscription to “it's your turn now” politics, which is the unspoken mantra of all identity politics, which is the most pernicious turn in our public life of a generation. It is divisive, exclusive of some, favouring of others, government by categories, and empty of the idea of common citizenship.

In her public role Ms. Freeland is not and cannot be a feminist.

And that obliges her to set aside personal predilections and overt favouritism to one movement, and exercise her powers more equably. For all Canadians. It equally obliges her to see the citizens of this country outside the prism of woke dogmas and the lure of current political fashions.

She is the Finance Minister of Canada. Here's the only tag that works. It's a budget for all Canadians. As Canadians.

ADRIAN WYLD / THE CANADIAN PRESS Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland holds a copy of the budget as she packs up her papers at the end of a news conference in Ottawa on Monday.