PM touts gender equity in Africa

Equality will bring stability, Trudeau says

MONROVIA, LIBERIA •Africa and the rest of the world will never achieve peace and stability without empowering women and girls — and encouraging men to support them, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Thursday on the first day of his visit to Liberia.

“When you try and settle a conflict that doesn’t involve women in the solution, it’s not going to last,” Trudeau said in the capital of Monrovia during a panel discussion on the leadership roles that women can play in peace, security, governance and sustainable development.

Trudeau opted for Liberia — an impoverished country in West Africa that lived through years of brutal civil war and was hit hard by the deadly Ebola epidemic in recent years — as the first stop on his first visit to Africa since he became prime minister.

He did so, he said, in part because of the leadership of Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her role in securing and maintaining peace following civil war.

The symbolism dovetails nicely with a decision by the Trudeau government to put gender equity and the empowerment of women and girls at the heart of its international development strategy, which he talked up to the friendly — and sometimes adoring — crowd gathered for the panel discussion at city hall.

“We have to pierce through the perception that women’s issues are only for women to talk about and to fight about,” Trudeau said as he encouraged men to join the battle to improve the lives of women and girls in order to improve the lives of everyone around them.

He did not shy away from saying that development assistance should include access to abortion. Earlier in the day, however, the prime minister danced around another controversial question about human rights in Liberia.

“The fact is, different countries have different paces of evolution in terms of recognizing and enshrining those rights, but we can see that there has been tremendous progress over the years in many different areas,” Trudeau said when asked to address the fact that many in Liberia do not condone same-sex marriage.

Standing beside Johnson Sirleaf at a joint news conference, Trudeau praised the Liberian president for the leadership she has shown on female genital mutilation, another human rights issue that affects the region.

Asked for her reaction to Trudeau’s comments on LGBTQ rights, Johnson Sirleaf tried to walk a fine line between homosexual relationships and the country’s law prohibiting anal intercourse.

“Liberia has no laws that restrict the rights of individuals to their own choices,” she said.