Big words, smaller action
When it comes to the issue of abortion and access to it, no one outdoes the Trudeau government in rhetorical flourish.
“This government will never back down on defending and promoting women’s rights in Canada and around the world,” says Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“Everyone in Canada should have access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care, and that includes access to safe, accessible and stigma-free abortion services,” declares Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos. Adds Marci Ien, the minister for women and gender equality: “The freedom of a woman to choose belongs to her and her alone.”
After this mountain of words, however, the government seems content to produce a molehill of action. On Wednesday, it announced $3.5 million, a drop by contemporary standards, for two projects designed to improve access to abortion services.
Set beside the urgent words about problems with access, and how they fall heavily on poor and disadvantaged women, this is more than just a dollar short. It’s also 13 months late, given that the government set aside $45 million to address this very problem in its budget — not the most recent one, but the previous budget in April 2021.
That money sat unspent until now, when suddenly there’s a bright light shone on the issue of abortion because of events across the border.
The leak of an impending U.S. Supreme Court decision that may strike down the Roe v. Wade decision establishing a nation-wide right to abortion in the United States has no direct impact on rights or access in Canada. But Canadian public opinion being what it is, the overhang of the American situation brings a new urgency to long-standing issues in this country.
It was obvious well before the Supreme Court leak that Canada had a problem with uneven and unequal access to abortion. Indeed, that’s why the government earmarked that $45 million last year. So the fact that it took an unrelated American event to finally jolt it into action puts all the rhetoric in perspective.
Certainly, the government should get on with improving access and addressing those inequities. But doling out grants to organizations like the National Abortion Federation and Action Canada (with more to come for other groups, says the government) is the easy part. The government is still ducking the harder decisions in this area.
One such decision is how hard to press provinces that don’t fully live up to the promise of providing equitable access to abortion, as they must for any other health service. Some offer few services in remote and rural areas, forcing women to travel far or take time away from work and family. Others have put cumbersome limitations on access to Mifegymiso, the abortion pill.
The feds could use the Canada Health Act and their power to withhold health-care funding as a lever to force access. But they’ve done that very sparingly, presumably because confronting provinces is awkward and potentially unpopular.
The other decision is how — indeed whether — to follow through on the prime minister’s promise to look at the “legal framework” around abortion in Canada to make sure a future government could not roll back women’s rights.
That is indeed fraught. Any codification of abortion rights in Canada would involve putting some limits or conditions on it, something that at the very least would be bitterly divisive. Better, perhaps, to let sleeping dogs lie and not upset the large national consensus on a woman’s right to choose.
In the meantime, though, the government could at least try to close the gap between its rhetoric and its reality on addressing access issues. Either tone down the words, or get more serious about action.
It was obvious well before the Supreme Court leak that Canada had a problem with uneven and unequal access to abortion ... So the fact that it took an unrelated American event to finally jolt it into action puts all the rhetoric in perspective