Yet another female premier has been ousted from office after a single term. Is it too impolite, not to say politically incorrect, to ask why? Jason Kenney’s sweep to a majority in Alberta on April 16 is telling Canadians something important.
With the rejection of Premier Rachel Notley, Albertans have put faith in Kenney, giving his United Conservative Party a comfortable majority government and ending the oil-producing province’s brief flirtation with an NDP government.
Kenney had essentially promised a conservative counter-revolution to repeal various NDP-instituted regulations and taxes, most notably the carbon tax and corporate tax increases which inflicted a bruising stretch of economic doldrums under Notley’s tenure as premier and saw the Alberta oilfields hitting the skids. Which is why Notley was shown the door, along with her tax increases, deficit budgets, and what Albertans began to call the “Notley-Trudeau alliance” on climate policy, which they regarded as against the better interests of Alberta.
The highlights so far
Notley is just the latest female premier to fail in her bid for re-election to a second term. The first was one-termer Rita Johnson who in April 1991 was elected interim leader of the Social Credit Party in British Columbia and then appointed premier of that province where she served until her exit in March 1992.
Johnson’s brief foray into high-profile politics was followed by Kim Campbell, the first and to date only female prime minister of Canada. Campbell served from June 25, 1993 when she took office facing a statutory general election until November 4, 1993, when her party was wiped out in a Liberal landslide, leaving the Tories with only two seats.
Then came a band of six more female premiers beginning with Eva Aariak of Nunavut who, in November 2008, was chosen as the second premier of Nunavut over incumbent Paul Okalik and MLA Tagak Curley for one term only, ending in October 2013.
In December 2010, Kathy Dunderdale of Newfoundland and Labrador became that province`s first female premier for one term only, until January 24, 2014.
In March 2011, Christy Clark was sworn in as the 35th Premier of British Columbia for two years and then re-elected to serve another four years until her defeat in 2017, making Clark the lone female politician to break the ‘one-and-done’ trend.
Meanwhile, in Alberta, Alison Redford served as that province`s 14th premier from October 2011 until her ouster in March 2014.
And in Quebec, Pauline Marois became Quebec’s first female premier in September 2012 by leading her Parti Québécois to minority victory. Her party was defeated 19 months later in the 2014 Quebec general election, an election she herself had called and which led to her personal defeat in the riding of Charlevoix–Côte-de-Beaupré where she announced her resignation as PQ leader, marking the shortest stay of any Quebec provincial government since Canadian Confederation and the lowest showing for the PQ since its first general election in 1970.
Which brings us to Kathleen Wynne of Ontario who, it is claimed, elevated Canada`s international prestige in the area of gender equality to a level unimagined even a decade earlier. Indeed, as the CBC gushed, Wynne’s election “embodies social progress of a magnitude that the rest of the word can only envy and few countries can dream of emulating.”
After replacing the disgraced premier Dalton McGuinty and subsequently leading the party to a majority victory in 2014 as an openly ‘gay’ premier, Wynne then ushered in her government`s controversial and widely opposed sex-ed programme which stubbornly remains in force to this day, despite her ignominious defeat and loss of her party`s status last June, marking the worst defeat of a governing party in Ontario history.
Oh, the novelty!
So now that the novelty of female politicians has run its course, perhaps it’s time to take a step back and look at what these female politicians have wrought in the political sphere.
Throughout Canadian history, only 12 women have served as a First Minister in Canada, a fact many feminists regard as lamentable, a fact they think must be corrected by more feminist activism and more government sponsored programmes designed to lure young women into politics which – despite all the ‘heady’ progress made since the 1960s and all the economic, social and political influence women have gained since then – still isn’t enough. Why? Because all these ‘gains’ must reach a fulcrum of power and influence where they become irreversible.
Which, of course, is the point. And which is why they insist that more must be done to achieve true equality with men who must be further feminised in the years ahead. Hence Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s GBA + (Gender-based analysis) program created by Status of Women Canada analyzing what it calls the gender and identity implications of government policy.
As if the proper management of a country is based in some ideological notion of equality rather than by choosing well-suited persons to serve the country, its citizens and its order in practical and measurable ways.
But such facts of life appear to matter little in the Trudeau world where its GBA+ matters a lot in that it’s providing the justification for filling a full 50% of his cabinet with women, despite only 27% of the MPs currently seated in the Commons being female. Got that?
The drones drone on
This is also why the House of Commons Status of Women committee –created in 1971 by Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s Liberal government and upgraded in December 2018 to the Department for Women and Gender Equality, a full government department – is making a cross-party call for the federal government to offer financial incentives to political parties to nominate even more women to run for election to correct what it claims is an under-representation of women in politics.
Apparently, Trudeau’s marking International Women’s Day 2017 by promising $650 million for reproductive health, sex education, safe abortions, contraceptives and the prevention of sexual and gender-based violence around the world wasn’t enough.
“Despite their growing political participation, women represent just 35 per cent of all legislators in Canada and remain under-represented at all levels of government,” the report said. “Increasing women’s participation in electoral politics is essential for achieving greater gender equality. Having more women in elected office is about more than achieving equality in a traditionally male-dominated field — it could also have significant effects on public policy.”
The committee said Ottawa should also consider encouraging parties to set voluntary quotas for how many female candidates they plan to field and publicly report on efforts to recruit female candidates after every general election.
They weren’t done. Other recommendations included a call for publicly funded education campaigns and training to counter what they claim are the negative effects of gender-based harassment of female politicians, both in traditional and social media. And to compound the mischief, MPs who worked on the report plan to ask another Commons committee to look into ways to eliminate gender bias in the design of voting ballots and to examine ways to eliminate the gender-based heckling alleged to go on in the House of Commons.
International Women’s Day 2019
Could anything be more artificial than this? Are women so dull-minded, so inept and so helpless that they need the democratic system to be manipulated in their favour?
Apparently, the answer is yes. How else to explain the logic behind an initiative launched on International Women’s Day 2019 and titled Canada 2020: No Second Chances? This is a new initiative exploring the experiences of the twelve women who have served in Canada’s most senior political roles and promoting how crucial their role has been in Canadian politics. Meaning what exactly? That’s there’s something more important to learn than the brazen self-promotion this exercise promises to be?
And can someone explain to me what was so admirable about the performance of the Daughters of the Vote in the House of Commons last month when several of these 338 young women – invited as guests to sit in the Commons on International Women’s Day, March 8 – turned their backs on the prime minister and the leader of the Opposition, presumably as a rebuke over the SNC-Lavallin affair? And why other Canadian women should therefore support this band of disrespectful exhibitionists and activists?
Some perspective, please
No Second Chances? How about No Excuses for the less than stellar performances of this first round of Canadian women in high-profile politics?
How tedious this has all become. As has all the self-congratulatory hype that, for the past couple of decades, has invariably surrounded the election of any and all of the ‘first’ female politicians in various categories across the political grid. When, frankly, there’s not a whole lot to boast about and few, if any, real achievements that can be laid at any of these women’s feet.
Is this perhaps the real reason why these female politicians are almost always booted out after a single term by literate voters who pay taxes and pay attention and are not suckered or intimidated or guilted by the feminist hype?
The truth is that Canadians actually do consider what’s really been going on. And they may well have asked themselves whether any or all of these women are talented, independent-minded and competent enough to achieve something real and something practical for the civic body they`ve been representing. Such as better roads. Lower energy rates. Efficient police services unhampered and unoppressed by leftist politics. And so much more. Instead of the social engineering these feminist politicians have been using taxpayer resources to bring about – from upending the nation`s morality and rearranging the traditional family to the shutting down of the nation`s economy to achieve such leftist egalitarian fantasies as socialism and climate change.
In short, as more females serve the State – not God – it is the State that is eventually destroyed, not God.
Vassals of the State
The truth is that while the rare female politician serves her community constructively and competently, many others have been ignoring their civic responsibilities as true servants of their communities and focussing on ideology.
And as such, most have been operating as vessels of the State. And as vessels of ever more egregious leftist ideology and destructive social engineering, all the while failing to understand – or outright rejecting – the truth of human nature as created by God, as Father George Rutler of Crisis Magazine has pointed out so brilliantly. “Whereas Christianity holds that men and women are equal but not the same, feminist dogma holds that women are the same as men but treated unequally.” This is a fundamental error which, in turn, has opened the door wide for today’s multi-pronged attacks on masculinity as bad, toxic, hurting women and as justification for treating men as objects of fear, ridicule and scorn. And that wherever possible the critical components of healthy manhood should be loudly criticized and punished.
The hideous result is that not only do feminist politicians blank half their voting population, they also have nothing to say to disaffected young men, abandoned psychologically if not physically by their mothers to temptations of criminality, sexual confusion and spiritual impoverishment. All the while pretending to ‘care’ as they race to and fro in a perpetual state of oblivion to all but their own ideology and the unnatural outcomes they wreak.
Is this what we’re supposed to celebrate?
The unavoidable result is that the natural and social order, as devised by the Lord God of Creation, is rendered unfit for purpose, as these vessels of leftist social engineering try to transform their world into an unthreatening marshmallow devoid of love, devoid of children and devoid of beauty while its Frankensteinian monsterisms continue to grow, eventually rendering all of life unfit for its natural purpose.
A mother who permits herself to abort her unborn child is no longer a mother; a government which legalizes the wanton perversion of its entire society can no longer govern a vanishing nation; and its godless citizens become incapable of even the slightest happiness.
Why? Because by forsaking its natural purposes, the society they live in is poorly served by their attempts to take jobs for which they are ill-suited. Which is also why so many voters today have low opinions of their politicians when it comes to judging their lack of accomplishments against their promises.
Yet, having wed themselves to the State, these politicians continue to upend the natural and moral orders in multiple ways, including seducing ever more women into politics – however untalented – and tempting them to take on all the natural strengths of men while forsaking their own natural, God-given talents and persuading many to get out of the motherhood business altogether.
What’s to celebrate?
Have female politicians made the world a better place? Many would agree that, despite all claims to the contrary, the world is no better, and may be worse. And that women are far busier but no happier as they wrack up what they regard as career accomplishments which, in truth, are meagre, if not worthless and downright useless, while their real lives – the one God intended – is forsaken.
The hard but glorious Truth for anyone trying to improve life on Earth by following anyone or anything but God is this: There is no such thing as Progress; there is only the Cross of Christ. Which we are reminded of daily and which is why the State – the Cross’s only true opponent – works so furiously and deceitfully to remove it from public consciousness and the public square.