Amidst a global pandemic that has disproportionately impacted LGBTQ2S+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer and Two Spirit) people, whose communities already face high rates of poverty, homelessness, and health inequities, and in a country where people like me still face near-daily harassment for daring to exist in public spaces as out, proud, and visibly gender non-conforming people, LGBTQ2S+ communities and our issues should be top of mind for federal political parties in Canada. Yet, all parties have failed on this front, with such insignificant commitments to our communities that it would be laughable—if it weren’t so heartbreaking.

As the Executive Director of Wisdom2Action, a LGBTQ2S+-owned and operated consulting firm that works closely with both local and national LGBTQ2S+ organizations, I have seen the urgency in our communities—the desperate need for real federal leadership, fiscal investment in our organizations, and legislative change. And yet, despite the crises facing our communities, our issues have barely been addressed this election season.

By and large, our communities rarely receive much attention in federal elections. While our issues were referenced on occasion in the 2019 election, largely to score cheap political points against competing parties, the 2021 election has barely touched on LGBTQ2S+ people, despite the ongoing crises and human rights issues we face.

While there’s undoubtedly been significant progress on LGBTQ2S+ issues since the Liberal Party formed government in 2015, through legislation protecting trans rights, an apology for the discriminatory purge of LGBTQ2S+ employees in the public service, and new funding commitments to support LGBTQ2S+ community organizations, we are still facing crises on multiple fronts. Findings from Statistics Canada have highlighted significant income disparities, demonstrating that a “pink ceiling” on employment persists in our country. Many LGBTQ2S+ people still struggle to make ends meet, find affordable housing, and live free of discrimination. While hate crime tracking is far from adequate, all signs point to rising rates of hate-based violence targeting our communities.

At the outset of the election, our team at Wisdom2Action published a report identifying eight key policy proposals for consideration in this election. The recommendations include a substantial increase in funding for LGBTQ2S+ community organizations, working with provinces and territories to improve access to transition-related healthcare, and banning invasive, medically unnecessary surgeries on Intersex children. Endorsed by two major LGBTQ2S+ organizations, the Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity (a national youth-focused charity combatting homophobia and transphobia in schools and communities across Canada) and the Enchanté Network (a national network representing and supporting over 160 pride centres and LGBTQ2S+ community organizations across Canada), this report provides a clear path for progress on LGBTQ2S+ issues. However, the bulk of the recommendations identified in the report have not been reflected in federal political party platforms on LGBTQ2S+ issues.

The Liberals seem to believe they’ve got our votes well in hand, the Conservatives just don’t want to be called bigots this election, the NDP don’t seem to realize that, despite often being called the “social justice party,” they won’t win with us without real commitments that speak to our needs and priorities, and the Greens, if the recently leaked internal report that named transphobia as an urgent and unaddressed issue within their membership is any indication, aren’t particularly well positioned to speak to our issues.

The way political parties talk about our issues couldn’t be more out of touch with the lived realities on the ground. Almost half of trans people in Canada live either below the poverty line, or very close to it. As much as 40 percent of the homeless youth population identifies as LGBTQ2S+. Our issues aren’t window dressing—they are pressing and urgent crises, and our political parties should treat them as such.

Our communities have questions. If elected, will all parties commit to an all-ages, trans-inclusive ban on conversion therapy? If the Liberals lose, will their replacements continue the work Trudeau started on a federal LGBTQ2+ Action Plan? Will whoever forms the government expand funding to the LGBTQ2S+ community organizations across Canada that are both desperately under-funded and working tirelessly to respond to the crises in our communities? None of these questions have been answered as of a week before the election.

I would be remiss not to give credit where credit is due: there are some bold commitments in party platforms. The NDP committed to improving access to medication and gender affirming healthcare, alongside the provinces and territories. The Conservatives did talk about our issues in their platform, such as their commitments on LGBTQI+ refugees were a big step in the right direction, especially given the recent targeting of LGBTQ2S+ people in Afghanistan. The Liberal Party platform included a couple worthwhile commitments, but in essence promised a continuation of the work they began pre-election.

They have some good ideas—but nothing groundbreaking. They promised (once again) to ban conversion therapy, committed to implementing the LGBTQ2S+ action plan they developed before the writ dropped, and pledged to increase funding for LGBTQ2S+ community organizations. While the blood ban wasn’t touched on in their platform—a surprising omission—Trudeau has indicated he expects Canadian Blood Services to overturn the ban soon.”

While there are indeed some worthwhile proposals up for debate this election, none of them speak to the crises in our communities. None of them adequately reflect the devastating prevalence of poverty, homelessness, hate crimes and violence plaguing LGBTQ2S+ people in 2021.

The message couldn’t be clearer: while all parties, and especially the Conservatives, don’t want to be labelled homophobic this election season, it remains that none of them have put in the work to respond to the specific and unique issues facing our communities. They care about LGBTQ2S+ people—but only insofar as is politically expedient.

LGBTQ2S+ issues are election issues, and they matter both to LGBTQ2S+ people, our allies and Canadians. It’s past time for our political parties to move beyond tokenistic commitments and deliver real proposals in response to the crises in our communities, and advance the rights, health and safety of LGBTQ2S+ people in Canada.

Democracy in Canada is premised on the idea that we vote for candidates who are best suited to exercise their judgment, act on our preferences, or a combination of both. Often, it seems, members of Parliament opt for the third approach. But whose interests get represented? For one, the governing class and the capitalists who underwrite them. But, more particularly, it’s those who are likely to turn up at the ballot box.

Elections Canada estimates that in the 2019 election, roughly 54 percent of voters aged 18 to 24 cast a ballot. That’s low especially compared to a turnout of 65 percent in the 35-44 age bracket, 68 percent in the 45 to 54 group, 73 percent among 55- to 64-year-olds, and a remarkable 79 percent for the 65 to 74 cohort. That turnout distribution is common and reflects a typical gap—as seen in 2015 and 2011. This gap has largely remained even as overall voter turnout has been on the rise since 2011. For this year, Elections Canada has canceled its Vote on Campus program, citing the pandemic and minority Parliament, which left them with short notice of the election call. That won’t help things, as the absence of the program, piloted in 2015, will make it harder for some young people to vote.

The spread between younger and older voter turnout presents two issues: it produces electoral returns that are not representative of the preferences of the population and it underwrites an asymmetrical representation of issues that get addressed by politicians—or how they get addressed.

In January, pollster Philippe J. Fournier wrote in Maclean’s Magazine that young voters can play a central role in determining an election, as they did in 2015 when the Liberals formed a majority government. But, he cautioned, with an eye on the polls, “Leading among younger voters is…a double-edged sword for any political party: While this theoretical support does inflate a party’s national number in the polls, it also means it could very well underperform its polls on election night if young voters are not motivated enough to, well, bother voting.”

A Léger poll taken in late August has the NDP favoured by 18–34-year-olds at 37 percent compared to 27 percent for the Liberals and 23 percent for the Conservatives. For those aged 55 and older, the order changes: 37 percent Liberal, 34 percent Conservative, and 14 percent for the NDP. This is common. The data suggests if we were to see full turnout, we would have a different electoral outcome than with turnout that disproportionately favours the preferences of older voters.

Mobilizing young voters requires parties that engage them and speak to the issues they care about. Just ahead of the election launch, Abacus Data found younger millennials and Gen Z voters—those 25 years old and younger—cited cost of living as a top issue ahead of climate change and poverty and inequality. Rounding out the top five issues of primary concern were access to healthcare and housing. Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples was a top issue for 32 percent of respondents.

Comparing top issues across age groups, Abacus consultant Oksana Kishchuk looks to millennial voters, the largest voting cohort, and finds “a 25-point gap between cost of living and the second most important issue,” which happens to be climate change and the environment. But breaking down the numbers, she notes “Cost of living is still a top issue for both older and younger millennials (and Gen Z), but younger millennials and Gen Z are in fact placing more importance on the social issues we might expect younger people to be passionate about.” Of further note, and perhaps surprise, is “Millennials as a whole are almost entirely aligned with boomers on social issues like climate change and the environment and Indigenous reconciliation, and even on housing…But with cost of living, there is a 19-point gap between the percentage of boomers that placed this as a top 5 issue, and the percentage of millennials.” The focus on cost of living aligns millennials with Gen X voters, 66 percent of whom cited it as a top concern but diverges among the younger millennial cohort, who cited Indigenous reconciliation more often than older millennials, Gen Xers, and boomers.

Whichever way you look at it, cost of living matters a lot to young voters. One way to address the issue is structural economic reform. In August, Innovative Research Group found in a survey of over 1200 Canadians, that 53 percent of Canadians believe “the economy needs to be radically transformed,” with men 18-34 outpacing the average with 57 percent support and women of the same age group at 58 percent. Just 34 percent of men over 55 years old (but 54 percent of women) agreed. But how? The top policy flagged by respondents was a universal basic income, with 51 percent of respondents selecting it as among the three most important transformations – and 26 percent citing it as the most important – just ahead of an increase in social services.

What about ditching the current economic system all together? Innovative found that 35 percent of respondents support “moving away from capitalism.” Here, the generational divide is stark: while 43 percent of men and 49 percent of women aged 18-34 support the shift towards a new economic order, just 32 percent of men and 39 percent of women aged 35-54 feel the same way. Among those 55 and older, support drops to 24 percent among men and 30 percent among women.

This data suggests that young voters want aggressive policy to meet the rising and intersecting crises we face, chief among them climate change and economic insecurity. But Samantha Reusch, executive director of Apathy is Boring—a non-partisan, non-profit focused on youth citizenship—says getting young voters to turn out requires engagement. “Encouraging young people to vote and getting them out to the polls takes sustained investment. What that means is focusing on issues and priorities that young people care about.” Yet, parties fail to sustain youth outreach. “Because we turn out in fewer numbers, it’s not always the case that parties and leaders prioritize the issues young people care about or speak to them during an election campaign—and certainly between election campaigns we don’t see the same investment in engaging with young people.”

What can be done? Reusch says her organization’s approach is “to meet young people where they already are,” which means “connecting issues that young people already care so much about back to the federal election.” She thinks climate change will be one of those issues along with social movements including anti-Black racism, Indigenous reconciliation, and efforts to combat anti-Asian hate. Affordability and the economy rank high on the list, too. “These things impact young people and I think that…if leaders are focused on addressing these issues in the campaign, there’s a chance they could bolster turnout significantly.”

PHOTO BY KAREN MILLS

The Premier of Alberta is a Conservative. Every single seat in the province bar one went blue in the last federal election. Despite the severe lack of representation in government, those with leftward ideologies still exist in Alberta. Where can they turn to hear friendly voices? The Alberta Advantage podcast.

The bi-monthly podcast was born in 2017 out of a local Jacobin magazine reading group’s desire for political representation at home.

“We found there was a real lack of any kind of conversation about topics from a left-wing perspective,” says Joël Laforest, producer and panelist with the Alberta Advantage. “We figured we could use the ability to have discussions that we built up as a reading group and try our hand at putting it into a podcast.”

Since then, Alberta Advantage, whose name is a play on a 1990s Tory moniker for the province’s unique tax structure and non-renewable resource-derived revenue, has been lauded as Calgary’s best podcast and now receives over $1,700 a month through Patreon.

It isn’t all awards and donations, however.

“Being left-wing in Alberta has real challenges and material consequences,” says host and sound engineer Kate Jacobson. “We face real risks to our employment and our physical safety…. The right in this province is very organized.”

Jacobson says she’s fortunate enough to have secure employment outside the podcast, but others on their team of about 20 volunteers have to be more clandestine about their work on the Advantage.

“Sometimes it can feel very difficult to live here,” she says. “You’re basically swimming against a tide. There are all these ideas that people have been trained to believe about the oil industry, trade unions, socialism, and the government. You have to counter those at every level.”

Jacobson and Laforest say they’re both particularly proud of a November episode that tackles an advertisement they refer to as “oil propaganda.” Presented by representatives from the Birchcliff Energy and Tourmaline Oil companies, published by a group called Canadians for Canada’s Future and endorsed online by premier Jason Kenney, the ad in question says oil companies have been taken for granted for too long by “all too many people who vigorously condemn what we do while relishing in the fruits of our labour.”

The ad goes on to marry the narrative that oil companies keep the country running with emotionally arresting imagery, such as workers embracing their children.

For nearly an hour, Advantage dissects the ad, which they refer to as a “crypto-fascist piece of media” and part of a concerted effort to make the rest of Canada feel a protective, nationalist pride for the oil industry, as they say Albertans have been trained to do.

Looking forward, Jacobson and Laforest say the Advantage plans to begin producing video and text content for their online audience. They say the latter is particularly important after the folding of StarMetro, Calgary’s only liberal-leaning daily newspaper.

2019 marks 50 years since the Stonewall rebellion, now regarded as the watershed moment in American and even global (Euro-American-centric) queer liberation. A hot summer night at the mafia-run Stonewall Inn in New York City became a six-day-long riot after queers refused to submit to police violence, and its anniversary is now celebrated as the turning point in the course of LGBTQ2S+ history.

The American celebration of this anniversary is marked this year by sponsored events such as WorldPride, as well a plenitude of institutional commemorations. Love and Resistance: Stonewall 50 is an exhibition in the New York Public Library’s main branch on Fifth Avenue, lit in deep lavenders, cobalt, and neon red made to look like the iconic bar’s signage. The show is replete with “little magazines” (what we would now call zines, or chapbooks) and photos of the years directly preceding, and then after, the Stonewall rebellion. Before 1969, the photographs are mostly in silhouette, hiding the identity of the subject; newspaper articles ridiculing pansies and drag queens. Pamphlets, handouts, and other paper ephemera line the walls as the public gains of the era generated more press, more attention and more celebration. It showcases community joy: the dances, the bars, and party culture. But Love and Resistance was deliberately culled in its curatorial scope so that the materials highlight the activism of a first generation fighting for “gay liberation,” but elided any material related to hiv/aids. While this is often how the historical timeline is divided, curator Jason Baumann aimed with this exhibition to inspire our contemporary population to action and activism. By framing the exhibition as a triumph over adversity and leaving out contemporary struggle, the Stonewall moment is effectively neutralized. Stigma around HIV/AIDS; transsexual, transgender, and gender non-conforming people—even the fight for equal employment rights is far from over across North America. There are numerous ongoing struggles in the queer community. These must be addressed through legal frameworks, policy reform, and destigmatization of sexual identity and behaviour within Canada and the United States. The potential energy of the Stonewall anniversary flags in its efforts to galvanize people to activism when it’s positioned as separate and disconnected.

But we’ve made it this far, and we’ve minted it now.

The shining new “gay loonie” was launched on April 23, 2019 commemorating the 50th anniversary of Bill C-150, which is also cited as the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968-69, and Omnibus bill of 1969. Our collective memory echoes the words of (Pierre) Trudeau:”…there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” In this statement, he was referring to the reform that was tucked into the bill marking Canada’s first move towards state deregulation of sexual conduct. While C-150 lessened the official censure of gay sex—only acceptable in private between two consenting adults over 21—the taboo of gay life was still a pesky, divisive topic. In the bill there is no mention of the word “homosexual” and instead this bill aimed at widespread decriminalization of sodomy and other sexual acts between two adult persons. The decriminalization of gay sex was a by-product of protections and non-interference by the Canadian government—all the bedrooms of the nation would be safe as long as there was no public display, or group sex. This wall between the public and private served as a thin barrier between pseudo-legality and gross indecency.

Bill C-150 was neither a strident act for the rights of queer people in Canada, nor one that would solve social homophobia. The milquetoast effect of the bill—neither fully legalizing gay sex nor actively outlawing discrimination against queer people—today represents the peak of homobanality that floats into gay villages every summer. Scholars and activists have contested the release and celebration of the coin. The Anti-69 Network is a group of affiliated scholars and activists across the country against the shoring up of the “myth” of 1969, as historian Tom Hooper of York University states. The network points to the underlying insidious nature of the ’69 criminal code reform. Their actions include the organization of the Anti-69 conference, Against the Mythologies of the 1969 Criminal Code Reform, held at Carleton University in Ottawa in March of this year. The conference was aimed to heighten awareness of the increased surveillance of queer life and sex post-Reform. Gary Kinsmen, co-author (with Patrizia Gentile) of The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation, mentioned in a conference plenary statement that Trudeau’s famous quote about the bedrooms of the nation has been historically misremembered: while the bedrooms of the nation were safe, very few other places were, because of the differentiation between the public and private sphere, laws regulating group sex and the ways in which homosexuals were seen as simultaneously dangerous and pathological, tolerable only away from the “normal” public. The surveillance and criminalization of queer people in Canada intensified and was more explicit as the parallel gender-based violence of the colonial state continued to inflict assimilationist policies on the Indigenous Two-Spirit communities through residential and day schools, and the drafting of the 1969 White Paper by Trudeau’s Liberal government.

Today, while (Justin) Trudeau marches at Pride celebrations, trans people are often unable to access healthcare because of social and medical barriers and Indigenous Two-Spirit people are subject to heightened violence and discrimination in settler and Indigenous communities. These challenges as well go unaddressed by our cadre of popular and populist political leaders: Andrew Scheer refuses to participate in Toronto Pride, while Doug Ford actually leaves town. We have parades; we have currency, but we don’t have political leaders who care about the distinct challenges in the lives of actual queer people within Indigenous and settler communities. In an election year, the platitudes can be numbing, just washing over us like pink waves, or rainbow smoke.

It’s easy to celebrate the ’69 Reform and our neighbouring queer history at Stonewall as particular, rich moments. To commemorate something, we often want to be able to look back and have uncomplicated feelings about what happened then, how bad it was then, how good we have it now. But celebrating the past means also looking critically at the inclusions or exclusions that make it into, or are left out of, our commemorative ephemera, and exhibitions. In celebration of our collective struggle we owe it to ourselves to pursue a memory that can recognize our past while establishing a dialogue with our present.

Image: iStock/Inna Sinano; design: Valerie Thai

In the spring of 2019, Newfoundlanders Adam Denny and Jonathon Brown came together after learning they both had a similar vision in mind: a provincial Green party.
Their province, which was hit hard by the cod fishery collapse in 1992, has increasingly been focused on developing an offshore oil industry. Even though that too has faced troubles, it still brings in big bucks—about 25 percent of the province’s GDP.

In Denny’s view, the provincial Conservatives, Liberals, and even the NDP consider the expansion of the oil and gas industry non-negotiable—an important economic engine, despite the province’s commitment to lowering carbon emissions. When Denny couldn’t accept the expansion as necessary or appropriate, he and Brown began corralling others via Facebook and taking modest steps with the goal of running Green candidates in the next provincial election, likely to take place in 2023. “There’s not a single party out there that’s truly taking climate change as the crisis that it is,” Denny says.

At the time Denny and Brown started taking steps towards formally founding a party, Newfoundland and Labrador was the only province in the country that did not have a provincial Green party. On top of that, only 1.1 percent of voters—the lowest rate in the nation—selected the Greens in the last federal election. But the recent election in Prince Edward Island, which bolted the Greens from relative obscurity to the official opposition, was inspiring to Denny. “That was a light bulb moment,” he says. “Not just in Newfoundland, but I suspect across the country.”

With climate crisis a top voting issue, the Greens have found new footing. A recent government study found that Canada’s climate is warming twice as fast as the global average. And as of June 2019, the Climate Action Tracker found that Canada’s efforts to fulfil the goals of the Paris Agreement—limiting global average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius—were “insufficient.”

Over the last two calendar years, in addition to their historic showing in P.E.I., provincial Green parties have gained seats in British Columbia, New Brunswick, and Ontario. Federally, a second Green MP, Paul Manly of Nanaimo–Ladysmith, was elected in a May 2019 by-election and joined Elizabeth May in Ottawa.

For the first time since their 1983 founding, federal Greens have the opportunity to make their biggest move yet nationally, drawing from their experiences on smaller stages. Jo-Ann Roberts, deputy leader of the federal Greens, says the biggest change she’s noticed is a shift in voter attitudes.
“I can tell you as a candidate in Atlantic Canada who’s going door to door, the biggest impact the win on P.E.I. is having on the doorstep is Greens are seen as first of all winnable,” she says.

The collaboration seen between P.E.I. Greens and other parties helps too, she says. For instance, in July, P.E.I.’s MLAs, including Conservatives and Liberals, voted in favour of stronger provincial emissions targets. “Those are things that people see as real action,” Roberts says, adding that it’s translating to voters asking if the Greens could achieve something similar at the federal level.

But as the party looms larger, so does criticism of their policy points; their non-environmental platform, for example, doesn’t always stack up. During the lead-up to the 2015 election, the Greens were criticized for not budgeting enough for early childhood education or at all for a Guaranteed Livable Income plan. The party also courted controversy this summer after contracting the political strategist Warren Kinsella to build a party war room to defend against political attacks. Both the symbolism and the choice of Kinsella were widely considered at odds with Green values.

Moreover, some of the party’s environmental policy planks—like ensuring all new cars are electric and retrofitting “every building in Canada” to be carbon neutral by 2030—could be considered naive. The International Energy Agency estimates around a 30 percent adoption rate for electric vehicles in Canada by 2030 in one of their scenarios; even an ambitious proposal from the Canada Green Building Council only identifies retrofitting a strategic percentage
of buildings.

The Greens have also been experiencing internal growing pains that have come as a result of their expansion. Don Desserud, a University of Prince Edward Island political science professor, pinpoints criticism in P.E.I. about how the candidate nomination process ran prior to the last provincial election as an example of this. Some Greens, he says, were concerned with “selling out” by moving towards the centre from the party’s previous, more strident leadership—for instance, when it came to critiquing agricultural polluters. Though Desserud also says that some of the “moderating” in P.E.I. was of tone more than anything else—they changed gears from criticizing farmers for pesticide use, focusing instead on encouraging individual responsibility rather than strictly increasing governmental regulations. Desserud describes the change as “a compromise in methods but not in principle.”

“That sort of fringe—if it’s a fringe—of the Green Party that’s there probably saw quite rightly that their party was not [as ‘pure’ a party as] they thought, but this is the nature of our electoral system for good or for bad.”

In a proportional representation system, Desserud says, there wouldn’t be a need to moderate to increase electability. The Greens, he says, are not the only party that needs to confront this issue—it’s a regular and cyclical conundrum for the NDP that plays out every few elections. “Every time [the NDP] got a bit of success nationally, they’d move their party a little more to the right and then they’d get hammered the next election because they looked too much like the Liberals,” he says. “And so then they’d rush back to the left and talk about restoring themselves to their first principles and start the process over again.”

Over email, Alex Tyrrell, leader of Quebec’s Green Party, says that in his view Green voters aren’t looking for the party to become more moderate. “With this newfound success the Canadian Green movement is at a crossroads; should we stick to our principles and continue our work to transform Canadian society or should we advocate for some practical first steps in an effort to attract centrist voters?” he writes. “In my opinion, if people are voting Green they are doing so because they want to see a radical change; not just to change the name of the governing party.”

As the party courts new potential Green voters, though, they’ll need to address the harsh reality that new voters don’t necessarily have the same desires as the party faithful. A June 2019 Abacus Data report found that while 35 percent of Green voters want to see a Green government, only 10 percent of those who would consider voting for the Greens but currently don’t—“Green accessible” voters—want the same. “It is very hard for a party that has two MPs and won 3.5 percent of the vote in the last election to imagine that they can form government,” says Abacus CEO David Coletto.

Even though Newfoundland and Labrador’s Greens are the last to start, Denny says he is hopeful they will benefit from building upon the knowledge and experience of other Green parties.
They have a base of support that has been developing for several years, he says; his and Brown’s work to mobilize potential party members means this largely silent, disparate support will finally have an outlet.

Despite climate concerns and recent wins offering tailwinds to the Greens, though, their future isn’t certain. While voters want to see changes in climate policy, they may not want to see the Greens—with their broad-strokes, big-picture ideas—form government.

But even if the Greens don’t form government, a larger slate of their MPs could make a positive difference; they have so far in P.E.I. even without a plurality of seats. There’s a place for environment-focused thinking in parliament, and the Greens may just be what the country needs right now.

Image: iStock/JPA1999; Design: Valerie Thai

“Indigenous nations are their own sovereign nations.” It’s a rhetoric stated consistently in a variety of arenas, both political and non-political. It is a truthful rhetoric at that.

Being Anishinaabe, and also raising an Anishinaabe/Nehiyaw/Nakoda daughter, has further affirmed the truth that we are, 100 percent, our own sovereign nations as Indigenous Peoples. It has affirmed this truth within myself as I think about the future my daughter will have growing up on the political landscape that exists today, constantly having to fight for the truth of her inherent rights.

As such, we as Indigenous nations have absolutely no business in voting within a political system founded and grounded on the continued genocidal, assimilative practices and policies that make up “Canada” today.

When my ancestors made treaty  with the Crown, the original intent and outcome was never based on the idea that we, as Indigenous nations, would assimilate to the point that we would deem our own political and traditional governance systems irrelevant and dissolvable.

With this knowledge, I know that in order to have strong, healthy nations, I must raise my daughter with the knowledge of the original intent and outcome of those treaties. This, in turn, aids in the reminder of the immortality of treaty.

The fact is, treaties are of international stature. Canada has created a false narrative that these treaties have already been “fulfilled,” and even the idea that it is time for, the colonially named, “new nation to nation relationship.” And so many of our people are cattle to that idea. The idea, framed in other words, really just means that Canada is ready to enact their next stage of their assimilation policies.

I, for one, am not for these processes. I stand firm in who I am, and where I come from, as an Anishinaabe person on these lands. And with that knowing any ideas or commitments that come from this “new nation to nation relationship” are as void as any identity colonial governments have given me in my lifetime.

Another fact is that only sovereign nations can make treaty. They are agreements made between two nations, an eternal commitment. And many people forget that.

What many people are also forgetting—or aren’t even learning about—is that treaties, 1 to 11 specifically, created an agreement between Indigenous nations and the Crown that gave permission to the queen to enact her government, which eventually took the shape of Canada.

Also, Canada holds absolutely no title to the land. Even though they place it out like they do. Indigenous Peoples, and our nations, were, and are, the ones who gave that permission for Canada to even be what it is today. Settlers who live on these lands today are only here because of the permission that was given when those treaties were signed.

That doesn’t mean I’m going around reminding settlers on who allowed them to build their lives and families on these lands, unless of course their racism creates the space for me to. It is simply a piece of knowledge that must be made known to all people when learning about the history of these lands on which we live.

So, here we are, in a space where Canada attempts to define our peoples as domestic ethnic minorities, rather than the sovereign nations that we are. The trauma that colonialism inflicted on our peoples, and that it continues to attempt to inflict, has confused the collective mind of many Indigenous Peoples. The colonially created trauma that was deeply rooted in my childhood was a direct outcome of Canada attempting to define who my family was, as Anishinaabe peoples, and doing everything they can to control us.

This confusion has led many families to follow the concept of “pan-Aboriginalism,” and the “Aboriginal Canadian” that abides by, complies with, and conforms to Canadian perspectives of how an Indigenous person is to conduct themselves. We see this being fulfilled when Indigenous Peoples, of their own sovereign nations, are becoming political members within another nation’s (Canada’s) political system.

Me, as an Indigenous person—from an Indigenous nation—participating, and becoming a part of Canadian federal, provincial, and municipal politics would be like Donald Trump coming into Canada’s system and becoming a member of parliament.
It doesn’t make it any sense.

So why have we allowed it to make sense for our people today?

Some people make the suggestion of a “First Nations,” or “Aboriginal” political party.

A First Nations political party will only create an inheritance of this debt to ourselves as Indigenous Peoples, when in reality, that debt is not even ours to carry in the first place.

Because of treaties, Canada is in debt to us, as Indigenous Peoples. The goal is to treat us like ethnic minorities in order to alleviate that debt. To relieve that debt, they must assimilate us as Indigenous Peoples, and many of our people are falling for it. The narrative has brainwashed a lot of our peoples to the point where reinstating our original traditional governance systems have become a no-go zone. Going to that no-go zone is what our children, as Indigenous Peoples, need in the times of crises that we are constantly facing today.

I am doing my best to raise my daughter with that knowledge, and to equip her with the tools to speak up when people state otherwise.

John A. Macdonald has been quoted saying that “we must take the Indian out of the child” in order to “solve the Indian problem.” This is a concept that is still publicly being practiced today. In fact, the concept of “the Indian problem” didn’t ever go away in the eyes of Canada, it was just transformed into the debt problem. Every colonial political party aims to relive that debt in some way, shape, or form.

With this genocidal history in mind, and with the attempts being ongoing today, I continue to restate the truth that there never was an “Indian problem” in the first place. Because from the lens of Indigenous systems, there is only the problem of colonialism.

So for myself, voting in Canada represents me justifying and agreeing with the unlawful and colonial perceptions of the treaty relationship, along with all the assimilation processes that have, and are continuing to, take place today. Ultimately, it would be compromising what my ancestors had put their lives into, and what they prayed about, specifically in relation to treaty.

The solutions to our struggles as a result of colonialism are not in a vote every four years in a system that created these problems. The solutions are in the revival of our kinship systems, the protection of our children, and the affirmation of who we have always been as Indigenous Peoples. It is in the reoccupation of our lands and governing systems, which worked for us for generations prior to colonialism.

The aim is to manipulate the next generations of our peoples to forget about that. And we are seeing that in the form of policies and programs targeting Indigenous youth.

The reality is both the Canadian and Indigenous Peoples are blaming the results of the Indian Act for what treaty was supposed to be, rather than what Canada has made it to be.

So rather than investing my time and energy in a system that has created the problems we are facing in the first place, I would rather invest my time and energy in strengthening our communities to our continuing nations through the work of healing our traumas and restoring our kinship systems, and ultimately, how we as Indigenous Peoples relate to our children.

I will always practice strengthening our own Indigenous systems, rather than complying with systems that colonialism has lethally placed
against us.

Because that, in itself, is where our uprising begins.

Design by Valerie Thai

1. The Rise of the Alt-Right

Andrew Scheer formally addressed the United We Roll convoy in February, a protest that began as a pro-pipeline demonstration and grew to represent racism and xenophobia characteristic of the worldwide yellow vest movement. In May, Conservative MP Michael Cooper read a passage from the New Zealand shooter’s manifesto into parliamentary record, though his comments were later purged. In June, the RCMP launched a hate speech investigation into the Canadian Nationalist Party, an extremist far-right group that failed to gain federal status in the 2019 election. The party’s leader, Travis Patron, posted a video calling for the removal of the “parasitic tribe,” a not-so-subtle dog-whistle for Jewish people.

Far-right hate groups aren’t new in Canada, but they’re getting louder and some of their rhetoric is starting to seep into mainstream politics. Not challenging this rise in the upcoming election would send a clear message to these groups that there’s room in the political mainstream for the hateful views characteristic of the alt-right. “If you don’t condemn that kind of activity, you’re actually giving it oxygen,” says Barbara Perry, the director of the Centre on Hate, Bias, and Extremism. She says the number of far-right extremist groups in Canada is closing in on 300. Around the time of the 2015 election, she says that number was more like 100. This movement to the right, she says, is being called something of a “perfect storm.”

“We often like to blame Trump for … normalizing hatred,” Perry says. “But you know, we had our own patterns of a movement to the right, some of which predated Trump,” like the increase in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment in the 2015 federal election.This “perfect storm” has emboldened far-right hate groups and people who have ties to them in Canada. In the 2018 Toronto municipal election, Faith Goldy, a former correspondent for Rebel media, ran for mayor. She’s been widely criticized for her association with white nationalism, especially after her reporting at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and her appearance on The Krypto Report, a podcast from the neo-Nazi blog The Daily Stormer. She garnered over 25,000 votes in her run for mayor. “There is that political normalization of hate and hostility I think that we’ve seen now modelled in Europe, modelled in the U.S.and then our own brand as well,” Perry says.

Coverage of the alt-right and far-right hate groups can have massive implications in public understanding. There’s a risk that taking fringe groups too seriously can give them too much oxygen, but ignoring them means these groups can continue to operate unchecked. The often ironic rhetoric of alt-right fringe groups does require extra analysis, and there’s work to be done in debunking their claims.

“So much of [the work] around anti-immigrant sentiment is taking down those myths, taking down those stereotypes that they associate with it,” Perry says.

—Michal Stein

2. Foreign policy

On February 28, 2019, the New Democratic Party published a statement urging the Trudeau government to cease arms exports to Saudi Arabia: “As Canada joins the international community to provide desperately needed assistance in Yemen, it continues to export arms to Saudi Arabia, the chief instigator of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” says the NDP International Development Critic, Linda Duncan.

The Saudi arms deal—and other, similar policies—tell the true story of Canadian politics. During elections, domestic issues tend to dominate the agenda. What we fail to realize is how seriously Canadian foreign policy impacts the world beyond our borders; it stimulates famine, refugee crises, environmental destruction, and political repression.

As an example: we often discuss immigration without recognizing Canada’s role in creating refugee crises in Latin America and the Caribbean. Forced migration is the product of sustained, racist intervention in those regions, like Canada’s armed support for the 2004 Haiti coup. Canada has interfered in Haitian elections, destabilized its institutions, and supported right-wing politicians, all in an effort to reduce wages and open up Haiti’s gold reserves to Canadian mining companies. These actions create economic conditions that force Haitians to flee and seek asylum—only to be met with anti-Blackness and unjust detention.

Canadian policy is regularly determined by the interests of mining companies. As a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Canadian mining companies contracted paramilitary security teams in Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru that are accused of kidnapping workers, protestors, and their families. The Liberals promised to regulate the industry in 2015. Yet, as the group MiningWatch Canada notes, the government never committed to legislating the international operations of Canadian mining companies, despite ongoing protest against abuse. Broken promises and willful ignorance are Canada’s de facto foreign policy, in part due to the connections between corporations and politicians. The mining industry and the political class share financiers, investments, and economic interests.

The failure to ensure livable wages at home is directly reflected in the coercion of cheap labour abroad, in defiance of human rights and international law. Canadian free trade with Israel, for example, relies on and benefits from the economic and political repression of Palestinians. Still, as the government of Canada website boasts, “Since CIFTA [Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement] first came into effect over two decades ago, Canada’s two-way merchandise trade with Israel has more than tripled, totalling $1.9 billion in 2018.”

Canada’s close relationship with Israel has wider international consequences. While Canadian relations with Iran have improved in recent years, the Canadian government still views Iran as inherently threatening, and continues to find new reasons to halt diplomatic relations and impose sanctions—including those instituted in 2006 and 2010 in the wake of the Iran nuclear deal, at the urging of Israeli government officials and pro-Israel lobby organizations. It is worth recognizing that Canadian hostility towards Iran does not happen in a vacuum, but comes partly as a result of extensive lobbying by officials and organizations that perceive Iran to be a threat to Israel, and have thus made it a priority to characterize every action by the Iranian state as a violation punishable by a regime of coordinated isolation, marginalization, and sanction.

The sanctions, imposed by Canada and the U.S. among others, are monstrous; they directly endanger Iran’s most vulnerable communities. Sanctions disproportionately impact women, as over 170 Iranian women artists and activists argued in an open letter opposing American sanctions. Iran also holds a substantial refugee population, most of whom will go without vital services and will be instead pushed to deportation due to the sanctions. Canada’s bellicose policies against Iran—integral to its support for Israel—contradict our leaders’ “pro-woman” or “pro-refugee” public image.

It is necessary to draw links between these destabilizing economies of extraction and the waves of forced migration, income inequality, and climate crisis that have shaped the 2019 election. The same global capitalist system that makes rich Canadians richer and poor Canadians poorer relies upon state-sanctioned violence abroad. It succeeds by deflating wages, repressing protests, and killing local economies. Canada’s foreign policy agenda is deeply enmeshed with its domestic policy choices. This election, Canadian voters must recognize the global stakes.

—Alex V. Green

3. Artificial Intelligence

Since March 2017, Justin Trudeau has been hyping the federal government’s investments in AI. At every budget announcement, ribbon cutting, and international panel, he has talked up responsible adoption of AI that is human-centric and grounded in human rights. The initial investment of $125 million was topped up with another $230 million in 2018. In the meantime, dozens of jobs for AI researchers, and graduate student positions have been created in computer science and engineering schools.

As a job creation and innovation strategy, it seems to be doing well—there’s been a boom in tech startups in Toronto and Montreal—but there’s been a conspicuous lack of investment on the human rights side. Of the hundreds of millions of dollars being invested in AI research, exactly $0 of that is going to hire or train people with the expertise necessary to make sure the results won’t be a dumpster fire. While deep-learning experts are getting cushy jobs, experts in the social and ethical implications of AI are only getting a couple of workshops.

It’s unclear whether the strategy is that the people with the training needed to stop the ascendancy of our AI overlords should volunteer their time, or that the AI geniuses should do this work themselves, because after all, they’re geniuses. But letting AI geniuses take care of human rights issues would be as reckless as letting artists perform brain surgery. There is a long history of people in AI being blissfully unaware that other kinds of expertise exist, and this attitude is exactly why companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are now mired in controversy over their ethical blunders.

Some of the not-so-genius ideas AI workers have come up with recently are algorithms that recommend home movies of kids running through sprinklers or doing gymnastics to people who watch child pornography, selling facial recognition software that barely works to cops who don’t know how to use it, but are making false arrests with it anyway, and pretending to sell music players or thermostats that actually conceal hidden microphones that monitor your conversations.

The average doomsday naysayer may think they have nothing to hide, but stalkerware is enabling disgruntled exes, incels and other trolls to track, harass, and potentially kill people. Cell phone tracking data is being sold to bounty hunters, resulting in Coen brothers-esque shootouts, and hundreds of millions of social media users were unknowingly exposed to fake news stories during recent election campaigns.

Trudeau has a mediocre track record for keeping his promises about protecting digital rights. He campaigned on the promise to repeal Bill C-51, which allows CSIS to spy on Canadians without cause in the name of anti-terrorism, but he only rolled back select parts of it. That said, Trudeau is the only official party leader who seems to have a policy on tech innovation at all. Andrew Scheer only cares about innovation when it comes to oil. While Jagmeet Singh’s commitments don’t mention the tech sector, other NDP members, in partnership with the Green Party’s Elizabeth May, have been vocal in advocating for a stronger Digital Privacy Act, and giving the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada more enforcement power.

AI and commercial surveillance are going in directions far worse than even the most paranoid imagination could cook up. This is not a field that is capable of regulating itself, and empty rhetoric about human-centred AI isn’t doing anything to hold beneficiaries of AI investment, like the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, to their promises. The money is there. If even a small fraction of the investment in AI were directed toward protecting rights, we might have a chance at avoiding creating our own homegrown AI dystopia. So far none of the official party leaders seem up to the task.

—Catherine Stinson

4. The opioid crisis

Since 2016, more than 10,000 people have died of an opioid-related overdose in Canada. After years of headlines, such a number can seem abstract, or even worse, desensitizing. These are more than statistics though; each one of those numbers represents a void: someone who will not be at a birthday party, at a graduation, at a wedding, at the dinner table. From January to September of 2018 alone, 3,286 Canadians died and of this 73 percent of deaths were attributed to fentanyl.

Things have changed in the past three years. Safe injection sites, once limited to a section of Vancouver, are now opening up across the country—thanks to the dedicated work of frontline workers, who initially risked arrest by opening up unsanctioned sites. Once scoffed at by politicians, local mayors are now accepting that these sites save lives. Still, the death toll continues to rise. Safe injection sites are not a panacea, nor can overworked frontline workers be everywhere at once to stop an overdose. As the federal election looms and the opioid crisis rages on, one has to ask: are our representatives doing anything?

No party has thus far put forward a comprehensive plan to tackle the opioid crisis beyond vague platitudes. Even the NDP plan, which promises to expand treatment and decriminalize drugs, in the same vein, proposes going after “the real criminals—those who traffic in and profit from the sale of illegal drugs” with harsh and strict penalties, betraying the entire point and purpose of decriminalization. Meanwhile, Liberal party officials keep tweeting about how the overdose crisis is a crisis, while ignoring the fact that they currently have the power to do something about it. 

The solutions to the overdose crisis are clear: while we need more safe injection sites and we need those sites to be supported by federal funding—and harm reduction workers need supports too—these sites do not actually stem the rate of overdose.
They do however, prevent overdose deaths—a key distinction.

In order to stem overdoses, people need access to a clean supply of drugs. Advocates are calling upon the government to allow prescription heroin, and some doctors have taken it upon themselves to start prescribing another opioid, hydromorphone.

Treatment also needs to be made easier. Typically, drugs like methadone or buprenorphine are used in treatment, weaker opioids that reduce withdrawal symptoms while a person is in recovery. Two years ago, British Columbia switched the medication used for treatment from methadone to methadose, a drug that is even weaker than the former. As a result, the B.C. Association of People on Methadone says that switch resulted in people resorting to using heroin. The College of Pharmacists of B.C. says the switch was made to reduce the tendency of “abuse,” a false idea that reaffirms stigma against drug users and reinforces the moral panic around drug use.

One last piece of advice to politicians as they hit the campaign trail is this: listen to people who use drugs and those on the front lines. Go to an overdose prevention site without cameras, meet with members of drug users unions across the country—learn about their experiences and use those to shape policy.

There are deeper conversations to be had about addiction in Canada. How the lack of housing, financial support, and health care among other things are feeding the overdose crisis; but for now, a safe supply of drugs, better access to treatment and more safe injection sites make up a good plan to stop the deaths and stem the rate of overdose. People who use drugs, harm reduction workers, doctors, and public health professionals have been saying this all along; let’s hope our leaders listen for once.

—Abdullah Shihipar

5. Climate justice

We’ve got a problem. The climate crisis is on our doorstep, but instead of looking to scientific data and ongoing evidence, the issue has been divided along political lines. Ideologies about trade and taxation have become the test-pieces about whether one is actively working to limit climate change, recognizing it as a concern, or remaining, still, a skeptic.

Fortunately, international science shows that it’s not too late to keep global warming below the critical 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming—a level that will not halt climatic change, but will significantly temper the impacts. However, instead of hunkering down and working to a) keep the warming to 1.5 degrees, and b) put measures in place to deal with the impacts we know are coming, political parties—and much of the media around them—are mired in discussions that would have been outdated a decade ago.

In Canada, two of the most public climate conversations are around the carbon tax and the Trans Mountain Pipeline. These are certainly not insignificant issues, but the laser focus on them obscures the bigger picture. There is a solution to the climate crisis, but only one: we have to radically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. At this point, neither the Liberals’ nor Conservatives’ climate plans are sufficient to keep global warming to the threshold 1.5 degrees Celsius. To meet that target, there can be absolutely no new carbon infrastructure, never mind a project like the Trans Mountain Pipeline that is the equivalent of putting two million more cars on the road.

Here’s a broader slice of the picture: a 2019 report using government data and approved by independent scientists, states that Canada is heating up twice as fast as the average rate of the planet—twice as fast.

Global warming causes major events, including melting permafrost, loss of ice caps, rising seas, record high temperatures, severe flooding, and droughts. In turn, those events can lead to further impacts: loss of income, loss of housing, food insecurity, tainted water supplies, and so on. Much of Canada has already experienced at least some of these effects and the magnitude and frequency of impacts are projected to increase over time.

On June 17th, Canada declared a national climate emergency which was, in a weird way, heartening. Except the meaning of it was lost the next day when they also re-(re)approved a significant expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure. The longer we dither, the less likely our solutions will be robust or equitable. And we only have just over a decade before we’ve stalled so long there is no way to limit climate impacts to a reasonable level. This is a crisis. But, unlike many crises, we know how to stop this one. We need politicians to recognize this as a fact, not an opinion, and face this issue head on. We can still keep the ship afloat, but to do so we’re going to need all hands on deck.

—Nola Poirier

Photo courtesy of Shake Up The Establishment

What happens when two bio-medical science graduates, a philosophy PhD candidate, and an arts major commiserate over climate change in Canada? Positive activism is born.

In April 2019, a group of University of Guelph students and recent graduates, Manvi Bhalla, Janaya Campbell, Taro Halfnight, and Cameron Fioret, were commiserating over Canada’s response to climate change. Disheartened by misinformation in the political sphere, they wanted to make information available and accurate; they decided to act.

“We wanted to make climate change more of a priority in the Canadian federal election and noticed a media frenzy in America on party platform issues a year in advance of their 2020 election,” says Bhalla, an award-winning activist and leader with numerous NGOs. “Yet Canada had not really announced anything despite our election being six months away.”

Shake Up The Establishment, or SUTE for short, was born that evening. “We wanted to shake up the establishment, shake up how we do politics; shake it up with information, positive change and power to the people,” says Fioret.

SUTE’s objective is to increase informed voting and voter turnout regarding the fight against climate change while maintaining positive government relations. The group decided to make all information on their website non-partisan, up-to-date, and fact-checked, citing credible sources, such as academic papers and links to party platforms. It is entirely volunteer-run and currently receives no funding. They may seek out funding in the future, they say, but will never accept partisan funding.

“SUTE is a one-stop hub for up-to-date federal party platform information, not a regulatory body,” explains Fioret. The website’s content is updated weekly with new announcements or party corrections via politician speeches or MP’s offices. “The goal was to encourage people to obtain accurate, up-to-date information [through] a lay summary of climate change, how it works, and how it affects people. We try to add information [to the website] that is as specific as possible [to counter any bias in the media].”

In the week after launching, the four millennials contacted MP offices and the party profiles poured in. Bhalla created a simple, straightforward chart to compare each federal party’s policies and promises on this hot-button issue, which they have categorized by different types of emissions.

“We wanted to provide reputable information from reputable sources to encourage positive activism,” says Bhalla, noting 300 people contacted their MPs within two days after SUTE posted a “how-to reach your local MP” social media post. Another highlight Bhalla shares is when their post, “Breaking news: Canada has declared a climate emergency,” received close to 1,000 likes in one day.

The group has also received kudos from leading climate scientists, 1960s environmental activists and some high-profile media coverage, including a CBC interview, print media features and being featured on a podcast that also included Catherine McKenna, Environment and Climate Change Minister, and Ed Fast, Official Opposition Critic for the Environment. But their most important audience is their growing social media following. On Instagram, for example, hundreds of people tune into SUTE’s weekly Q&A each Monday.

“Youth are very excited and energized. We’ve seen them mobilize [on social media and through letter campaigns], so that’s very exciting,” says Bhalla, noting that SUTE’s most active followers are the 18 to 25 millennial cohort. (Their target audience is 18 to 34 because that is the highest percent of electorate this election.) Bhalla also points out that many of their followers message regularly for updates on certain climate emergencies when the media does not cover it.

“People want to help,” Campbell acknowledges, citing SUTE’s success with shareable social media alerts and campaigns. “But if it’s too hard, it will deter people.”

Armed with easy-to-use letter campaigns and MP contact information, SUTE has provided effective tools for the public to mobilize, speak up and challenge Canadian federal government parties who are not living up to election party promises.

“Climate change definitely isn’t going to go away, even after the election. Our organization is about giving power to the people to hold their leaders accountable in an accessible way,” says Fioret.

Image: iStock/hannarongsds; design: Valerie Thai

In 2015 Canadians broke a record: 88 women were elected to the Canadian House of Commons.

Fifty women were among the 184 Liberal MPs elected. Trudeau went on to appoint his cabinet with gender parity. Because it was 2015. But a male appointing an equal cabinet with representation based on the binary does not a feminist make. It was of course a gain for women everywhere; countries like Colombia, Ethiopia, France, and Spain followed suit.

It may seem hard to dispute Trudeau’s feminism, given his “it’s 2015” cavalier approach, appointing a gender-balanced cabinet and vocally grandstanding as a feminist. He said he will keep saying he’s a feminist until it’s met with a shrug. But we should always shrug when a man says he’s a feminist. We should always be cautious when someone calls themselves an ally—specifically when a man calls himself an ally to feminism. Identifying as a feminist is the bare minimum a man can do. Men aren’t feminists just because they say so and we don’t have to take their word for it when they do.

But I don’t think anyone is really negating Trudeau’s #wokebae persona. The deconstruction of Trudeau’s public image as a feminist is sprouting through the cracks created from his brand of shallow, white feminism that doesn’t address the underlying injustices that further gender inequality.

At a debate back in 2015, ahead of the election, Trudeau pointed to “misogyny in certain types of music,” access to porn, “communities in which fathers are less present,” and shifting parental roles as factors contributing to sexualized violence. These are stereotypes and myths familiarly associated with Black communities, signalling the lack of intersectionality in his feminism to communities of colour.

Another red flag was when Trudeau was caught appointing all minister of state positions—a junior cabinet position, basically given a specific responsibility within a senior cabinet minister’s portfolio and a salary that paid $20,000 less—to women. Five
of those being part of his legendary

15 women in cabinet. (An equal salary was retroactively applied.) This isn’t proof that the Liberal party under Trudeau isn’t feminist but it does reveal priorities; appearing to be feminist is easy, acting on it takes more thorough thinking and planning.

In 2016 he was accused of having a deeply unfeminist first budget, just two weeks after addressing the UN women’s conference, declaring himself a feminist loudly and proudly. Kate McInturff, a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, found a gender divide in the 43,000 new jobs promised in the 2016 budget and 100,000 in 2017-18. And the Status of Women’s total budget was just 0.02 percent of total federal program spending. Pam Palmater, a Mi’kmaw lawyer, professor, activist, and politician pointed out the wan funding promised for Indigenous Peoples.

That same year, it became mandatory for all memos to cabinet and treasury board submissions to include a gender-based analysis (GBA+). GBA+ is a tool to determine how policy, legislation and program decisions impact women and men differently, including age, income, disability and other intersecting factors, across all government departments and agencies. This was introduced without giving the adequate resources necessary to effectively implement it, so, fewer than half of federal departments and agencies have a gba+ framework. The Liberal 2019 budget promises to fund the Treasury Board Secretariat with $1.5 million in order to support GBA+ in all departments receiving 2019 funding.

But it wasn’t until the SNC-Lavalin scandal that Canadians writ-large began questioning his feminist agenda and what kind of feminism it truly served. CBC reported Tourism Minister Mélanie Joly said the Liberals have a feminist agenda and “our record speaks for itself” in defence of her party leader’s questioned feminism.

Funnily enough, Finance Minister Bill Morneau hasn’t been shuffled once in his four years, despite multiple ethical fumbles and then becoming a central player in the SNC-Lavalin scandal.
Yet the heat was entirely on Jody Wilson-Raybould and Trudeau allowed it to happen; he actively participated in that narrative by shunning Wilson-Raybould for breaching the party’s trust without so much as a blink in the direction of beginning to understand why an Indigenous woman felt pressured into recording conversations. She knew she wouldn’t be believed.

When Trudeau 2.0 was elected into office, it was on campaigning about a transparent government, electoral reform, feminism, and Indigenous rights—it was a campaign based on “sunny ways” or whatever.

Officially, the Liberals campaigned on 231 promises. Along with gender parity in cabinet and ensuring gender-based impact analysis on cabinet decision-making, other promises that directly or indirectly affected women included launching the inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), developing a new National Early Learning and Child Care Framework, implementing a Canada Child Benefit, electoral reform, and including representatives from women’s groups on the Canadian Firearms Advisory Committee.

When the Liberal government announced it was backpedalling on one of its major campaign promises, electoral reform, and let then-Minister of Democratic Institutions, Maryam Monsef become the scapegoat, it let down a lot of women.

There were 533 women candidates in the 2015 election and only 16 percent of them were elected. Canada’s first-past-the-post is a “majoritarian” political system as opposed to proportional representation. Fair Vote Canada reports “of the five countries
in the world who have 30 percent or more female parliamentarians … three have a proportional electoral system, and two have a mixed proportional electoral system.”

Despite making up just over half of the population, we still only represent 26 percent of our federal government so gender parity in cabinet seemed big.

Between 2016 and 2018, 43 percent of Governor in Council appointees (the people who get paid to work on federal commissions, boards, crown corporations, agencies, and tribunals) had gone to women; women make up
46 percent of the Senate.

Canada used to be ranked 50th in terms of gender equality internationally and now it ranks 62nd. We aren’t advancing as fast as other countries, like Bolivia, Iraq and Kazakhstan, in terms of parliamentary gender equality. The United Nations suggests 30 percent leads to a shift in policy and practice in government. This slug-paced crawl towards gender parity in parliament won’t get us to gender equality elsewhere. In fact, some estimate it  will be 118 years before the gender wage gap is closed.

Now, technically, Trudeau achieved gender parity, launched the inquiry into MMIWG, developed the child care framework and overall completed 100-plus promises.

Last December the government finally passed the long-awaited Pay Equity Act to force equal pay between men and women employed in federally regulated workplaces—so it doesn’t help women working in the hospitality or service industries, post-secondary institutions or health care, among others. This was followed by creating the Department for Women and Gender Equality in December—elevating the Status of Women Canada from an agency within the Department of Canadian Heritage to its own full department.

The Canadian Gender Budgeting Act also passed in December 2018, which requires the government to consider gender and diversity in taxation and resource allocation decisions and in the development of policy in a budgetary context.

Persistent and just-as-large gaps remain in pensions, parental leave, and health care. Initiatives meant to decrease these gaps need to be adequately funded: otherwise, they’re window dressings on a decaying house. Trudeau has made marked advances in his feminist agenda that deserve recognition, but a government that only waters the leaves will starve the roots, inhibiting true growth.

Illustration by Graeme Zirk

Dear Citizens,

They’re coming for you. For your brains. You hear that and you think of George Romero. Dawn or Day or Night of the Living Dead. But this is worse. I’m not talking about zombies. I’m talking about politicians. Zombies will come for you and they’ll chew on you for a bit, but that’s it. They won’t ask you for money or stand at your doorstep and promise they care about you and whatever you care about, then take your vote and disappear for half a decade. Zombies won’t tell you to watch out for other zombies because those other guys don’t really have a plan for munching on your cerebral cortex and, worse still, if those other zombies win, they’ll take that roadkill you’ve brought home for dinner.

During the federal election this year, politicians and their follower-hordes will use sophisticated techniques to frame issues and target, mobilize, and demobilize you and other voters. They know how to talk about things, e.g. tax cuts are relief, climate pricing is a tax or an incentive, and how to appeal to the right neighbourhoods (not everyone gets a door knock) or age groups (young people don’t vote, older people do). They’ll play on your fears. (If you don’t vote for Party X, then Party Y might win, and don’t even consider Party Z because why are they even bothering?)

Working on my master’s and PhD, I spent most of a decade learning about the psychology of how we make political decisions. I come by the zombie idea honestly. Humans haven’t evolved to make complex, considered, rational political decisions easily. We can do it. But making good political decisions—ones you come up with based on reliable information and reasons that are your own and true—is tough. We can do it, but it takes time, effort, practice, resources, and incentives. You’d think in a democracy—rule by the people and all that—the state would be set up for such things. You’d think politicians would want there to be plenty of meaningful chances for folks to participate in public life. Not so much.

Politicians are often very decent and capable people. Some are quite smart. But come election season, they want your vote. If you can bring a friend to the polls with you, assuming they’re a supporter, even better. They don’t care so much about you making good political decisions at that point. In exchange, you get Heaven, and that’s better than Hell, which is what you get from the other guys. Unfortunately, the road to each is paved with platitudes and half-truths and doublespeak.

There are some things you can do to resist. If it’s zombies you’re worried about, you’re going to want boards and nails and clubs and Molotov cocktails and whisky. If it’s politicians, it’s good and critical news sources and awareness of the traps that candidates will set for you and time to think and (if you’ll excuse the self-promotion) my book and probably, at least for some, whisky.

You might be tempted to give up. Don’t. Either when managing zombies or politicians. Push back. Don’t give into the fear or hopelessness. Arm yourself. Turn out to vote and pick the person you want to pick for your reasons—just make sure you have reasons and you know what you’re doing. Trust me. It’s the best way to maximize your chances of surviving this thing. 

Wishing you all the best,

David Moscrop