Here’s a glimpse so far:

Up for Debate

Wouldn’t it be handy if there were a debate specifically about women’s issues? There hasn’t been one since 1984. That means there has not been a debate focused on women’s issues in my lifetime. Up for Debate, an alliance of over 175 national women’s organizations, invited Stephen Harper, Tom Mulcair, Justin Trudeau, and Elizabeth May to debate such issues. Mulcair was proud of the fact that he was the first to accept the invitation. Trudeau and May also accepted, and Harper did not. When the time came, Mulcair backed out. If Harper wasn’t doing it, neither would he. As a result, because two men didn’t want to play, organizers canceled the event. Up for Debate went ahead with Plan B, where one-on-one interviews with the politicians were arranged. Mulcair—the guy who backed out of the debate last second—took this opportunity to identify as a feminist. Trudeau also says that he is a proud feminist. Harper did not participate in the interviews.

I was looking forward to this debate. Very disappointed it had to be cancelled. https://t.co/q2Awq4iQcX

—    Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) August 24, 2015

Where did our debate go, @ThomasMulcair? And @pmharper? #women #GPC http://t.co/iSLL9pN4Ue pic.twitter.com/m1cQArPhnZ

— Green Party Canada (@CanadianGreens) August 24, 2015

Transcripts of full interviews:

Mulcair

Trudeau

May

Munk debate

The Munk debate is a charitable initiative of the Aurea Foundation, a right-wing organization founded by Peter and Melanie Munk of Barrick Gold. The September debate was on Canada’s foreign policy. Unlike the women’s issues debate, RSVPs to to the invitation of right-wing millionaires were quickly accepted, disheartening to say the least. May was not allowed to attend. The Munk Debates reasoning is the Green Party does not have party status. However, as a charity they are not legally allowed to support or oppose a political party. So the reason is official, not because of the boys-only nature of the Munk Debates. In the end, May used Twitter to participate in the debate. Trudeau said May should have been able to attend. Yet, he still attended, as did Mulcair and Harper.

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

Harper has said there really isn’t an issue around the fact that Indigenous women are over-represented among Canada’s missing and murdered women. For him, it is a non-issue that does not rank high on the Conservative radar. Not all candidates agree with him. “”Do you think that if 1,200 women who had been murdered or had gone missing in Ottawa, we’d need the United Nations to tell us to have an inquiry?” Mulcair asked at an August rally. “It would have happened a long time ago. This is about racism, that’s what this is about.” The NDP leader says he will launch a national inquiry into Canada’s missing and murdered indigenous women. May has said the same and Trudeau has committed to support indigenous advocacy groups.

Childcare

Women today can work! Just for less money. Oh, and often only within daycare hours—which usually do not reflect the precarious shift work so many women undertake. Currently, Harper maintains he will slash all benefits for low-income earners, including childcare. Trudeau says he will end this trend and help families with lower incomes. Mulcair promises affordable childcare, saying, like healthcare, childcare is worth the money. May agrees that childcare is kind of a big deal.

Sex Work and Bill C-36

Harper passed Bill C-36 into law, further endangering the lives of women in sex work. But actually, he is saving them, because these women need to be saved by the morals of rich white men, as do we all. (Sarcasm intended.) May says the Green Party will repeal C-36, and Trudeau said, last year, that his party would be looking at the Nordic Model. More information about parties’ positions on sex work can be found here.

Domestic Violence

Those who participated in the Up for Debate interviews touched on this subject. Prior to the debate, the only thing the Green Party addressed in terms of domestic violence, according to a Toronto Metro article published August 26, was that “false allegations” were common. OK. At least, by the time the interviews were done May, a self-described feminist changed her tune, saying Canada needs a national strategy to confront domestic violence against women. Both Mulcair and Trudeau spoke about Parliament being a boys’ club and that they will lead by example there to make it less so.And money for shelters is a good idea, says Trudeau, but it isn’t up to the federal government to create them because municipalities, he believes, should do it. So, someone is going to do something, don’t worry about it.

Abortion

Pro-choice, anti-choice, reproductive rights. Light stuff, right? Harper doesn’t actually come out and say he is anti-abortion rights. Instead he says that abortion should not be discussed within politics because it is a matter of faith and morals. And although his own faith condemns these rights, he isn’t in the good books of anti-abortion group Campaign Life Coalition (CPL). The Conservative party is, though. At least there is someone out there ready to police women’s bodies. Phew. The CPL hates Trudeau, so that’s a good sign for the Liberals. Mulcair’s NDP is also pro-abortion rights: “A New Democrat government will increase funding for women’s organizations, particularly women’s rights organizations. Family planning, reproductive and sexual health, including access to abortion services, must be included in Canada’s approach to maternal and child health.” May is also on Team Abortion Rights.

The Niqab

Conservatives were getting attention for doing things like peeing in people’s mugs, and that was weird. So, a distraction—I mean, very important issue—was created by the Harper government. The niqab is a veil that covers part of the face and a sign of faith worn by some Muslim women. It is also being attacked for being anti-Canadian—as decided after settler colonialism. The argument goes something like this: “My white grandparents knew what it was to be Canadian (after white folk made what it is to be Canadian tailored to said grandparents) why can’t everyone else?!”

While fostering xenophobia the Conservative party is saving women by oppressing women. Anti-Muslim propaganda is being circulated on social media and women are being attacked because of this federally accepted hatred of the “Other.”

Mulcair says this is wrong. Like, no one likes the niqab, he says, but we need to trust the authority of tribunal decisions. Trudeau is also opposed to Harper’s stance. At a Maclean’s sponsored debate the Liberal leader said:  “You can dislike the niqab. You can hold it up it is a symbol of oppression. You can try to convince your fellow citizens that it is a choice they ought not to make. This is a free country. Those are your rights. But those who would use the state’s power to restrict women’s religious freedom and freedom of expression indulge the very same repressive impulse that they profess to condemn. It is a cruel joke to claim you are liberating people from oppression by dictating in law what they can and cannot wear.” As for May, at a televised French debate she said, “It’s a false debate . . . What is the impact of the niqab on the economy, what is the impact of the niqab on climate change, what is the impact of the niqab on the unemployed?”

Fun Facts

• Trudeau addresses misogyny, in certain communities.
• May re-started a women’s caucus in Parliament.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her second year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

With the upcoming election, Canada is set to take a different path—if we want it to. But to what new direction? To answer that question, we first decided to look back over the past nine years of Conservative Canada. While we didn’t have space to examine every aspect of policy (which could, in itself, fill an entire book), we did pick 10 areas that we believe are worth reviewing to help choose a path forward. So if the cute kitten didn’t help, get ready to dive in as we review the Conservative government’s track record. From balanced budgets to immigration to women’s rights, we examine how 10 key Canadian issues have fared after nearly a decade of Conservative leadership.

If you want Google Maps directions from Whapmagoostui, Quebec to Parliament Hill, Ottawa, our trusted search engine doesn’t know what to do with itself. That wasn’t the case for six Cree First Nation youths, who arrived at the capital on Monday. They trekked the 1,600km distance with the help of a guide to show their support of the Idle No More movement.

The Whapmagoostui community resides at the shore of Hudson Bay, Quebec. Led by David Kawapit, who turned 18 on the journey, the crew left home on snowshoes in mid January. The forecast was -58 on their first night. Along the way, close to 400 others from First Nation communities joined the walk, and the cause.

The journey parallels Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike in an attempt to meet with Stephen Harper. Spence survived on a liquids-only diet on Turtle Island for six weeks before Harper agreed to chat. The Cree walkers travelled for 10 weeks. Only this time, Harper never showed.

Green Party leader Elizabeth May was there, and said, “It says a lot that Stephen Harper isn’t here … It says a lot that we need to move heaven and earth to meet First Nations on a nation-to-nation basis with respect.”

Granted, our conservative Prime Minister is busy, and just because we fall under his regime doesn’t mean we dictate his itinerary. But when his government stubbornly and consistently ignores the rights of First Nations’, they have every right to demand his attention.

Harper is taking heat for being absent, welcoming the Toronto Zoo’s new batch of Chinese pandas who arrived via FedEx, the day that the walkers arrived. Sure, this trade may strengthen our relationship with communist China. But it was at the cost of showing the First Nations respect. Certainly Harper was aware that they were scheduled to arrive then, as thousands of others awaited their arrival atop Parliament Hill. It prompted this petition, requesting that Harper refrain from further pointless photo ops.

This matters because aboriginal injustice and the environment matter. The Idle No More movement can easily be described as a quest for equal rights and respect. The ending to this historical pilgrimage takes place at a peak of tension. Increased funding for First Nations has been budgeted for, but not delivered.

The Cree youths met with Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt, who now says he plans on visiting in the summer. They left for home yesterday. For this trip, they took a well-deserved plane ride.

The more obvious question (you’d be right to ask) is: Why I don’t do them? I co-founded the Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting in 2009 in order to produce the types of stories that will be highlighted here. The sad fact is there have been many more stories worthy of examination cross my desk than I and the CCIR have been able to do because the resources to do them simply haven’t been there. Sometimes, to paraphrase a Sweet Honey on the Rock song, ‘our stories are not our stories . . . they come through us but they are not from us’. And so, sometimes the CCIR has painfully sought to place good stories in the hands of other news organizations elsewhere – with mixed results.

What I’ve learned during my time as a journalist is that it is not simply a case of a monolithic media keeping information we all need about the powerful at bay. Most, if not all, journalists I’ve met would jump at the chance to expose, for instance, widespread civil rights abuses by the police of demonstrators if they felt the information was there. Why good stories don’t always get picked up is more complicated, and we’ll explore why this is too.

I should be clear though, about two points before going much further: 1. I don’t think the role of the Canadian journalist is to be in the service of, “peace, good order and government,” and 2, the views expressed throughout this column are mine alone, and not those of the CCIR.

So without further ado . . .

I don’t need to tell you that the internet is a great resource for news and information about the world we live in (you are after all reading this online), but with the proliferation of insta-news through social networks and near universal technology it’s also a frequent receptacle for misinformation and opinion dressed up as fact.

A case-in-point is the photo of German riot cops minus their helmets flanking the occupy demo in Frankfurt that went viral last week. It was presented as evidence of police solidarity with the demands of the protestors . . . but I had my doubts. Twenty years ago German riot police routinely fired water cannons from atop armoured vehicles at anti-nuclear and anti-capitalist demonstrators in pitched battles on the streets of Berlin, Bonn, and elsewhere in Germany, reminiscent of what we see today in Montreal.

German attendees to the recent demo have since done their level-best to clarify in message threads that the photo is not as advertised and in fact there were mass arrests and blocked routes by police later that day.

It’s not that this is impossible to contemplate. Historians have pointed to the necessity of the police and military standing down, or standing with the populace in moments of great social upheaval in order for wholesale change to be possible.

So this got me to thinking about a story I haven’t seen yet about the mass protests in Montreal: Have there been any Montreal police/SQ refuse orders to crack down on demonstrators?

As with the German photo, Montreal police refusing orders in the months since the protests began  have become the stuff of rumour, supposedly existing somewhere out there in the French-language twitter sphere. This would be difficult but not impossible for a journalist to verify.

If there are refusals there’ll be disciplinary hearings. A chain-of-events that becomes possible to track—though the Montreal police have been notoriously difficult to pry information from.

Something else that has been noticeably absent from the slow-to-burn national (that is to say, English) press coverage of the tuition hike fight is how Canada, as a signatory to the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, committed to higher education being made, “equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education;” (See s. 13(2)(c))

So what ever became of this commitment?

With national media pundits and editorial pages quick to point out that the students in Montreal are “spoiled and entitled” because they have reportedly the lowest tuition rates in the country, this would invite, you would think, a national discussion about the rights and obligations to a post-secondary education in this country—there have been stories recently in the U.S. press about the likelihood of a school loan debt bubble burst to rival the mortgage loan crash—which got me thinking about  what approach, if any, the Harper government is taking on the issues and events in Montreal? Has there been government-to-government discussion about the widening protest? Are there contingencies in place as this fight spills over into other parts of the country?

Obviously, what’s going on in Montreal is bigger than tuition, and this is certainly no longer a case of the media looking away; this is the biggest story in the country—but what’s the story? It’s this kind of fog that we need to pierce in search of the truth.

Bilbo Poynter is the co-founder and executive director of the Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting. His reports have been seen and heard on CBC National Radio News, CBC.ca, As It Happens, the Montreal Gazette, the Global Post, J-Source, and MaximumRockNRoll. Stories Undone will appear on This every second Monday.