Proportion of women in the House of Commons dips, with slight rise in minority MPs

2025/05/01 Leave a comment

Latest article with preliminary analysis of 2025 election results in terms of MP diversity:

…In Canada, Indigenous representation in the House also dipped slightly, according to an analysis by Andrew Griffith, a fellow of the Environics Institute and a former director-general in the federal immigration department. He found that 3.3 per cent of elected MPs are Indigenous after this election, down from 3.5 per cent in 2021. 

However, there was a slight rise in the number of visible minority MPs. Mr. Griffith found that their representation stands at 18.1 per cent now, compared with 15.7 per cent at the last election. 

“We appear to have reached a plateau with respect to women and Indigenous peoples MPs,” he said in an e-mail.

“On the other hand, the combination of growth in immigration and visible minorities, matched with most political party candidates being visible minorities in ridings with high numbers of visible minorities and immigrants, continues the trend of increases in their representation.”…

Source: Proportion of women in the House of Commons dips, with slight rise in minority MPs

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Number of female candidates drops across parties: study

2025/04/23 Leave a comment

Results of the preliminary analysis by Jerome Black and myself:

…Mr. Griffith, who has carried out similar research for previous elections, said he was surprised to see the drop in the proportion of female candidates, particularly among the Conservatives. They had a lot of candidates in place soon after the election was called, whereas the NDP and Liberals were later with nominations, he said.

“It’s surprising that the number of women standing for the Conservatives actually declined very significantly: a third of the nominations in 2021 to not even a quarter of the nominations in 2025,” he said. “Conservatives actually made a concerted effort to recruit visible minorities, but they seem to have dropped the ball with respect to women.”

He said some women may have been deterred from standing by the rise in abuse directed toward female politicians.

“It’s certainly part of it,” he said. “But I’m still surprised at such a dramatic decline.”

Source: Number of female candidates drops across parties: study

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Iranian women’s growing defiance to hijab law grows too loud for a troubled regime to silence 

2025/02/24 Leave a comment

Good long read and reporting:

…Despite the rebellion on the street, Iran’s rigid system of religious rule has never been formally liberalized. Women today are still reprimanded, arrested and even imprisoned for their defiance. Surveillance cameras on the streets are calibrated to detect women in cars who fail to wear a headscarf – and they are routinely ticketed and fined. Warning signs in building entrances sternly order women to obey Islamic rules and cover their hair.

But what’s new is that an increasing number of women are willing to accept this risk and pay the price. And the authorities have been unable to stop them. “The police don’t have enough handcuffs for all of them,” says Keywan Karimi, a Kurdish filmmaker in Iran. “The system is the same, the police are the same – but what’s changed is the level of resistance. People are pushing more against the system, and they’re accepting the cost of resistance. Where once it was one person, now it is thousands.”

The growing defiance by fearless women is just one of the mounting pressures on the Islamic regime that has ruled Iran since the overthrow of the monarchy. After a wave of large-scale protests over the past decade, social unrest continues to ferment. Political uncertainty has worsened the situation: Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, is now 85 and lacks a clear successor. The election of a new reformist president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has sparked frictions inside the ruling elite as Mr. Pezeshkian tries to placate the population with some limited easing of traditional restrictions….

Source: Iranian women’s growing defiance to hijab law grows too loud for a troubled regime to silence

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Selby: How narrow views of romance inform which marriages are seen as legitimate

2025/02/14 Leave a comment

For Valentine’s Day. Almost a killjoy commentary as not everything can or should be reduced to politics….:

…Legislation and scrutiny of marriages seen as fraudulent subtly position romance as a proxy to assess narrow liberal ideals. Somescholars have called this phenomenon a push for a “sexual democracy,” where women’s bodies are subtly expected to remain visible and sexually available as signs of their putative equality. 

Perhaps unexpectedly, niqab bans in both France and Québec further reflect these values. Full-face veils are, tellingly, depicted as lacking sexual agency and individualism, and impeding a cisgender woman’s ability to attract men.

Narrow views of what kind of romance should be legitimized and celebrated are not limited to governments. Such views also manifest in consumer culture and in the wedding industry, and are desired and performed by many of us, including among my research participants in arranged marriages. Romance’s pervasiveness, desirability and seeming spontaneity mask its politics.

As we enjoy romantic gestures on Valentine’s Day, we should also consider the cultural specificity of these tropes and their potentially exclusionary politics in determining whose relationships are deemed legitimate. Entrenchments of patriarchal chivalry, monogamy, consumerism and narrow gender roles can run in tandem.

Source: How narrow views of romance inform which marriages are seen as legitimate

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Immigrants’ Sense of Belonging to Canada: The Role of Source-Country Gender Inequality

2025/02/13 Leave a comment

Interesting findings:

“A growing body of literature uses country-level indicators to examine the impact of immigrants’ source-country conditions on the home and work lives of immigrants after arrival. One measure that has attracted increased attention is gender inequality in immigrants’ countries of origin. However, little is known about the degree to which the transition from high to low gender inequality countries affects the development of connections with the receiving country and whether immigrant women and men are impacted differently. This article examines the association between source-country gender inequality and immigrants’ sense of belonging to Canada. Our regression analysis of data from the 2013 and 2020 General Social Surveys suggests a higher level of source-country gender inequality is associated with a stronger sense of belonging to Canada for both immigrant men and women. Despite concerns from some conservative critics that gender inequality in source countries hinders immigrant integration, the results show that immigrants from cultures different from Canada develop a strong sense of belonging to Canada. Our findings suggest that cultural distance does not necessarily have a negative impact on immigrant men’s and women’s self-perceived integration into their host country.”

Source: Immigrants’ Sense of Belonging to Canada: The Role of Source-Country Gender Inequality

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‘Everything’s on the table,’ minister says about Canada’s response to Trump’s order on gender

2025/01/24 Leave a comment

Probably not:

Gender Equality Minister Marci Ien says that President Donald Trump’s executive order that the U.S. government will only recognize male and female genders from now on is “highly disturbing,” with worrying implications for members of the transgender community.

Ms. Ien said she will be meeting with Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly on Thursday to discuss how the order will affect Canada, including whether a travel advisory should be issued to warn gender-diverse Canadians planning to visit the United States.

The two ministers will also talk about whether Canada should create a special carve-out in the Safe Third Country Agreement with Washington, so that transgender asylum seekers who come to Canada’s border would not be automatically sent back to the U.S.

Asylum seekers coming to either Canada or the United States must make a refugee claim where they first arrive, but human-rights and refugee advocates argue that the U.S. can no longer be considered safe for trans people.

“Everything’s on the table,” Ms. Ien said in an interview. “Canada already opens its doors to 2SLGBTQI+ people who are fleeing aggression. Canada already does that, and I don’t see why we stop doing that. Did we ever think that the United States would be one of those countries? I don’t know about that. That’s new.”

Her remarks contrast with those of Immigration Minister Marc Miller, who in an interview on Tuesday said that despite Mr. Trump’s measures, he still regards the U.S. as a safe place under the agreement….

Source: ‘Everything’s on the table,’ minister says about Canada’s response to Trump’s order on gender

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McWhorter: How Hollywood’s Awards Season Could Change the World (a Little)

2025/01/20 Leave a comment

Always interesting takes:

Hollywood’s awards shows are always closely scrutinized for signs of who’s up and who’s down, what’s in and what’s out. Lately they have also offered a clue about a trend that has nothing to do with film production or red carpet gowns. It’s about grammar. Amid all the razzle-dazzle, you may have missed the fact that last year the Golden Globes went where the Screen Actors Guild had previously led: They lauded not actors and actresses (lead, supporting or otherwise) but rather “female actors” and “male actors.”

After so many years and so many ceremonies, that was a real change for the industry, but it emerged from a long history. At least as far back as the 1980s, I’d heard calls to eliminate the use of female-marked terms such as “heroine,” “goddess,” “waitress” and “chairwoman” — and, yes, “actress.” (I for some reason have never truly internalized “flight attendant” over “stewardess,” and still have to remind myself to make the substitution.)

Such terms can seem to imply that the women who occupy these roles are somehow essentially different from — and perhaps lesser than — the men who do. Appending a female suffix positions the male version as the default, and makes the female word a mere version or variation of it.

The call to use “actor,” “hero,” “god” and “chair” to refer to women as well as men emerges from a belief that the words we use can shape our thoughts. That view was put forth most influentially by the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s. The idea is that de-gendering our terms is a powerful gesture, a political act that asserts women’s equality and retrains our cultural assumptions.

A similar impulse has guided efforts to popularize inclusive language about race and gender identity or any number of other sensitive subjects. As those efforts proliferated in recent years, the consensus on what was inclusive and what was outdated seemed to shift faster and faster. It sometimes felt as if the lexical earth was shifting under our feet almost by the week — and not always for clear purpose.

Lately the tide seems to be turning against those attempts to engineer how people speak. In general, I’m glad about that. But de-gendering terms is a worthwhile endeavor that deserves an exemption from our impatience.

The problem with replacing older terms with newer, allegedly more sensitive ones is that a replacement term inevitably takes on the same negative associations that the old term had accreted. The psychologist Steven Pinker calls it the euphemism treadmill. Think of the procession from “crippled” to “handicapped” to “disabled” to “differently abled,” changes undertaken to avoid stigmatizing the people the term refers to. The constant renewal suggests that the effort has only had fitful success.

The introduction of a new term may suggest new ways of thinking, at least for some, and for a spell. But covering a hole in the roof with construction paper keeps the wind out, too, or at least some of it, and for a spell. It’s not actually a solution. The fashion of late to refer to the “unhoused” rather than the “homeless” is a useful example. “Homeless” began as a well-intended replacement of words like “bum” and “bag lady.” However, over time, the same dismissive associations those old terms engendered shifted over to “homeless person.” You can be sure that if “unhoused” becomes the default, it will need replacement in a generation or so. Truly addressing the homelessness (houselessness?) epidemic would be a much more meaningful approach to the problem than changing what we call it, and I suspect the “unhoused” would say the same.

De-gendering, however, is a different case. Unlike creating euphemisms, folding two words into one does not present a new model subject to obsolescence. “She’s an actor” simply phases out “actress” and sends it on its way, along with Studebakers, Koogle peanut butter and Red Skelton. It creates no new word poised to inherit the potentially dismissive air that “actress” implied.

Of course, changing words will hardly eliminate sexist bias. And I can’t help chuckling to recall one person I knew who years ago earnestly insisted on calling a Walkman a “Walkperson.” But to the extent that this kind of language change really can play some part in changing habits of mind, let’s form the new habit and pass it on to our kids.

Source: How Hollywood’s Awards Season Could Change the World (a Little)

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Lisée | Féminisme viril: On reactions to “disappearing” reference to women

2024/11/05 Leave a comment

My favourites example is pregnant people rather than pregnant women:

…Ce n’est pas son propos, j’en conviens, et ça ne le rend pas moins pertinent. Car en parallèle de ce progrès fulgurant, des forces venues du volet masculin de la planète et prenant les atours du progressisme tentent de faire subir recul sur recul à un certain nombre d’acquis féminins durement gagnés.

Sophie tient un compte précis du nombre de fois où, par dérive intellectuelle ou par simple volonté d’être dans le vent, des organismes de l’État ou de la société civile ont voulu faire disparaître le mot « femme » du vocabulaire, ici et ailleurs, y compris les mots vagin, clitoris, même sein ! Au nom de l’inclusion du 0,75 % de la population qui s’auto-exclut des deux genres, il faudrait biffer les mentions de l’existence de la moitié des 99,25 % restants. Un peu comme si on interdisait à Justin Trudeau de dire « Canadiens, Canadiennes », car il est certain qu’il y a toujours un ou deux touristes dans l’auditoire. Elle note par exemple qu’il ne sera plus possible de suivre l’évolution du nombre de femmes au Collège des médecins, car leurs questionnaires ont changé pour donner, non deux choix de genre, mais 14 (14 !).

Une poignée d’insurgés

On pourrait lui répliquer que plusieurs des cas locaux et recensés ont été battus en brèche à cause de la réaction provoquée dans l’espace public par des femmes (et des hommes) qui réprouvent ces dérives. Justement. Si ces réactions existent, c’est que Sophie Durocher et quelques autres se sont donné le rôle de dire non. De faire de la « pédagogie de combat », selon l’expression de l’admirable Française Caroline Fourest, ou du « féminisme viril », selon celle de Sophie.

Ces interventions portent leurs fruits. Je me hasarde à penser qu’en Occident, ces dérives auront connu leur apogée entre 2020 et 2023 — et qu’elles sont désormais sinon en retrait, ou du moins sur la défensive. C’est davantage le cas au Québec qu’ailleurs, ce coin de continent que j’aime appeler la République du bon sens. Martine Biron a été prompte à refuser que le mot « femme » disparaisse du Code civil. Elle a été appuyée même par Québec solidaire. C’est un signe. Le refus d’accepter que les Montréalaises soient représentées par une femme voilée dans une image d’accueil à l’hôtel de ville s’est rendu à Valérie Plante, qui y a donné droit. C’en est un autre.

Ces victoires ne sont pas arrivées seules. Il a fallu qu’à la manière de Sophie Durocher, des citoyens s’insurgent contre ce qui s’installait comme une nouvelle façon d’être, présentée comme moderne et inclusive, alors que leur effet combiné, voulu ou non, réduisait l’espace que les femmes avaient acquis. Pour mener ce combat, il fallait accepter d’être exclu, pendant cet instant où la bêtise semblait dominante, du club des gens bien, du réseau de l’élite et du progrès.

C’est plus ardu que vous ne le pensez. On trouve moins de volontaires pour mener ces combats que de partisans du confort bien-pensant. C’est pourquoi on ne demande jamais, sur ces questions, où est Sophie Durocher ? Elle est toujours là, au front.

Source: Lisée | Féminisme viril

… That’s not his point, I agree, and that doesn’t make him less relevant. Because in parallel with this meteoric progress, forces coming from the male component of the planet and taking the guise of progressivism are trying to subject a number of hard-won female achievements to back and retreat.

Sophie keeps a precise account of the number of times that, out of intellectual drift or out of a simple desire to be in the wind, state or civil society organizations wanted to make the word “woman” disappear from the vocabulary, here and elsewhere, including the words vagina, clitoris, same breast! In the name of the inclusion of 0.75% of the population who self-exclude themselves from both genders, mentions of the existence of half of the remaining 99.25% should be deleted. A bit like forbidding Justin Trudeau to say “Canadians, Canadians”, because it is certain that there are always one or two tourists in the audience. She notes, for example, that it will no longer be possible to follow the evolution of the number of women at the College of Physicians, because their questionnaires have changed to give, not two gender choices, but 14 (14!).

A handful of insurgents

It could be said to him that several of the local and registered cases were defeated because of the reaction in public space by women (and men) who disapprove of these excesses. Precisely. If these reactions exist, it is because Sophie Durocher and a few others have given themselves the role of saying no. To do “combat pedagogy”, according to the expression of the admirable French Caroline Fourest, or “virile feminism”, according to Sophie’s.

These interventions are bearing fruit. I venture to think that in the West, these drifts will have reached their peak between 2020 and 2023 – and that they are now if not in retreat, or at least on the defensive. This is more the case in Quebec than elsewhere, this piece of the continent that I like to call the Republic of common sense. Martine Biron was quick to refuse to have the word “woman” disappear from the Civil Code. She was even supported by Québec solidaire. It’s a sign. The refusal to accept that Montrealers be represented by a veiled woman in a welcome image at City Hall went to Valérie Plante, who gave it the right. It’s another one.

These victories did not come alone. It was necessary that, in the manner of Sophie Durocher, citizens rebelled against what was being installed as a new way of being, presented as modern and inclusive, while their combined effect, wanted or not, reduced the space that women had acquired. To lead this fight, it was necessary to accept to be excluded, during this moment when stupidity seemed dominant, from the club of good people, from the elite network and progress.

It’s harder than you think. There are fewer volunteers to lead these fights than supporters of well-thinking comfort. That’s why we never ask, on these questions, where is Sophie Durocher? She’s still there, at the front.

Filed under gender, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Adams: Why is the Trump campaign getting involved in the gender wars? They’re reading the room

2024/08/20 Leave a comment

Contrast between Canada and USA with respect to gender always interesting:

…The next few months will reveal whether an openly patriarchal appeal to U.S. voters is a winning move in America in 2024. It’s not a slam dunk: some Americans who believe Dad should be on top may nonetheless be put off by some of the harder edges of the conservative agenda. But while the U.S.’s election result will inevitably influence Canada, Canadian politicians should be careful about borrowing from the gender wars chapter of the U.S. playbook. The underlying values landscape in Canada is marked by more common ground, especially on social issues. Canadian leaders who aspire to be the boss in the House are wise to be circumspect about who’s on top (if anyone) in our households.

Source: Why is the Trump campaign getting involved in the gender wars? They’re reading the room

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Nicolas: Conservatismes dénationalisés

2024/08/08 Leave a comment

While I wouldn’t class J.K. Rowling the same as the “pyromanes” Elon Musk and Donald Trump, valid point on the convergence of the nationalist right wing across countries:

Il y a désormais 20 ans, l’été normalement très peu politique des gens de Québec était interrompu par une manifestation de 50 000 personnes se portant à la défense de CHOI Radio X et de son animateur vedette Jeff Fillion alors que la licence de la station était menacée par une décision du Conseil de la radiodiffusion et des télécommunications canadiennes, le CRTC. Les voitures de mon quartier étaient placardées d’autocollants où on pouvait lire : « Liberté ! Je crie ton nom partout ! »

Liberté de quoi ? Liberté, pour Jeff Fillion, d’insulter les femmes, les immigrants, les gais, les pauvres, les politiciens : bref, à peu près tout le monde. Du moins, c’était là le type de propos dits « controversés » qui avaient justifié la décision du CRTC.

En septembre 2004, une élection partielle dans mon comté, Vanier, a fait entrer à l’Assemblée nationale un nouveau député de l’Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ), Sylvain Légaré. Le chef de l’ADQ, Mario Dumont, avait vu dans la mobilisation locale une occasion politique en or et avait fait campagne en se portant à la défense de Radio X.

Cette page d’histoire locale illustre bien le contexte social et politique dans lequel a émergé ce qu’on a appelé la « crise des accommodements raisonnables ». L’été 2004 représente en quelque sorte une version bêta de l’alliance entre personnalités médiatiques populistes et politiciens populistes qui permet aux uns de normaliser leurs idées dans l’espace public et aux autres de faire des gains électoraux à court terme.

La recette testée cet été-là a été adaptée à l’échelle de la province dans les années qui ont suivi. D’un côté, des anecdotes médiatiques du type « les immigrants et les minorités exagèrent » ont trouvé leur courroie de relais à l’Assemblée nationale. De l’autre, le nouveau paradigme parlementaire a décuplé la proportion du débat public québécois qui divise la population sur la base des attitudes face à « l’identitaire ». À bien des égards, on vit toujours dans ce paradigme.

La métamorphose politique de ces années-là n’est toutefois pas unique au Québec. L’alliance entre médias de droite populiste et mouvements politiques conservateurs a aussi été cimentée par des hommes bien plus puissants, tels que Rupert Murdoch, propriétaire de la chaîne américaine Fox News comme de plusieurs médias du même acabit au Royaume-Uni et en Australie, et Vincent Bolloré, propriétaire de CNews et de plusieurs autres chaînes françaises. Ces hommes ont transformé non seulement les médias, mais aussi le champ des idées politiques acceptables et la manière de débattre dans leurs pays d’activité respectifs.

À bien des égards, la dynamique politique des années 2000, c’était le bon vieux temps. L’enfance du problème, en quelque sorte.

Ou du moins, c’est ce qui m’appert alors que je regarde comment des présupposés sur l’identité religieuse du suspect dans une affaire de meurtre servent de bougie d’allumage à une vague d’émeutes violentes portée par des mouvements d’extrême droite en Grande-Bretagne. Ou quand je vois comment la Russie, frustrée d’être exclue des Jeux olympiques, contribue à semer le doute sur l’identité de genre d’une boxeuse algérienne, Imane Khelif, de manière à faire s’entre-déchirer tout l’Internet occidental pris au piège dans ses « guerres culturelles ».

Je suis tentée de distribuer à J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk et Donald Trump les trois médailles d’une nouvelle discipline olympique : celle de l’ultrariche pyromane. Je laisse au jury le soin de terminer à qui revient l’or, l’argent et le bronze, mais de toute évidence, ces trois-là ont formé le peloton de tête cette semaine.

Je dis que les années 2000 m’apparaissent comme un temps plus doux, parce que dans l’affaire Khelif, nos populistes locaux se sont simplement fait les perroquets de nos champions internationaux ultrariches pyromanes. Depuis l’avènement des médias sociaux et la montée mondiale du populisme de droite, les dérapages qui empoisonnent nos débats d’idées sont de moins en moins désignables comme « nos » dérapages.

Du temps du code de vie d’Hérouxville, ça chauffait, certes, mais on se sentait un peu moins directement comme les pantins des milliardaires de la mondialisation en manque d’attention. On pouvait se battre contre les préjugés toxiques à armes tout de même plus égales lorsqu’on n’avait pas carrément les algorithmes de plateformes comme X contre nous.

En 2008, le rapport Bouchard-Taylor avait désigné, finalement, la « crise des accommodements raisonnables » comme une crise de perception alimentée par des anecdotes montées en épingles par certains médias d’ici. Ce que l’actualité de la semaine démontre, en quelque sorte, c’est que le carburant de nos crises de perception est plus que jamais complètement sorti des champs de compétence provinciaux.

La « bollorisation » des médias français influence directement les élites politiques et médiatiques québécoises admiratives de l’Hexagone. Les guerres culturelles de Fox News sont adaptées à la sauce canadienne par le mouvement conservateur de Pierre Poilievre. Par TikTok et YouTube, les masculinistes parlent aux jeunes de partout dans le monde. Et les propagandistes russes alimentent les complotistes occidentaux sur des plateformes où la vérification des faits a pour ainsi dire pris le bord. En fin de compte, la circulation des idées réactionnaires sur l’immigration, les minorités, les femmes et l’identité de genre s’est accélérée et internationalisée de manière phénoménale depuis 2008.

Entendons bien : les idées ont toujours circulé et circuleront toujours. Cela dit, des commissaires auraient bien du mal, en 2024, à pointer une origine précisément locale à nos « crises de perception » contemporaines sur les drag queens, les trans, les femmes trop masculines, les immigrants qui prennent trop de place, etc.

C’est là un grand paradoxe des nationalismes conservateurs contemporains. Tout en vantant la nation, ils s’appuient sur des discours qui ont de moins en moins de contenu spécifiquement national. De la France au Royaume-Uni, des États-Unis à l’Italie, de l’Espagne au Canada, les scénarios semblent de plus en plus interchangeables — et la « question de l’heure », hors de notre contrôle.

Source: Conservatismes dénationalisés

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