Fall Update
Hey y’all, I was going to post a new episode tomorrow (Friday, September 27) but your girl has COVID. This means I feel like I got hit by a truck and won’t be able to deliver anything to you this week. Tentatively, assuming I don’t die, I will post the new episode tomorrow.
In the meantime, enjoy a piece I wrote for my Hill Times column. Feedback is welcomed!
OTTAWA—The machetes are out. We are starting to see the Liberals begin to cannibalize their own, with a divided caucus, deplorable poll numbers, and a deeply unpopular prime minister.
In response, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has begun to court Mark Carney as a potential finance minister, which begs the question: what about Chrystia Freeland?
Last week, Globe and Mail journalist Robert Fife reported: “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has publicly called on former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney to join the government while declining to say whether he wants Chrystia Freeland to stay as finance minister.” Fife’s article goes onto reveal that “senior officials in the Prime Minister’s Office, including chief of staff Katie Telford, are concerned about Ms. Freeland’s effectiveness in selling the government’s economic message.” I mean, yeah, she sucks at it; however she is not the only one—the prime minister himself has been incapable of doing the same. But that doesn’t matter because—like the United States Supreme Court—Trudeau is never held accountable for his failures.
You know what else the Liberals are never accountable for? The female sacrificial lambs they send out for slaughter to save the position of a mediocre man.
Since Jody Wilson-Raybould’s high-profile resignation in 2019, the PMO has used women to cover the feces-laden screw-ups by the prime minister. The SNC-Lavalin affair—which really blew open with Wilson-Raybould’s resignation—centred on one question: did the prime minister and his goons try to pressure her into saving SNC-Lavalin from criminal prosecution for a bribery charge? Once Wilson-Raybould refused to play the patriarchy’s games, she was demoted. When she subsequently resigned from cabinet, she did so under a heavy cloud of scrutiny and inspection while some of the men involved got to keep their jobs—I’m looking at you, Ben Chin. Fellow minister Jane Philpott also resigned from cabinet in solidarity, and one-time parliamentary secretary Celina Caesar-Chavannes left caucus for her own—but not wholly unrelated—reasons shortly after.
Funny thing is, many of the other women in caucus said nothing—nary a whisper, nary a word. Imagine, had all the women in caucus threatened to resign, these men would be too scared not to negotiate for better. But no, since everyone is out for themselves, and they’ve all drunk from the pipe of individuality, women don’t actually support other women in their fights against bigotry brought on by misogyny.
Unfortunately, Freeland—who never really supported other women—is now being tossed aside—allegedly—to support the whims of a patriarchal political system that uses more qualified women to uplift less-qualified, middling men. Gaining ostensible power from a patriarchal framework will never be real power. In addition, your accomplishments will be diminished to devise a reason for your ouster. Wilson-Raybould was called “difficult.” For Freeland, the chickens have come home to roost.
The girl-boss era has come to its predictable end.
My criticism of Freeland does not diminish her accomplishments, which include childcare, capital gains tax reform, and using the Parliamentary Black Caucus’ idea of cutting off the Ottawa occupiers from their financial source. However, that’s not good enough, as Fife reports that some Liberals think that either Energy Minister Jonathan Wilkinson or Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne could take Freeland’s place as minister of finance.
Who?
So let me get this straight: some Liberals are encouraging a nobody like Wilkinson—please don’t write this paper saying how amazing he has been. The point is, no one knows him outside Parliament Hill—or a minister who couldn’t get his own legislation right, in the form of Bill C-27? You have got to be kidding me. She is way more qualified than both of them put together. And if the problem with Freeland is that she can’t sell the government’s economic policies, what makes PMO think these undistinguished men can? Champagne couldn’t sell his approval of Rogers acquisition of Shaw, given the Competition Bureau tried to block the deal.
At the end of the day, barely passable white men—who have fewer qualifications—are put on the same level as the current female deputy prime minister. When you cape for the patriarchy you will never be spared its misogynistic impacts. It will run over you to the next inferior white man.