In his first major move as Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney eliminated roughly a third of all cabinet positions, including the crucially important Minister of Women and Gender Equality. This decision marks a major setback for women’s rights in Canada at a time when these rights are under threat around the world.
Carney, sworn in as prime minister on Friday, has justified the trimmed-down cabinet as a “smaller, experienced cabinet” positioned to move fast and secure Canada’s economy in the face of US President Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada and other threats.
But deprioritizing gender equality does not help Canada’s economy, and risks entrenching serious gendered harms. The gender wage gap and gendered poverty and inequality persist in Canada. Women and gender diverse workers also face disproportionately high levels of harassment and violence at work. Much work also remains for Canada to ensure and support sexual and reproductive health rights at home and abroad.
Canada needs proportional representation now! As a fairer electoral system would increase women’s representation in parliament by 8%.
One cool thing they could do that would benefit women and workers would be to mandate better staffing policies for nurses at hospitals, clinics, and long-term care homes. These places receive provincial and federal funding, so hiring more nurses and medical aides (roles which are predominately filled by women) would be a great step in growing the number of healthcare workers and improving access to medical care.
The “nurse shortage” is entirely manufactured by medical groups that deliberately underpay and under-fund their own personnel and facilities. Just look at their books: they’ve got record profits almost across the board.
Take a look at: provincial responsibilities
And yet provinces have accepted federal funding that is contingent on meeting certain requirements that are in line with federal policy goals. There is still a federal role in healthcare no matter how many people tell me it’s impossible for the feds to do anything helpful in this sector.
Don’t you think your energy would be better spent emailing MPs than making low-effort excuses on part of the feds that I’ve been hearing for years?
The boosted healthcare funding that JT gave the provinces isn’t bound by the same rules tho, as every province refused to sign the agreement forcing the extra billions to be spent on healthcare alone.
For the most part the premiers love their little fiefdoms and will protect them with our lives.
There was and will be federal healthcare funding that Trudeau is not attached to. It’s disingenuous to claim that the federal government has no tools available to achieve its goals if it so chose to make healthcare spending official policy. Historically, these things often start at the provincial level, but that doesn’t mean that they have to or that federal funding wouldn’t help a province already moving towards improving their existing system.
It’s not beyond them to invent a new program with specific funding requirements, they’ve done it many time. If voters are made more acutely aware that provinces are leaving money on the table due to corporate lobbying and partisanship while healthcare languishes and nurses exit the field, that could go very poorly for some Premiers (like Smith, whose administration is showing their ass in the middle of a healthcare spending scandal).
Carney has a limited mandate as acting PM. What would we able to do to advance accessibility, between now and no later than 7 months from now?
Especially when this trade war is such a pressing and immediate threat. I hope human rights, equality and disability advocates understand that if Canada capitulates to Trump, he’s going to roll back protections and accessibility measures just for the fun of it.
Isn’t he interim PM? Why waste months trying to fill minister positions if the election is near and they could be tossed out anyway? It’s not a “cut”, we don’t have the time.
This work can and should and will continue, but it doesn’t need to be a cabinet level position right now.
We have our backs against the wall, and in my opinion we need to laser-focus on our absolute priorities right now.
Should we retreat from the progress made? Fuck no. Should we stop working on this? Also no.
But there is so much urgent work that needs to be done to completely retool and rework our economy and industry and national defence. We need our leaders to have focus to ensure that the steps we are taking are done with urgency and that the changes we implement are having the effects we want, and that side effects are mitigated.
So for today, for right now, I support this move. 100%
I think our survival as a nation is more important than token positions in the government.
While I agree that this is a war time cabinet I strongly disagree with the use of “token position,” you are sounding like MAGA and anti DEI.
Not maga or dei. I want effective government in a crisis situation, not someone stuck in 2015 and trying virtue signal.
