by Jim Hodgson

A decade of promises and at least a measure of good will were flushed away with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s declaration that his government does not have a feminist foreign policy.

Speaking in Johannesburg at the end of the G20 summit, he said issues such as gender equality and reducing gender-based violence are an “aspect” of his government’s foreign policy. “But I wouldn’t describe our foreign policy as feminist foreign policy.”

Frankly, it was always hard to reconcile proclamations of feminist foreign policy (FFP, as it came to be known) by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his foreign ministers with Canada’s efforts to sell weapons abroad, inaction in Gaza, and preference for threats and sanctions over dialogue in Venezuela. After all: wouldn’t a truly feminist foreign policy veto arms sales to Saudi Arabia because of its suppression of women’s rights? 

House of Commons finance committee chair Karina Gould, who served in several cabinet posts under Trudeau and ran against Carney for the Liberal leadership, told the Canadian Press that Carney’s words “certainly” mark a departure from the previous government. But she insisted the policy the prime minister described remains feminist.

“The ideals that he was talking about continue to be feminist, and I think that what it means is that as Canadians, we expect that we’re going to stand up for gender equality around the world and here in Canada,” she said.

“Prime Minister Carney is making it very clear he is no friend to women and he is no friend to gender equality in this country,” NDP MP Leah Gazan told reporters Nov. 24.

Feminist aid policy

The Trudeau government did somewhat better with its Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP). Beyond policy documents, FIAP seemed to produce some results across the development cooperation sector with promotion of gender equity, empowerment of women and girls, and rights and inclusion for 2SLGBTQIA+ people. 

Even so, there were calls for more. Canada’s ecumenical justice coalition KAIROS said FIAP was “sound policy” but that its funding priorities needed “to align the advancement of human rights and women, peace and security with economic empowerment.”

After the Harper government in 2009 refused to support the KAIROS international assistance work, funding was restored by the Trudeau government to a revamped KAIROS Women, Peace and Security program. 

Now Trudeau is gone, his “sunny ways” undermined by the SNC Lavalin affair and his treatment of cabinet ministers who were women. And international development cooperation is being buried in favour of investment regimes, eternal debt and oceans that rise along with temperatures.

“Inside/outside strategies”

And so I find myself thinking in different ways. Sometimes I feel that I placed too much faith in the official spaces, even as I always identified most strongly with social movements. Sometimes we used “inside/outside” strategies: those who could talk to the politicians would do so; the rest of us would march in the street outside. I think of anti-free-trade demonstrations in Québec City in 2001 or the protests at the Toronto G7/G20 meeting in 2010.

Today in Mexico City’s La Jornada newspaper, Raúl Zibechi has a column in which he decries the “pyramids” of power we build within our progressive movements even as we denounce the pyramids of power in our capitalist “democracies.” He points to an event the Zapatistas will hold in San Cristóbal de Las Casas,  Chiapas, Dec. 26-30 this year. Zibechi and others will offer their “analyses on pyramids and on how histories are handled within the economic system, bad governments, laws and the judicial structure, resistance movements, the left and progressivism, human rights, the feminist struggle, and the arts.”

I can’t attend this year, but I will pay attention. As the new accord between Carney and the premier of Alberta showed this week, we can’t trust conventional power to make good choices on behalf of the people. We need to propose alternatives and press to make them reality.