The Emerging Ugliness

This is post is a "two parter".

The first topic is some interesting bits about the government's cuts to Status of Women Canada. Via Marginal Notes, I came across this blog whose authors had come into possession of a slide show that was presented to SWC staff after Minister Oda announced massive and sweeping cuts to the offices of SWC.

Read it, and the accompanying blog - it's very enlightening as to just how small-minded our current CPoC government is.

Perhaps most amusing is the use of the term "world standard best practices" to measure gender parity. First of all, it suggests that there is a "world standard", and that such a standard needs no further contributions to improve it. I suspect that Canada's work (guided by SWC) defines what "world standard" does exist!

Primary among the cuts to SWC is the dismembering of the research side of the organization. Apparently, the CPoC thinks that we already "know everything", and therefore no longer need to study gender parity. Of course, this is consistent with the Conservative belief that if it won't survive in the "open market" it's not worth doing.

Moving along, just for fun, we find out how the Conservative government is implementing their own lovely level of bigotry - even if they can't legislate it.

Via the NDP, we learn that Immigration Canada's "interim policy" refuses to acknowledge legal same gender based marriages from other countries.

We aren't talking about countries that have radically different legal notions of marriage from Canada here. We are talking about Spain, The Netherlands and Belgium for example.

I am disgusted that a marriage solemnized - and legal - elsewhere in the world - receives a special form of discrimination applied to it.

This is the kind of mean-spiritedness that has come to characterize the CPoC, and their approach to governance. Next thing you know, we'll find the Canadian Military will be obliged to enact a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy - where gay members of the forces can find themselves fired - once someone finds out they are gay. (Ironically, the US military has a shortage of linguists that speak Arabic - they've fired most of them under DADT!)