The Perils of Woke Governance

From Quillette:

All governments eventually become enmeshed in some kind of scandal, of course. But Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are unlike their predecessors in one crucial respect: They have created the first national government anywhere that has explicitly presented itself as a political vessel of ultra-progressive social-justice mantras such as intersectionality and #MeToo. And there is evidence to suggest that this scandal has been all the more damaging to the Liberals precisely because their grubby treatment of a principled Indigenous woman is so obviously at odds with the pious social-justice posturing that, until just a few weeks ago, often made the Liberals sound more like an activist organization or undergraduate student society than a G7 government.

Trudeau’s woke identity is something he brought into office from day one. He banned anyone with pro-life views from his caucus, then tried to force recipients of a Canadian summer-jobs fund (including Bible camps) to declare support for pro-choice dogma. When asked why he insisted on creating Ottawa’s first gender-balanced cabinet, Trudeau declared, “because it’s 2015”—as if to suggest that anyone who didn’t support affirmative action was a misogynist (causing feminist website Jezebel to gush that “the sexiest thing about Justin Trudeau is his cabinet’s gender parity”). Under the Trudeau government’s bill C-16, pronoun misusage could become actionable under Canadian human-rights law. His government has introduced new environmental impact assessments that require project managers to impute “the intersection of sex and gender with other identity factors” in their environmental analysis. And he has promised transgender offenders the right to be imprisoned in jails that align with their gender expression.

On the question of “male toxicity,” in particular, Trudeau often has seemed like a social-justice Twitter account on two legs. He told Marie Claire magazine that he was raising his sons in a way that would allow them “to escape the pressure to be a particular kind of masculine that is so damaging to men and to the people around them. I want them to be comfortable being themselves, and being feminists—who stand up for what’s right, and who can look themselves in the eye with pride.” Trudeau also talked about the need for “gender budgeting” when it came to “big infrastructure projects” such as oil pipelines, since “gender impacts when you bring construction workers into a rural area…because they’re mostly male construction workers.” And of course, Trudeau has spent a good deal of his time as Prime Minister talking about “reconciliation” with Indigenous people—which has mostly involved leading a maudlin exercise in national self-flagellation. Fittingly, when asked by reporters on Thursday whether he would be apologizing for anything to do with the Wilson-Raybould scandal, he said no—but then added that he would be apologizing to Canada’s Inuit later in the day (for Ottawa’s handling of a tuberculosis outbreak that took place more than 50 years ago). (Read more.)

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