Harper's Female Problem

The PM isn't so helpful to Canadian women, but at least they get a free ride in the courts.

The Conservative government is no friend of Canadian women, declares the Montreal Gazette’s Janet Bagnall, writing that in the past five years Harper’s government “not only didn't do much for women, but undermined what previous governments had done.” Bagnall lists a series of troubling statistics: Canada is 33rd in the world in terms of the earning gap between men and women, since 2006 the percentage of government positions held by women has fallen to 32.5 per cent, and stricter rules for accessing unemployment benefits have disproportionately affected single mothers, 48.9 per cent of whom live below the poverty line. Perhaps the most baffling decision, especially in light of the Robert Pickton case, was the government’s denial of funding to a Native Women's Association of Canada project to investigate the cases of 600 missing aboriginal women. The irony of course is that Harper was in Davos this week on a much-publicized trip to oversee a new global maternal health agency. “The world's vulnerable need a defender,” Bagnall writes. “But there are vulnerable women here at home. They need help too.”

Here’s a ridiculous column by Sun Media’s Charles Adler. He contends that a Winnipeg woman named Joan Henderson who severely injured city worker Michael Pacheco while driving drunk got off on the charges without jail time purely because she is a woman. What he doesn’t do is provide any evidence to support this claim, merely posing the question, “If Michael Pacheco had been drinking doubles, then gambled on a safe drive home and smashed his car into a mother … do any of you think Michael Pacheco would have received the same sentence as Joan Henderson?” He suggests one would have to be sick in the head to answer “yes” to that, which is odd because he clearly intends you to answer not with your brain, but with your gut on this one. You’ll be pleased to know that Adler will soon host a nightly show on the new Sun TV network, where it’s a safe bet his audience demographics will skew heavily towards the testicled portion of the population.