News Stories on the Status of Women Canada
http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/williamson.html
March 11, 2004
No more NAC?
By LINDA WILLIAMSON -- Toronto Sun
Way back in the last century, women in Canada really could have used a national lobby organization to fight for their rights. Better yet, a federally-funded organization.
But in 1916, proto-feminists like Nellie McClung were still trying to persuade the feds to let them vote, never mind fund their groups.
Amazingly enough, though, they won the vote, without the aid of taxpayers' dollars. Just as they did the legal battle to have women finally recognized as "persons" in law in 1920. Those two battles set the stage for countless other women's achievements, including the brief tenure of our first female prime minister (Kim Campbell, remember?) in 1993.
By 1972, however, the Canadian government had finally had its consciousness raised, and began funding various special interest groups - including the women's movement. That largesse soon begat the awkwardly-named National Action Committee on the Status of Women (better known as NAC), a coalition claiming to represent some 3 million women via 600 different organizations.
NAC promptly became known as the voice for Canadian women, making sure it was never far from the headlines with its outlandish positions, which just happened to include:
* Opposing, in 1999, the erection of a privately funded statue commemorating the historic work of McClung and the four other women who won the famous "Person's Case," because of alleged racism in the women's Victorian-era backgrounds;
* Opposing Kim Campbell in the 1993 election because, as a Tory, she was allegedly not doing enough for women.
It's that kind of wackiness that leaves me somewhat torn about the news that NAC is, once again, about to expire if it doesn't get yet another injection of federal funding. This week, journalists seeking to commemorate International Women's Day apparently discovered NAC's Toronto-based operation was no longer answering its phone.
The group, having consumed millions of taxpayer dollars over the past three decades, is now asking Ottawa for interest relief on some $30,000 in unpaid taxes and penalties, and a $100,000-plus grant to "relaunch" itself.
Gosh, will NAC survive? And if not, whatever will Canadian women do without it?
As a columnist, I have to admit I might miss writing about NAC's absurd antics. But as a woman and a taxpayer, I was ready to bid them goodbye... well, a century ago. It's hard to pin down exactly when I realized NAC didn't even come close to representing me, a "feminist" who blames groups like NAC for tarnishing that word.
Maybe it was in 2000, when its demonstrators stormed Parliament Hill and demanded $30 million for groups working for "women's equality" (including the illogical bureaucratic fiction of "equal pay for work of equal value.")
Maybe it was in 1999, when they termed their mandate as "a major political struggle and revolution" against "racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, ageism and classism." Its idea of fighting for women's rights today is to demand the World Bank be closed and the U.S. get out of Iraq.
Far from representing the interests of mainstream Canadian womanhood (which, like it or not, includes women with conservative values), NAC has become a fringe group of the extreme left.
Yet in 1998, when the feds first dared to take away its annual "core funding" of $250,000-plus - promising instead to fund its projects on a case-by-case basis - its leadership howled about an "attack on democracy" because it would be reduced to actually asking members for money. (Imagine!)
This, at a time when its then-president, Joan Grant-Cummings, was comparing Canadian society to Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. (Her predecessor, Sunera Thobani, also blasted Canada in 1996 as a racist, sexist society that was abusive to women - in a speech in China, of all places.)
In 2000, NAC said its membership was "at least 50% lesbian" (I've nothing against lesbians, but that figure is clearly disproportionate to society at large), yet wailed it was the only group that could truly represent women in Ottawa.
Well, it wasn't true then and it's sure not true now. It's time to end the farce and cut off NAC's life support. If it really had even a fraction of the 3 million members it claimed, it wouldn't have to ask for money - it could survive as countless other lobby groups do, through donations.
Who needs NAC? Not me, nor any woman I know. It's just another federal boondoggle. And soooo last century.
Linda Williamson is the Toronto Sun senior associate editor. She can be reached by e-mail at linda.williamson@tor.sunpub.com.
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@tor.sunpub.com.
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- A petition in regards to Status of Women Canada and "hate crimes" (please look and sign)
http://www.angelfire.com/pq/iaingray/issues_men_websites_CCSW.html
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Whither Manhood And Fatherhood;
It's Time To Yell 'Fire' In This Theater
By
Gerald L. Rowles, Ph.D.
The electronic conversation began this way. I asked my colleagues, "Why is it, do you think, that divorced dads have not yet stormed the 'castle' to demand that they be given back their parental rights?
Censoring men won't make women equal
Date: Wednesday, June 04 @ 05:44:53 EDT
Topic: Canada
SEE: “Families, Homosexuality & Marriage” under “Issues Research”
Ottawa Citizen
The federal Status of Women department just spent $75,000 of your money on a report that wants to silence people who say that, in some respects, men have it tough, too. It doesn't seem very fair.
The report, School Success by Gender: A Catalyst for the Masculinist Discourse, doesn't say what a masculinist is (our Oxford dictionary says it's someone who is an advocate of the rights of men), but helpfully defines discourse as "specific ways of organizing information by those who have some authority in order to spread their view of the world." So the report's authors are content to write that arguments about boys' poor school performance and higher suicide rates, or existing child-custody laws, are simply an attempt "not only to mask continued inequality but also to attack some of the gains made by the women's movement."
The report, which Status of Women says doesn't necessarily reflect the department's view, offers a solution, too. Amend the hate speech provisions of the Criminal Code to include women. And then start monitoring the Internet, hoping to shut the masculinists up through legal action of a sort that, if you'll pardon our discourse, used to be called censorship.
The report also calls for a network to counter masculinist views. Pardon us for being slow, but doesn't that exist already, with state-funded chairs in women's studies in universities, the state-funded National Action Committee on the Status of Women and even that government department called Status of Women Canada?
Another irony is that if we start hovering over gender advocates hoping for a hate-speech prosecution, we might find ourselves taking exception to what some women say about men as much as we do about what some men say about women. Indeed, the report itself accuses the masculinist movement of "a stubborn denial that girls or women are victims of discrimination, as a social group, by men." All men?
There are two basic things you can do when you are losing a debate over public policy. You can argue better, or you can try to silence your opponents through scorn and, if that doesn't work, censorship. Regrettably, this report seems to advocate the latter. But then again, we're probably just engaging in a discourse of inequality.
http://web.archive.org/web/20050405225817/http://www.canadiangrassroots.ca/
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NOTE: These are just a few of the Comments posted from around the world about:
"The Status Of Women", & Militant Feminist Groups Organizations on a research matieral they claim was fact but the courts have said otherwise.
Opinions by others
In Australia
This can not go unanswered, for a government institution to put out such an unbelievably irresponsible and vindictive piece of anti -male propaganda is a disgrace that must be responded to.
It has been brought to our attention that the Australian False Memory Association is included on a list of men's organizations to be monitored by The Canadian Secretary of State Status of Women. School Success by Gender. A Catalyst for the Masculinist Discourse. The A.F.M.A. works for the reconciliation of families affected by false recovered memories or Repressed/Recovered Memory therapy and its variations. It is our intention to request an explanation from the Canadian Secretary of State as to why an Australian family support group is publicly listed as a feminist hate group.
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In New Zealand
http://familyguardian.tzo.com/
Re: Men's Groups Promoting Hatred, Federal Report Says, May 30.
It is with considerable alarm that I read the Canadian federal government is funding research into whether men's groups are "promoting hatred." As an individual who has been involved with the fathers' movement in New Zealand for 14 years, I have learned that the biggest obstacle to men achieving justice is the power and influence of the extreme feminist lobby, which blames men for all that is wrong in society, and which has succeeded in spreading an orchestrated litany of lies about the supposed evils of men. For example, women also indulge in sexual abuse and domestic violence, but subjective research based on extremely flawed methodologies attempt to paint a very different picture. It is very easy to see who it is who is really promoting hatred.
** I wonder if the author of the report appreciates the irony in her recommendation, "inciting hatred on the basis of gender should be a hate crime." **
Should such a recommendation be implemented, a great many more of her radical feminist cohorts would face prosecution than would men, for the simple reason that the radical feminists have access to government funding, such as the $75,000 used to create this sexist propaganda document.
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In Britain
Dear Friends,
It is quite disgraceful if this was to go ahead. When are men going to realize that they must act in unison and go for the jugulars, and definitely not with kids gloves. The only way you are going to confront this and achieve your goals, is by direct action and by this I mean the kind of thing we are at present doing in the UK, where some of us have been arrested, you must accept this as part of the process. You must find a benefactor, if not then you must create a fighting fund, which could be used for organizing the demos/marches and also the fines. It would be best for those who are prepared to be arrested, to ensure that they are unemployed so to minimize the fines.
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In Canada
Seeing what is going on now with these projects funded by our governments gave me a big lump in my throat. I thought we lived in a progressive society, and then I see this --. What can I say except to say that I am honestly sad. What happened to our freedoms and equality that feminism swears to protect. There needs to be serious efforts to encourage our government to fund research into men's issues. Just look at our families in this country...Where's the father? Well one things for sure he isn't missing due to testosterone.
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In United States
I am (regrettably) accustomed to the Canadian government committing this sort of outrage in Canada, but I am shocked and dismayed that my government would attack "US citizens" in this manner. The Canadian government and especially it's feminist contingent, have made a habit of attacking the USA.
(Do a Google search for radical Marxist-feminist "Thobani" and her comments about the USA and it's recent war effort).
I am especially surprised that American's did not fully-comprehend the implications of "US citizens" being monitored by the Canadian government and then charge them with "hate-crimes".
Feminism is a Weapon of Mass Destruction
In this last century alone, governments around the world have killed over 500 million people of their own people. All this government sponsored propaganda about Domestic Violence is just a smoke screen to divert attention from the real abuse: Government Abuse Against It's Own People. This is the real Domestic Violence.
The Bible depicted governments as Beasts; in Daniel and Revelations. Look at old Nazi film; their Armies marching like ants mimicking the Animal Kingdom and therefore subhuman. Individual Freemen become just another cog in the Wheel of the Predator Beast State which becomes the Alpha Male which today It is doing this through the propaganda of feminism. By feminizing society and thus emasculating it's males for more State Control.
If the British had this current System some 200 yrs. ago the American Revolution would have never happened. Benjamin Franklin had like 13 bastard children, he would have ended up in jail as a 'deadbeat' dad. The rest of our Founding Fathers would have been forced to 'attend' Anger Management Courses. This US Media Propaganda Machine would have called the Protestors of the Boston Tea Party a bunch of 'nuts' and/or anarchists. Feminism is a military psychological weapon to feminize/emasculate society for more State Control by weakening the State's Main Competitor: Men
Other Links that explain what is going on with the threat and hate crimes on the male gender by Radical Feminist and Government
http://familyguardian.tzo.com/
http://www.cloakanddagger.ca/archives/week24.asp
http://www.savethemales.ca