Members and chair of the jury for this special award sponsors—and I had written
Maclean’s, L’actualité and Historica Canada —and there’s a ton of others
so, all of you, many present here tonight, parliamentarians and guests
I was really taken by surprise by the offer of the award.
My spontaneous reaction was that it was a mistake on the person.
In French we say “une erreur sur la personne” —a mistaken identity.
But this being said, my thanks for this wonderful honour.
I’m particularly touched
It was suggested I could speak—I would speak on women and/or on health care
I’ll speak of women tonight.
No men can leave the room, by the way.
I want to say a word on women in political power to start,
because with all the ”Sunny Days” excitement of two years ago, almost to the day,
with the first federal gender parity Cabinet,
the temptation was to conclude: we’ve made it.
Oh, no—we haven’t.
When I was first elected to the House of Commons,
we, the five women—and Flora MacDonald was one of them.
In 1972 we were 1.8 per cent of the 264 MPs, at the time.
This percentage reached 20 per cent in 1997, twenty years ago.
My shock when checking today’s figures is that women still make
only 26.3 per cent of this House membership, ranking us—Canada—
to the 64th spot out of the 188 countries analyzed by the Inter Parliamentary Union
Empirical research by Scandinavian feminists tell us that only when there
is a critical mass of 32 to 33 per cent of parliamentarians—
only when 33 per cent of parliamentarians are women do things start changing.
The reactions to women in politics; their performance and efficiency;
the political culture; norms and social conventions; the political discourse;
the political agenda starting to include issues of interest to women
and so on. To conclude, we still have a long way to go, the objective being
around 50 per cent of women MPs in the House of Commons.
Now, let’s now look at women without power, an entirely different story.
The Globe’s Elisabeth Renzetti recently entitled her column:
“Systemic abuses of male power are everywhere”
We all know something is wrong, for the longest of time,
and that it has to do with male power. But where do we start with this infamous
list of Harvey Weinstein, the RCMP, Amazon’s Rory Price, Bill O’Reilly,
Kevin Spacey the Paris and Oxford University “rock star” of Islamism Tariq Ramadan,
the Canadian Armed Forces, Bill Cosby the Montreal chef and TV personality Giovanni Apollo?
Where do we start? Where do we go with all of that?
I admire, and want to say it tonight, and thank the woman who suddenly and massively came out
through the “#MeToo”,
[applause] Merci
On a lighter note I admit that my English vocabulary has been enriched
these last months starting with Trump’s “pussy grabbing”. Not in my Robert and
Collins dictionary, which has lots of pussy-this and pussy-that, like
pussy-footing but not Trump’s one.
[laughter]
Stalking—I had—
[applause]
“Stalking”: I had heard the word before and still have, today, a vague idea
of what it means and that it could become very scary.
“Groping” is my last one. But after reading its translation into
French on the web—I hadn’t a clue what it meant—that word I knew
from unwanted experience way back as a new MP.
I won’t say more today.
As a former academic I also recently acquired new concepts: “toxic masculinity”
or “dominant masculinity” which the Globe’s Denise Balkissoon—I don't know to pronounce her
name in English—Balkissoon defines, quoting its author U.S.
university professor and I quote, “a form of alpha manhood that demands men
“extract submission from women, be emotionally removed but hyper-sexual and
“in control everywhere they go.”
The title of her piece in the in the Globe tells it all:
“Masculinity is toxic. Men don't have to be.”
I love it. I’m sure the men here tonight are men with “non-toxic” masculinity.
I would like a nicer, positive adjective so you will find it.
It was about equality of opportunity and equity.
Some observe that it is now switching to equality of outcomes.
Those concepts, metaphors like breaking through the glass ceiling
do not address the roots of many deeply-rooted social problems
such as sexual abuses and harassment. Behind each of
these equality objective, Man—capital ‘M’— stands at the norm.
I'm not interested to becoming equal to men.
I want the roots of patriarchy to be addressed as the
late French feminist philosopher Françoise Collin wrote:
“Equality is a principle of assimilation not a concept of social transformation.”
Thank you.
[cheers, applause]