2. Canadian Liberalism and Gender Equality: Between Oppression and Emancipation

Most feminists and LGBTQ activists disagree on some issues, including the legislative regulation of pornography and sexual exploitation (see Smith 1999: 29). Because gender—as opposed to sexualities—is the main theoretical focus of the chapter, it leaves important questions unaddressed.

Even if the Liberal Party of Canada has governed the country for roughly 70 per cent of the last century, it is important to distinguish the liberal ideology (as a set of assumptions and practices that are foundational to liberalism as the ruling ideology) from Liberal parties (as the partisan groups these principles have embodied in Canadian history).

In the words of DeGagne (2012: 26): “the current mainstream lesbian and gay movement is abandoning its emphasis on being different from the ‘straight majority.’… Formal but not substantive equality is granted once minorities are recognized (categorized), acknowledged (allowed to speak) and accepted (depoliticized). Ultimately, therefore, accommodation occurs on the terms of the majority.”

To gain political rights, Canadian liberal feminists used two distinct arguments. Some demanded to be treated as equals on the basis of their essential sameness with men. Others demanded rights as the logical extension of women’s distinct responsibilities as mothers. In Quebec, for instance, these two arguments emerged at different historical moments: if the latter (maternalist) argument appeared in the 1920s, the former (egalitarian) argument was mobilised in the 1930s by the more radical suffragists like Idola St-Jean (Baillargeon 2019: 89–166).

The Commission was mandated “to inquire into and report upon the status of women in Canada, and to recommend what steps might be taken by the Federal Government to ensure for women equal opportunities with men in all aspects of Canadian society” (Canada 1970: 4). Both Franco-Québécois and Anglo-Canadian liberal feminist groups participated in establishing the Royal Commission. The Quebec government did not appoint a commission similar to the RCSW, but a few years later it mandated the Conseil du statut de la femme to identify the various forms of discrimination Quebec women faced and to make recommendations to end that inequality. Like the RCSW, the Report of the Conseil, entitled “Pour les Québécoises: Égalité et indépendance,” embodies liberal assumptions and practice (Lamoureux 2016: 115).

As specified by Hooper, the 1969 legislative reform mainly concerned sodomy and decriminalised “acts of gross indecency,” not by removing the “gross indecency” section of the Criminal Code but by adding an amendment that stipulated that it was not criminal to pursue same-sex sex acts if and only if these acts are committed between two consenting adults (of age 21 or above) in narrowly defined private places. For that reason, “gay sex was still criminal” (Hooper 2014: 59), and same-sex sex acts amongst consensual adults have remained the object of prosecution and policing since 1969 (see Kinsman and Gentile 2010).

While sexual orientation was not listed as a prohibited ground for discrimination in the Charter at the time of its adoption, it was incorporated through a court interpretation in 1995 (see Smith 1999).

Sangster (2015: 383) emphasises that “shoehorning second wave feminism into a white, middle-class liberal category” is misleading, for many of these feminists did strive to understand gender as it intersected with other systems of oppression, in particular capitalist exploitation and Western imperialism.

It is not clear to Franco-Québécois feminists today that theorising gendered oppression as intersecting with other systems of oppression helped empower Franco-Québécois women. On the one hand, nationalism provided Franco-Québécois women with a vocabulary through which they could analyse their oppression (Lamoureux 1987: 51; see also Dumont 1992). On the other hand, Quebec nationalism, as other nationalisms, sprung from masculinised memory and masculinised hope and mainly valorised women as mothers of the nation to be born (Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis 1995: 5; Lamoureux 1987: 51).

Indigenous women and children experience the highest rates of violence, sexual abuse, rape, and suicide (Gabriel 2012: 186).

Impositions of patriarchal practices are especially visible in the various articulations of the Indian Act, which has defined Indigenous identity in ways that disenfranchised and dispossessed large numbers of women (Huhndorf and Suzack 2010; see also: Perry 2009, 2011; and Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis 1995).

One important consequence of this dismissiveness is that when Indigenous women are invited to speak to the women’s movement, they are not considered authorities on “women in general.” In the words of Lee Maracle, Indigenous women are expected to deal with the question of gendered oppression in “segregated Native fashion”: “No one makes the mistake of referring to [Indigenous women] as ordinary women” (1996: 18).

In the words of Green, “Indigenous feminism has routinely been denigrated as untraditional, inauthentic and non-liberatory for Indigenous women” (2017: 2). According to Gina Starblanket, however, “Indigenous feminism has the potential to nuance and advance the way in which [Indigenous Peoples] think about Indigenous resurgence” (2017: 22; see also Gabriel 2012).

Straight feminists were often apprehensive about advocating lesbian claims, “allegedly for fear of jeopardising the political success of the [women’s] movement with respect to other issues” (Smith 1999: 29).

Despite some of its problematic assumptions, Turcotte (1998: 275) and Lamoureux (1998: 170) argue that lesbians should maintain strong ties to the feminist movement, for it alone can address the material inequality lesbians face as women. Queer theory and activism—which alongside lesbianism seeks to deconstruct both gender and the imperative to heterosexuality—are insufficient to address the discrimination against lesbians, for they “overlook lesbian specificity and the difference that gender makes” (Rudy 2001: 217). As a result, queerness can “lead to the valorization of those things associated with the male, public sphere” (216; see also Turcotte 1998).

According to feminist and political scientist Jill Vickers, liberalism undergirds not only Canadian politics, but also Canadian political science. In her presidential address to the Canadian Political Science Association, she stated that feminist political science has not yet fully penetrated Canadian political science in its definition of power as inclusive of relations of power that are embodied in everyday structures like the family (2015: 762).