Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday that Kamala Harris’s loss in the U.S. presidential election was a setback for women’s progress — and cited several recent incidents that he said suggest women’s rights are under attack by “regressive” and “reactionary” political forces.
In an address to an Ottawa gala for Equal Voice, an organization that works to get more women elected to public office, Trudeau said politicians who are hostile to women’s rights — particularly a woman’s right to choose abortion — are “winning too often, unfortunately.” He said feminists like himself have to be “lucid” about the challenges ahead.
“We were supposed to be on a steady, if difficult, march towards progress. And yet, just a few weeks ago, the United States voted for a second time to not elect its first woman president,” Trudeau said, adding that “women’s rights and women’s progress” are “under attack.”
“And I want you to know that I am and always will be a proud feminist,” he said. “You will always have an ally in me and my government.”
While speaking at the Equal Voice Foundation Gala in Ottawa on Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said ‘everywhere women’s rights and women’s progress is under attack, overtly and subtly.’
The comments could be interpreted as a thinly veiled swipe at U.S. president-elect Donald Trump. In his first term, Trump appointed Supreme Court justices who were intent on overturning abortion jurisprudence — something they ultimately did with the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health decision.
Harris’s loss in the November election frustrated the hopes of Americans who wanted to see a woman in the Oval Office for the first time.
The comments come at a tense time for Canada-U.S. relations.
Trump recently taunted Trudeau on social media, calling him the “governor” of the “great state” of Canada. He has said if the U.S. is going to have large trade deficits with Canada, it might as well join the United States. Trump also apparently joked with Trudeau about Canada becoming the 51st state if the country can’t handle his promised tariffs.
Trudeau has said Canada is readying some sort of response if Trump does go ahead with a 25 per cent tariff on all Canadian goods destined for the U.S. Canada slapped retaliatory tariffs on some U.S. goods the last time Trump levied fees on Canadian steel and aluminum.
Trudeau also took a jab Tuesday at Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who was not at the Equal Voice event.
He said the other federal leaders in attendance, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, consistently show up for women.
“Showing up matters,” Trudeau said, pointing to his government’s work on women’s rights, his commitment to a gender-balanced cabinet and his preference for women candidates for judicial and Senate appointments.
He said 56 per cent of the Liberal government’s picks for the judiciary have been women, up from 32 per cent under the last Conservative government, and the Senate now has a female majority.
Trudeau said having more women in positions of power has delivered policy changes like government-subsidized child care, a gender-based violence strategy and a pharmacare program that eventually will cover contraceptives.
Poilievre has said he’s pro-choice and supports a woman’s right to choose an abortion. Trudeau said the Liberals “don’t just believe in a woman’s right to choose — we act on it.”
Melissa Lantsman, the Conservative Party’s deputy leader, was at the event and delivered remarks.
Lantsman attacked Trudeau without mentioning him by name, saying some leaders lean on “lofty platitudes” and demean women by pushing the idea that “all women who hold elected office have to have the same view on every single issue.”
“I have seen women in my party rise to positions of great responsibility because of merit, because of excellence, because of intelligence, and not because of quotas,” she said.
A focus on gender-balanced cabinets and token policies “pander and demean,” she said.
“It has to be about more than symbols. It has to be about actual substance. It has to be real results for real people,” she said, pointing to a troubling rise in sexual assaults and human trafficking in recent years.
