He’s like your mother who sends you clippings she thinks might interest you, which coincidentally are always ways to change your life in ways that have been anathema since you burst out of rural Saskatchewan to make the big city your home. But you’re polite because you know she wants the best for you.
Calgary Southeast’s Kenney, the minister for citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism — that’s three wisdoms — doesn’t want the best for us. He is Stephen Harper’s bullhorn. He wants to bully us into obedience, to be more like him because the man clearly thinks he’s fabulous. I wrote before with great joy about Kenney’s request on his website that visitors sign a petition thanking him for his fine work because he was persistently underthanked.
I’d thank him for inspiring this column but the form seems to have disappeared from the website. So consider this a “Much obliged.”
Reason to Thank Jason 1: Your website is wonderful, and I say that as a connoisseur of MP self-doting. Nothing flies below the Kenney political radar. “Minister Kenney expresses concern over southern Alberta storms.” “Minister Kenney Congratulates Chaldean Canadians on their New Eparchy”
Reason to Thank Jason 2: Kenney’s office sent out an email titled “LGBT Refugees from Iran,” touting his support for gay rights in a nation where Canada has abandoned its embassy (and thus presumably gay rights). Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender recipients were left wondering how on earth he knew who they were. Kenney said they were people who had contacted his office about the issue but one woman, who is complaining to the privacy commissioner, said she had never done so.
She had however once signed an online petition about a refugee claimant, CBC.ca reported. “This is scary. This is actually really scary,” she told a reporter.
I’d suggest that she might actually have met Kenney at a community event — his website has a beef stew of photographs of Kenney meeting voters of many ethnicities and religions — but none appears to be LGB or even T. Perhaps they doubt his sincerity. Don’t, I say.
Reason to Thank Jason 3: I save the best for last. Kenney this week announced that he favours Bill M-312 — to be voted on in the House of Commons Wednesday night — which would mandate setting up a committee, largely Conservative, to decide when human life begins.
As a woman, I have spent my life alert to any possibility of pregnancy, a waste of time since I clearly could just have called Kenney’s office to ask for a ruling. If a woman thinks she’s pregnant, she might as well be, for all the abortion rights she’ll have if Jasons ran the world.
Now I won’t have to make the call. If the motion passes and a committee discusses what lies in our stars — a matter that gave Shakespeare pause — over a PVC fruit plate and assorted cheeses, all Canadian pregnancies will have a federal Best Before date, and that day will be greeted in the delivery room.
Motion M-312 is a no-win proposition for the Conservatives, who already have the support of the Canadian Tea Party, there being no one else to vote for. The Conservative party whip, Gordon O’Connor, has already stood up in the House and defended abortion rights in terms so frank that I love him more than Jason himself. “Abortion is, and always will be part of society,” he said.
So this private bill won’t matter in the short term. But it is infinitely humiliating to women to have the matter of abortion rights raised again in Parliament. It makes one think that Harper has tacitly given approval to his more primitive MPs to try to renew ownership of women’s bodies, a suspicion the NDP has voiced to great effect.
So there’s Kenney and MP Stephen Woodworth and the gang — they are the Mississippi of the House of Commons — being handed a free vote on women’s lives. At this point, the joke stops being funny.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Heather Mallick
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