OTTAWA, October 6, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — Canada’s media are blasting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government for rejecting an opposition MP as chair of the status of women committee because she is pro-life.
And it’s a rare but welcome scenario to see such staunchly socially liberal venues as Toronto Globe and Mail taking this stance, says Campaign Life Coalition senior political strategist Jack Fonseca.
“This media backlash against Trudeau and the Liberals is well-deserved, and long overdue,” Fonseca said.
The Liberal-dominated status of women committee voted down Conservative MP Rachael Harder on Tuesday and instead forced Conservative MP Karen Vecchio to take the position of chair.
Conservative leader Andrew Scheer nominated Harder for the role, which is traditionally held by a member of the opposition.
But the Liberal and NDP members claimed Harder’s pro-life views disqualified her, a position Trudeau publicly endorsed.
Harder, the Tory shadow minister for the status of women, was accused of approving job grants in 2016 for pregnancy care centers in her Lethbridge, Alberta, riding, and of a pro-life voting record.
Media attention on Tuesday’s vote was virtually guaranteed after Liberal committee members staged a dramatic protest walkout last week that left the position of chair in limbo and committee unable to function.
But after Harder’s ousting, the Globe and Mail, MacLean’s Magazine, the National Post, and the CBC all castigated the Liberals for blatant bias.
And there was a suggestion that they were downright mean in carrying out what appeared to be a well-orchestrated, media-savvy campaign against the 30-year-old rookie MP.
“(T)hey took her down, ‘no’ by merciless ‘no’,” wrote Meagan Campbell in MacLean's, describing the vote on Tuesday. “ … so long, so-con … ”
National Post columnist John Ivison echoed this when he accused the Liberals of hypocrisy.
The government’s throne speech declared “the voices of all Canadians matter,” he wrote. “Except if you disagree with the Prime Minister. Then you will be shamed, disdained and silenced.”
Perhaps most surprisingly, the socially liberal Globe issued an editorial denouncing the Trudeau government’s actions.
The Liberals “denied Ms. Harder a position she is fully qualified to hold simply because she refuses to conform to their view of the world,” said the Globe.
The Trudeau government’s “shameful actions this week” send the message “it is perfectly acceptable in Canada to discriminate against people who oppose abortion,” it stated.
“The right to abortion is one we support, but there is a higher principle at play here – the right to hold beliefs, and to act on them legally, without interference from the government, and without being discriminated against by society,” observed the Globe.
Meanwhile, the CBC published an op-ed that of all criticisms might have struck a nerve with the youthful prime minister.
It suggested his actions could be construed as anti-immigration and anti-Muslim.
“Justin Trudeau's government always tells us how it is pro-immigration and pro-feminism, ready to defend the rights, opinions and values held by the women and men who call Canada home,” wrote Pakistan-born Palvasha Qureshi.
“The stunt at the status of women committee makes it seem like we've been brought to Canada for a photo-op, but are not actually welcome at the table,” she wrote.
Her “pro-life views and my voice are not being respected since they are not in line with Trudeau's supposedly feminist views,” noted the 21-year-old University of Ottawa student.
“How can Trudeau truly profess to be against Islamophobia if my pro-life convictions, shaped by Islamic beliefs, mean I would not be allowed to chair a committee if I were elected?”
National Post columnist Andrew Coyne also weighed in, decrying the Trudeau government’s “unvarnished assumption of moral superiority.”
The Liberals appear to believe “not only that their views are superior to those of their opponents, but that theirs are the only views it is possible for a decent person to hold.”
But Canadians may be growing tired of this, observed Coyne.
The Liberals are slipping in the polls, with Angus Reid showing the Conservatives favoured 36 percent to 33 percent as the party that “would make the best government.”
Indeed, according to Ivison, “in this case there are good business reasons for such blatant hypocrisy” in the highly publicized banning of Harder.
The Liberals sent out a fundraising email after last week’s protest walkout, pointing to Harder’s nomination as “a very clear demonstration of what we mean when we say Andrew Scheer’s Conservative Party will take us backwards.”
All this shows, wrote Ivison, that despite Trudeau’s “heartfelt soliloquies on the plight of beached jellyfish and other tragedies, the Liberal Party is a great, heartless electoral machine.”
Journalists couldn’t help but call out Trudeau for “violating parliamentary rules in order to block a hard-working young woman from getting a promotion,” Fonseca observed.
“I think Justin overplayed his hand, making it plain to see that he was discriminating against pro-life women, hilariously, while calling himself a ‘feminist’ prime minister,” he told LifeSiteNews.
“Now everybody knows that Justin ain’t the feminist prime minister he claims to be. On the contrary, he’s the misogynist prime minister.”