| Thanks to Paul Ford <sharedparent@sprint.ca> Radical feminism's absurd legacy
Friday, July 31, 1998
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
By Terence Corcoran
[The photo to the
 right
was not part of the article, but it does drive home the point. —WHS]
Let us first come to grips with the grotesqueness of the pay equity legal tangle that
could end up costing Canadian taxpayers up to $5-billion. The federal government took the
federal government before a federal government-appointed tribunal to determine whether the
federal government should pay restitution to 200,000 female federal government employees
because the federal government had failed to pay the women equal pay for work of equal
value since 1987. Topping off the absurdity, the case is also being fought by the Public
Service Alliance of Canada, the union that negotiated the allegedly unequal wages the
women were earning.
Now everybody is waiting to see whether the same federal government, the godfather of
this radical feminist monster, will appeal the whole mess to the Federal Court. This
should be a no-brainer for the cabinet, although judging from the cowering statement the
Treasury Board slipped out under the door in the wake of the Human Rights Tribunal
decision on Wednesday, who can be sure? Ottawa has been picking up the tab on freeloading
feminist ideology since the 1960s, so there's every reason to be concerned that the
government is going to cave in again. The government is "thoroughly analyzing the pay
equity ruling," according to the Treasury Board, which also noted that the ruling
doesn't say how much employees will receive or when, it merely "determines the
methodology of how to make the calculations."
That's not very reassuring. For all we know, this means Ottawa is already printing the
cheques, it just doesn't know when they will be mailed. The only hope for taxpayers is
that the cost of fulfilling the tribunal's order will strike the government as outrageous.
If the total bill were to rise to $5-billion, that averages out to $350 for each of 14
million taxpayers. Since 90 per cent of all taxes are paid by eight million taxpayers, the
cost of the pay equity boondoggle could run to more than an average of $600 for the
majority of taxpayers. For most Canadians in middle or higher-income groups, the cost per
family could easily run to more than $1,500.
And good luck reading the decision, possibly the most incoherent and disorganized
collection of socio-legal-techno-pseudo-science ever produced by a judicial body. It
begins in the middle, ends at the beginning and fights through 200 pages of
incomprehensible analysis that attempts to prove the unprovable and justify the
indefensible, which is that women are underpaid relative to men, and that the differences
can be measured and corrected.
The tribunal's decision is the culmination of more than 30 years'
worth of gender politics, a legacy richly chronicled
and demolished by former '60s activist Martin Loney in a new book, The Pursuit of
Division: Race, Gender, and Preferential Hiring in
Canada (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998). In an interview yesterday, Mr. Loney said
the tribunal's decision is another step in the "ever more inventive quest to socially
engineer society in a way that reflects the
redfems' premise that any indication
that women are underrepresented anywhere in society or paid less than men has to be
evidence of systemic discrimination."
The book is a much better read than that quote. It plots, blow by blow, step by step,
the grim, government-financed rise of gender
politics, from the 1967 Royal Commission on the Status of Women to the Human Rights Act of
1977 to the current national disaster. Today, a giant and lucrative industry of lawyers,
consultants, bureaucrats and activists feed off such organizations as the Human Rights
Commission and the tribunal. In the politics of gender
and race identity, Mr. Loney writes, "Canadians have financed an increasingly
destructive agenda whose outcome is not unity, equality or fairness, but division."
The parade of characters, politicians, feminists, dupes and con artists — from
Judy Rebick to Pat Carney to Rosalie Abella to Lloyd Axworthy — is thick and
colourful. But as Mr. Loney shows time and again through his book, there is no evidence
that women are underpaid or systematically and deliberately excluded from jobs or
positions or promotions or raises. Whether in the civil service or elsewhere, the only way
gender politics can be translated into statistical
material is by hauling in socialists and statisticians to manipulate numbers and jobs to
fabricate and invent proof. That goes a long way toward explaining the tribunal's
convoluted decision this week.
Missing from Mr. Loney's story is the international labour movement and the Marxist origins of the gender
issue. The Human Rights Act of 1977, which entrenched equal pay/equal work in law and gave
the tribunal the foundation for its ruling this week, was the direct product of clauses in
the 1951 Equal Remuneration Convention of the International Labour Organization, a
union-controlled leftist front sponsored by the United Nations.
Whether leftist or radical-feminist, the consequences of state-forced gender equality are now in: The cost is
exorbitant, the means absurd and there's no end in sight.
© THE GLOBE AND MAIL - 1998
See also "Dances with
taxpayers" Toronto Globe and Mail, Thursday, July 30, 1998
By Jeffrey Simpson, in Ottawa. |
