The Feminist Canaries are Singing Again

The Singing Feminist Canaries

In times long past, miners sent canaries down into the mines to determine whether the air was safe to breathe. The canaries would sing loudly as they were lowered down the shaft and if the canary died, it indicated the presence of lethal gas and the miners would refuse to enter the mine.

Today, we also have our own singing canaries, only the singing canaries of today are feminists, who instead of letting us know all is well, do quite the opposite. Whenever they start singing, we know we're headed for trouble. That is, when they start to sing, we know that the feminists are on the march again.

Singing Canaries During the Charter Debate

The feminist canaries began to sing loudly during the Charter debate in the early 1980s when their songs led to specific amendments to the Charter of Rights. These amendments greatly strengthened the position of feminists before the courts. For example, S.15(2) of the Charter provides for the ideological provision of affirmative action programs (reverse discrimination). No other constitution in the entire world is graced by such a provision. Moreover, S.15(1) provides specific wording that has led to a feminist interpretation of "equality" in the Charter. We should have listened more carefully for the feminist songs during the Charter debate, and headed off some of these amendments - but we failed to do so.

A few years later, the feminist canaries began to sing again when they decided to take over the Canadian justice system to modify it to suit their own ideological legal theories.

Immediately following the passage of the Charter of Rights, therefore, the radical feminists, in rapid succession:

1. established their own legal arm to support their movement , the Legal Education Action Fund (LEAF). This organization is hugely funded by the Women's Program. For example, with only a handful of members in 1985, the Women's Program gave LEAF $18,009 to hold its initial meeting to get the organization off the ground. Later the same year it gave it an additional $101,000, and LEAF has received millions of taxpayer dollars from the Program over the years to assist in its legal challenges.

2. established the radical feminist/homosexual-owned and operated Court Challenges Program (funded by the Canadian taxpayer) which pays for most of LEAF's court cases, as well as the homosexual legal challenges before the courts. According to The Lawyers Weekly, LEAF receives 75% of its funding for its Supreme Court of Canada interventions and 50% of all its other legal challenges from the Court Challenge Programs.

3. gained control of most Canadian law schools and their reference material, in order to apply feminist legal theory to the law courses in Canada. This has ensured a steady stream of feminist indoctrinated lawyers.

Feminist Legal Theory and the Justice System

In order to complete their take-over, however, the feminists had to utilize some sort of academic analysis to put
forward their argument that the legal system had a male bias. To this end, they organized a conference on "Gender Equity and Judicial Neutrality," which was held in Banff, Alberta in May, 1986. (Because they were feminists, they didn't actually pay for this conference themselves. Instead, the obliging federal Women's Program of the Status of Women gave them a grant to assist them in this major project.)

The speakers at this conference read like a Who's Who of legal feminists. First on the list was a speech by Rosalie Abella, who darkly referred to male bias present in Canadian courts. She stated that, "Every decision maker who walks into a court room to hear a case is armed not only with the relevant legal text, but with a set of values, experiences and assumptions that are thoroughly imbedded."

These assumptions by Ms. Abella served as the basis for the controversial speech by feminist Supreme Court of Canada Judge Bertha Wilson in 1990 in which she, too, referred to the lack of judicial impartiality in the Canadian court system. She claimed that our courts are ruled by a male perspective which has resulted in legal principles that are not "fundamentally sound" and which should be "revisited as and when the opportunity presented itself." She was pleased to report, however, that Canadian feminist scholarship was doing an excellent job of identifying areas of male bias in the Canadian judicial system and she suggested that feminist recommendations would remedy the problem. The "remedies" of course, were all conveniently presented at the 1984 feminist legal conference in Banff, and these papers were published by Carswell in 1987, in a book entitled Equality and Judicial Neutrality.

Unfortunately, the legal establishment believed Judge Wilson and her sister legal feminists, and acted quickly to implement their nonsensical ideas.

National Judicial Institute

First on the list for change was an adaptation of the judicial "education" program, to include a course on gender sensitivity (more accurately described as an "indoctrination" course) provided by the National Judicial Institute in Ottawa, presided over by Chief Justice Antonio Lamer. This gender sensitivity program was based, of course, on the proceedings of the 1986 Banff feminist legal conference, and the conveniently published and now famous book, Equality and Judicial Neutrality.

The mandate of this National Judicial Institute was supposedly to promote continuing education for federally appointed judges, and the courses were all discretionary, except the gender sensitivity course, which was mandatory. The gender sensitivity program, since it was based on Equality and Judicial Neutrality was, of course, an exclusively feminist program with feminist-only supporting documentation. REAL Women has attempted to expose and remove this perverse program from the National Judicial Institute since it began in 1992. As recently as September 1998, however, the now retired Chief Justice Antonio Lamer has denied that the judges gender sensitivity program reflected a feminist bias. And pigs can fly.

The Canaries are Singing Again

Not unreasonably, more and more Canadians have begun to raise objections to this feminist take-over of our judicial system. (Just ask the harassed fathers' groups about this problem). As resentment against this judicial activism has become more pronounced, the feminist canaries have again broken into song. Madame Justice Claire L'Heureux Dubé sang the opening tune in this regard, in her speech to the Canadian Bar Association in August, 1999 in which she claimed that any questioning of judicial activism was an attack on "judicial independence." (See Reality, March/April 2000, "Speeches by Judge Create Controversy," p. 16.)

However, the loudest songbird of all in support of judicial activism is Judge Rosalie Abella, now sitting comfortably on the Ontario Court of Appeal. In a well-reported speech in April at Osgoode Hall, Toronto, Judge Abella sang from a completely different songbook than she had previously used at the feminist legal conference back in 1986. At that time, when her sister feminists were gearing up for their take-over of the justice system, Abella claimed that judges held inherent biases. Now, she is loudly proclaiming that judges are absolutely wonderful - the noblest of the noble - and all are generously serving the public's interest only. She stated in her April, 2000 speech:

The judiciary has a different relationship with the public. It is accountable less to the public's opinions and more to the public interest. It discharges that accountability by being principled, independent, and impartial … Judges … serve only justice..

Judge Abella's turn-about is not surprising. Throughout her professional life, she has used her multiple government appointments on and off the Bench to pursue her own personal agenda of radical feminism and the promotion of homosexual rights.

Judge Abella's Backgound

With little legal experience behind her (she was called to the Ontario Bar in 1972), Ms. Abella was appointed to the Ontario Human Rights Commission in 1975 followed by an appointment to the Ontario Family Court and the Ontario Labour Relations Tribunal in 1976. These appointments appeared to be based on her two strongest assets - her female gender and her minority religious faith. On this basis, she could do no wrong. As a result, she was repeatedly pushed upwards in her career, with one government appointment after another. In 1983, she was appointed to form a one-woman Royal Commission on Equity in Employment. Her report led to the ill-advised and discriminatory employment equity legislation in Ontario (subsequently disbanded) and the now largely discredited federal Employment Equity Act in 1994. According to Professor Martin Loney in his book, The Pursuit of Division: Race, Gender and Preferential Hiring in Canada, Ms. Abella's recommendations in her Equity Commission report were made "without any factual data to support it." (See Reality, March/April 1999, Book Review, p. 13.)

A lack of factual data, however, has never prevented Ms. Abella from receiving star billing or from making nonsensical recommendations and judgments. She became the recipient of her own employment equity program when she was appointed Chairperson of the Ontario Law Reform Commission in 1989. Finally, in 1992, after her strenuous lobbying of Chief Justice Roy McMurtry, Ms. Abella landed her final and most prestigious appointment on the Ontario Court of Appeal. She has used this appointment to its fullest, to impose her feminist fantasies on Canadians.

Abella's Controversial Decisions

Since her appointment, Ms. Abella has handed down several highly questionable decisions. For example, in April 1995, she decreed it was in a child's "best interests" for the custodial mother to remove the child to another continent (Australia), away from the father, who was resident in Canada, even though the father had faithfully made his support payments. This decision effectively denied the father access to his child. (This decision was mercifully overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada.)

Just one month later, in May 1995, Ms. Abella ruled that since anal sex is "a basic form of sexual expression for gay men," … that the provision in the Criminal Code that required the age of consent for such sexual activity be set at 18 years was discriminatory. She stated: (See Reality, July /August 1995, "Title of Article," p. 7): "Court Lowers Age for Homosexual Sex."

… the provision perpetuates rather than narrows the gap for a historically disadvantaged group - gay men-it does so arbitrarily and stereotypically, and is, therefore, a discriminatory provision which infringes the guarantee of equality.

In 1998, Judge Abella was at it again, this time in the Rosenberg case, declaring that homosexual partners were "spouses" within the meaning of the Income Tax Act. As usual, she provided no reasonable or logical argument in her controversial conclusion and stated instead (See Reality, May/June 1998, "Courts Reject Traditional Values," p. 3):

… elected governments may wait for changing attitudes in order to preserve public confidence and credibility. Both public confidence and institutional credibility argue in favour of courts being free to make independent judgements notwithstanding those same attitudes.

Judge Abella is now our leading songbird in this new chorus protecting judges in their often misguided interpretations of the Charter of Rights.

The truth is judges have no special or secret knowledge with which to interpret the general and ill-defined words in the Charter of Rights. Instead, they come to the bench with their own political and ideological axes to grind and make their decisions based on these philosophical assumptions.

As a result, it is arrogance to assume, as does Judge Abella, that judges know what is best for us. This assumption also ignores the reality that the very basis of a judge's appointment is political. Judges are not above the political passions of the day, but, in fact, are an integral part of them.

At issue is the fundamental question of whether we should be governed by an unelected, unrepresentative, unaccountable committee of lawyers applying no will but their own, or should we be allowed to assume responsibility for our own destiny in accordance with the democratic process?

Judicial supremacy generates enormous power for feminist lawyers and judges, such as Judges Rosalie Abella and Claire L'Heureux Dubé. It is evident that radical feminists (both on and off the bench) are unwilling to relinquish this power. Feminists have turned our justice system upside down. As a result, it is no longer a "just" system.

Since our feminist songbirds have started to sing again, we can reasonably expect trouble ahead. They're determined to hold on to their power base in our judicial system - we've been warned.

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