'Gender Equality,' 'Child Soldiers' and 'Humanitarian Law' are Axed from Foreign Policy LanguageEmbassy: With subtle strokes of the pen, it appears the Conservative government has been systematically changing the language employed by the foreign service and, as a result, bringing subtle but sweeping changes to traditional Canadian foreign policy...
Errol Mendes, a professor of international law at the University of Ottawa... said that such changes to the language, depending on the context, could be an attempt to downplay the International Criminal Court... In fact, a source close to Foreign Affairs told Embassy that the Prime Minister's Office had once tried to change Canada's official position on the ICC to essentially state that Canada does not support the ICC, it tolerates it...
Removing references to 'gender equality' and 'gender-based violence' are particularly sensitive because it is Canada who, in the past couple of decades, has led the fight to bring these terms into the international development and human rights agenda...
Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada... said it is fundamentally important that 'gender-based violence' be recognized as a particular form of human rights abuse at the United Nations and elsewhere because it reflects the fact that it is women, particularly in the midst of conflict, who disproportionately experience very serious and distinct forms of gender-based violence...
"The term 'gender' has a specific meaning, it refers to a series of socially constructed roles,' said Maxwell Cameron, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia. He said that removing the term 'gender' from Canada's foreign policy vocabulary would mean there are a host of issues that can no longer be talked about in a meaningful or clear way.
As the source close to Foreign Affairs explained, the social conservative base is looking for some wins out of the Harper government.
"And one of the ones they're getting is these kinds of languages," the source said. "It's a substantial change in philosophy and for anybody outside who's followed Canadian foreign policy, if you were to talk to the Nordics or the Brits or the Dutch, they would be shaking their heads. They wouldn't understand what was going on, and would ask 'why are you contesting language which everyone's accepted and which you helped pioneer?'"
Image from UN Millennium Development Goals
