CIDA's Advice

As the Globe piece notes, CIDA's advice was to fund safe abortion services in countries where abortion was legal. That should put paid to the nonsense folks like Father Raymond J. de Souza have been spouting:

In many African countries, for example, for Canada to fund abortions would be breaking the local laws. To flout local laws and undermine local customs was once called paternalism. It’s an odd turn for Canada’s abortion extremists to be paternalistic, but such is the strangeness of this controversy.

Of all the ideas floating around re the various policies for a suitable G-8 Maternal Health Initiative, absolutely none involves forcing a country where abortion is currently illegal to provide abortions. And, you know, I read people like Andrew Coyne grousing about how we can't even have a debate in Canada these days over the issue. Well, there's been one on-going for the last couple of months, and if you want to know why the pro-life side has basically got its ass kicked (see here for how polls on the topic have changed), you can point to folks like Mr. De Souza and the kind of ridiculous arguments they've been making. I mean seriously. The guy's a priest; he's not allowed to bullshit, whether its in Jesus' name or otherwise.

Keith Martin Strikes Again

In his new post on our government's alleged G8 Maternal Health initiative, Mr. Martin makes one very salient but under-appreciated point:

Time is running out for mothers and children in the developing world. Less than six weeks remain before the G8 Summit begins in Ontario, and the Canadian government has yet to articulate any plan to reduce maternal and childhood mortality and morbidity, a key objective for the summit announced by Prime Minister Harper a few months ago.

We're getting close, in other words, and despite all the debate Harper's plan-to-have-a plan has generated, it remains in fact a nothing-burger. And it isn't out of the question that what will be eventually revealed to the G-8 will be so minimal as to extend little beyond the initial press release. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that wasn't the final result: a press conference and we're outta there and the whole episode is forgotten.

Martin is less cynical. He goes on to to outline a plan, which I too have been talking up (because it seems similar to what the government might have in mind), in which

Harper [would] propose a "framework" for action on Maternal Health, with this framework being divided into discreet little pots (as it were) named names like "training health care workers", "contraception" "safe abortions", "micro nutrients", and so forth. G-8 countries will be invited to drop money into one or more of these pots, with Canada assiduously avoiding the one marked "abortions".

Its interesting to note that, under Martin's hypothetical plan, its France (inventors of the "french safe") that get stuck with funding abortion.

Anyway, the third link is to last week's Christian Right piece as it appears in The Mark, where the publication's added credibility makes it seem twice as true.

McCoy On Ruth

I suspect the Senator's colorful intervention yesterday really was intended as friendly advice rather than a threat, and the evolution of Liberal Status of Women Critic Anita Neville's response to this advice, from understanding to condemnation, tracks the LPoC's realization that they had come upon a politically exploitable moment. But whatever.

Senator Elaine McCoy has indentified the deeper significance in Ms. Ruth's outburst:

Senator Nancy Ruth (ON) has never in her life shied away from a fight. When women stormed the barricades in 1981 to insist on including gender equality in the new Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for example, she was right there. Ever since then, she's dedicated herself to supporting women, and even maintains a website called Section15.ca which helps keep the Charter success alive. Now, thirty years later, she's reduced to advocating silence for fear of escalating backlash against women's rights.

I've been hearing countless anecdotes of how this government is systematically quelling any activity that does not support its own point of view. Groups have been told to remove any reference to gender equality in their application for funding, for instance, and all advocacy funding has been eliminated. But so far, no collective and sustained public protest has emerged. In fact, it would seem to me that many non-governmental organizations have been following the senator's advice for several years now.

Oddly enough, Senator Nancy Ruth's impassioned plea to keep quiet may have the reverse effect. A member of yesterday's audience told me that one panelist responded to her by saying their silence over the past few years has only served to make matters worse. Could it be that this very public event will galvanize them into organizing a collective response? Let's hope so. At the very least, it gives us one more testimonial to the insidious way in which the Harper government is doing its level best to change the DNA of our nation.

As to Ruth's suggestion that Harper might make abortion an election issue, I doubt it. The whole point behind the Liberals' poking and prodding the government over this for the past couple of months has been to encourage just such an outcome. The result has been that the Tories rapidly distanced themselves from Rod Bruinooge's no-hope private member's bill, and their endless squirming over whether to include contraception and/or abortion in the G8 Maternal Health initiative. And the end-game of all this squirming (I suspect) will likely be that abortion is included in the final plan, but (as I've explained here) some means will be found by which the Canadian government's financial contribution to that portion of the plan can be disguised.

In any case, they've been playing defense on this issue for weeks now. It's definitely not something they'd want to campaign on.

Maternal Health Compromise Emerges

Minister of International Cooperation Bev Oda told reporters, according to the Vancouver Sun, that Canada does not expect the other G8 countries to follow Canada's approach to promoting maternal health. "I've just told my colleagues that every country has experience, and we're asking them all to focus within a framework," she said. "However, they will be free and flexible to choose the best way that they will contribute to the effort."

So, in the end, both access to safe abortions and access to contraceptive measures will be in the G-8 plan; Canada will be allowed to direct its particular funds towards some other part of the "framework". This is the political equivalent of a fig-leaf. I've explained how little it actually means here.

On Martin's Fix

Well, let's get one thing straight. This is not, contra National Post writer John Ivison, the Liberals' problem. It is the government's; as of this moment, the Harper Tories have a maternal health plan that does not include family planning measures, and this summer they will attempt to foist it upon the other seven members the G8. Given the U.K. and American response thus far, the odds are very much tilted against their finding success.

Here's where MP Keith Martin's "fix", first reported last week in The Mark, comes in:

Mr. Martin appears to have found the solution. He said Stephen Harper should embrace the World Health Organization’s position of supporting women’s access to safe abortions in those countries where it is legal. Yet he recognized many members of the Conservative government have their own opinions that have to be respected. He suggested Mr. Harper could square his opposition to abortion while still implementing a maternal health plan by proposing each G8 country take the lead on one of the treatments.

“For example, Canada could be the lead nation on training healthcare workers and micronutrients, another country could focus on providing medications, another on access to family planning and safe abortions etc. This would enable Mr. Harper to move forward with an effective plan of action while being sensitive to the views on abortion of some of his members,” he said.

This, as I wrote at the time, is the solution employed by the George Bush II administration under similar circumstances--ie under similar pressures from its own political right flank.

Aside from problems of implementation--another state would have to come forward and offer to pay for third world abortions, which may not be so easy given the domestic political pressures within various G8 countries--there is a larger issue at stake: contra Ivison, and with all due respect to Mr. Martin, Martin's Fix is not a commonsense solution or a reasonable compromise. It constitutes an accounting gimmick, a butt covering exercise.

The G8's situation today might be visualized as follows: everyone throws their maternal care money into one big pot, and it is spent willy-nilly on the various "treatments" Martin specifies. Under the Martin proposal, each country would throw its money into one of several little pots, labelled "medications" or "family planning" or etc., and their money would be spent just on that one medical option.

Well, for one thing, how is it possible to ensure that, once the money have been turned over to the G8, it remains in its particular pot? How is it possible to determine if, for example, a dollar from Canada has wound up paying for a box of condoms in Kinshasa? It seems to me that it isn't. And, more importantly, in the end Canada's initiative still winds up paying for abortions in foreign lands, despite Harper's insistence that it not do so. Martin's plan, that is, simply provides a fig-leaf for a government climb-down.

Now, for progressives like myself, that's fine. Canadian policy as practised by several government's, both Tory and Liberal, does not change. The problem for Harper will come from his own political base, from the true believers for whom abortion is a make or break issue.

Will they allow themselves to be fooled by Martin's gimmick, which essentially gives them nothing?

Harper's Maternal Life Initiative A "Pro Life Victory"

So says Lifesite, and who can gainsay them: Shelly Glover's interview on CBC's Power & Politics is pretty specific about what won't be in the government's plan. Rather less clear on what will be in it, although it will apparently involve "clean water, nutrition, and inoculations". Also "prevention and education", although the presumably the "prevention" part would not involve education re contraceptive options.