Appointing a gender balanced cabinet was a laudable gesture by the Liberals, and even more so that women were appointed to senior positions. It has the powerful effect of telling girls that being a justice minister or foreign minister is absolutely normal. It signals to corporations, academia, conference organizers and management teams that coasting along without women at the table is no longer acceptable.<\/p>\n
So, what is the message that is being transmitted when a senior cabinet minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, is demoted for no reason obvious to the public? What do Canadians make of that senior cabinet minister having her judgment and decisions questioned over and over again?<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s start by assuming that Wilson-Raybould\u2019s gender was not a factor in how eight men and two women interacted with her on the SNC Lavalin file while she was attorney general and justice minister. Let\u2019s say that this was a case of the kind of hard negotiations that typically go on behind the scenes in politics. She is no stranger to that cut and thrust. Some in cabinet were new to this world, but this former BC regional chief most certainly was not.<\/p>\n
The problem is that her story of the workplace is so darn relatable \u2013 and familiar. Women know what it means to be undermined, condescended to, overlooked and ignored in the workplace no matter how much they\u2019ve achieved. This is true whether you\u2019re a woman who drinks Tim Horton\u2019s or Starbucks, whether you\u2019re a \u201cZoey\u201d or a \u201cHeather<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Wilson-Raybould recounted<\/a> how she was approached over and over again by the clerk of the privy council, members of the Prime Minister\u2019s Office, the prime minister himself, and the finance minister\u2019s office. They wanted her to trigger a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) for SNC Lavalin, a Montreal-based company facing a criminal trial. It\u2019s hard to ignore the larger power optics at play in male-dominated Ottawa \u2013 as Paul Wells has noted, the circle of folks lobbying around this matter<\/a> was exclusively male. Wilson-Raybould says she was warned that SNC\u2019s lawyer, former Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci \u201cis not a shrinking violet.\u201d<\/p>\n Those who approached Wilson-Raybould offered to hire an \u201ceminent person\u201d to advise her. (My experience is that most people described as \u201ceminent\u201d in Ottawa are men).<\/p>\n \u201cI said NO. My mind had been made up and they needed to stop \u2013 enough,\u201d she said of one conversation with two PMO staffers.<\/p>\n That didn\u2019t quite do the trick, though. In a meeting with the clerk weeks later, she was forced to underline again, \u201cI am confident in where I am at on my views on SNC and the DPA [and they] have not changed \u2013 this is a constitutional principle of prosecutorial independence.\u201d<\/p>\n No matter how many times she said she had made a decision, she had done her homework, please stop talking about this, it wasn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n And then suddenly she was demoted to the position of minister of veteran\u2019s affairs.<\/p>\n A voter might ask, at exactly what age or level of experience or position does a woman stop having to defend her judgment? Wilson-Raybould, 47, has been a Crown prosecutor in BC, a treaty commissioner, an elected band councilor and regional chief of the BC Assembly of First Nations. She became attorney general and justice minister in 2015, surely a position a prime minister fills with great care and research. And still.<\/p>\n That there is a different standard for women in the workplace is by now a banal subject. Women have to work harder<\/a> to be recognized in the same manner as men. To dispute this is to not be paying attention to the way the world functions. The Pew Research Center recently published data<\/a> that women in majority-male workplaces are less likely to see fair treatment.<\/p>\n I have strained to recall another occasion in the last two decades where a male cabinet minister was handed such a major demotion without there being a reason that everyone was clear on \u2013 leaving sensitive documents<\/a> at the home of a girlfriend with prior biker ties, for example. I can easily recall, on the flipside, really smart women being demoted \u2013 Rona Ambrose in 2007 after being forced to sell a flaming pile of garbage climate policy.<\/p>\n Any woman in a leadership position I have met, who works in male dominated circles, has stories to tell of having her ideas and authority undermined<\/a>, and being \u201cmansplained<\/a>\u201d in an area in which she is clearly the expert. Add to this the typical put-downs that women contend with \u2013 too emotional, too aggressive, too abrasive<\/a>, out of her league. Wilson-Raybould faced this as well, with a colleague publicly suggesting<\/a> her father was \u201cpulling the strings\u201d and that she \u201ccouldn\u2019t handle the stress.\u201d\u00a0 If anything, MP Jati Sidhu is profoundly unoriginal when throwing shade.<\/p>\n Again, the eight men and two women who pressed Wilson-Raybould to change her mind, who ignored her entreaties that they were treading on dangerous ethical ground, might have treated a male colleague like Ralph Goodale or Marc Garneau precisely the same way. From my interactions with some of these individuals, I certainly have no indication that they are anything but respectful.<\/p>\n But perception is everything in politics, and the perception here of how this accomplished woman was treated is something the Liberals will have to work to repair. Wilson-Raybould\u2019s sang-froid testimony was not one of a victim, but rather someone who wanted to be truly heard \u2013 a desire that women can understand.<\/p>\n Photo:\u00a0Jody Wilson-Raybould appears at the House of Commons Justice Committee on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Feb. 27, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS\/Sean Kilpatrick<\/span><\/p>\n Do you have something to say about the article you just read? Be part of the\u00a0<\/em>Policy Options\u00a0discussion, and send in your own submission.\u00a0Here is a\u00a0<\/em>link<\/em><\/a>\u00a0on how to do it. <\/em>|\u00a0Souhaitez-vous r\u00e9agir \u00e0 cet article ? <\/em>Joignez-vous aux d\u00e9bats d\u2019<\/em>Options politiques\u00a0et soumettez-nous votre texte en suivant ces\u00a0<\/em>directives<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Appointing a gender balanced cabinet was a laudable gesture by the Liberals, and even more so that women were appointed to senior positions. It has the powerful effect of telling girls that being a justice minister or foreign minister is absolutely normal. It signals to corporations, academia, conference organizers and management teams that coasting along […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":275295,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","ep_exclude_from_search":false,"apple_news_api_created_at":"2025-10-08T02:25:43Z","apple_news_api_id":"101e5b01-7be1-4087-ad1b-a851c4341673","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2025-10-08T02:25:43Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AEB5bAXvhQIetG6hRxDQWcw","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false},"categories":[9385,9358,9372],"tags":[8493],"article-status":[],"irpp-category":[4348,4295],"section":[],"irpp-tag":[7136],"class_list":["post-266989","issues","type-issues","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-medias-et-culture","category-politique","category-recent-stories-fr","tag-gender-inequality-fr","irpp-category-egalite-des-genres","irpp-category-politique","irpp-tag-medias-et-culture"],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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