Prime Minister Justin Trudeau affirmed the equality of women across the country on International Women’s Day.
Of course this was laudable on the surface, and very much in line with what Canadians value.
He applauded the progress made towards sexual equality while alluding to the continued injustices women face.
In a barely concealed swipe at certain patriarchal cultures that continue to thrive in Canada, he also deplored gender-based violence, forced marriages and lack of educational opportunities for women.
Trudeau suggested a catchy theme for the coming year: “Women’s empowerment leads to equality.”
Yet there is no sign the prime minister will revise his stance on the Islamist burka or niqab.
Nor has his government appealed a recent court ruling allowing face coverings at citizenship ceremonies.
On Tuesday, a new directive was released by the Ontario Human Rights Commission that no workplace can require women to wear sexualized attire.
This especially targeted restaurant owners demanding waitresses wear skimpy clothes.
No more hip-hugging short skirts, uncomfortable high heels or low necklines.
Women work just as well as men while wearing clothes that do not draw attention to them as sexual beings.
Kathy Laird, Executive Director of the Human Rights Legal Support Centre, said any woman now has some legal recourse if, for example, “cleavage is deemed an essential skill” in her workplace.
Of course, women can dress as provocatively as they want – but only when they want.
Women are more than sexual beings. They are doctors, lawyers, artists, musicians, teachers, as well as mothers, wives, daughters and sisters.
Paradoxically, the burka is also a sexualized garment.
It covers the woman from head to toe.
I oppose it for the same reasons I oppose enforced low necklines or miniskirts: both reflect expectations that are imposed by men and are based on the intolerable assumption that women are only sexual beings.
No one who opposes skimpy women’s attire should conclude that women ought to be totally covered up.
In fact, the burka, hijab and other coverings sexualize women in a more pernicious way.
It is only by conceding that women are purely sexual objects that influential men, and those women who obey them, see the hijab and burka as necessary.
The requirement is a relic of a primitive era when women were only considered sex objects, to be protected from the lascivious gaze of men.
A short skirt may or may not be sexualized, depending on the context, and light, short clothing can be worn for various reasons.
But a burka inescapably reflects a patriarchy that stigmatizes women as sexual beings.
Trudeau, while upholding the ideal of women’s equality, has in effect empowered forces that marginalize women.
No equality can realistically be achieved for women in Canada who are shrouded and invisible.
What Trudeau fails to understand is that this oppressive dress represents a kind of coercion that must be opposed legally, socially and morally.
The very crimes which the prime minister spoke of, like domestic violence and forced marriage, are committed because of the same broad religious sanction that forces women into tent-like garments.
When Trudeau speaks of women’s equality, he must condemn all the hurdles in its way.
There are deep-rooted cultural challenges to progress that any responsible government must address dispassionately and courageously.