@youcaughtscott.com:
Oh yeah [Carney’s] a very intelligent and accomplished economist. But those labels have been earned by fucking over the majority of people for the benefit of the wealthy. Austerity is good economic policy to these vultures.
We Basically Elected Stephen Harper Again. The Receipts Are in the Women’s Stat by Dr. Lindsay M. Tedds, , Dead For Tax Reasons
A few days ago, there was a small exchange on Bluesky that has been rattling around in my head.
Mary Grace laid out what Budget 2025 actually prioritizes: more business tax breaks including for fossil fuels, $925 million for AI, $81.8 billion over five years for the military — all at the expense of cultural heritage. Emmett Macfarlane replied: “Read this whole thread. We basically elected Stephen Harper as Prime Minister again.” And I quote-posted to say I’m writing a paper arguing exactly that, but about the women’s state.
I said I’d show the work. Here it is.
Because here’s the thing: Mark Carney’s government has not cut the Women and Gender Equality department. It has not announced a dismantling. It has not made a visible decision. It has done something more effective than all of that. It has let the machinery of gender equality in Canada quietly run out the clock — while preserving enough institutional form that most of the country won’t notice until it’s gone.
And by 2027–28, WAGE will be funded below where it was under Stephen Harper. Let me tell you why.
This Is the Fourth Time We’ve Done This
The dismantling of Canada’s women’s state in 2025 is not an anomaly. It is the fourth iteration of a fifty-year pattern: construction, dismantling, reconstruction, dismantling. Each time, the justification is austerity. Each time, the political cost of cutting women-specific institutions proves lower than cutting more universal ones. That asymmetry is not incidental. It is the pattern.
The first women’s state was built through decades of feminist advocacy — the Women’s Bureau in 1953, the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in 1970, the Minister Responsible for the Status of Women in 1971, the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, the Women’s Program funding outside organizations. It was a two-part ecosystem: inside machinery shaping policy from within government, outside organizations contesting it from outside. Together, they drove the law reforms that defined a generation — maternity benefits, criminalization of wife assault, restoration of Indian status for Indigenous women, sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination as human rights violations.
Then came the first dismantling. Mulroney and Chrétien austerity years. The Women’s Program budget fell from $12.7 million in 1987 to $9.2 million by 1990. The CACSW was dissolved in 1995. The Minister Responsible was demoted to Secretary of State. Funding to the National Action Committee and LEAF was rolled back.
When Alberta cut social services by 19 per cent in the early 1990s, four thousand women were turned away from shelters in 1994 alone. What governments dismantled as line items, women experienced as danger.
It was in the middle of this dismantling that Canada signed the Beijing Declaration and committed to gender mainstreaming. The Chrétien government’s response was to introduce Gender-Based Analysis — a tool, housed inside government, that required no independent advocacy infrastructure to support. The institutional gains of the women’s state were exchanged for a technical exercise. The tool was more palatable to government precisely because it was less threatening to it.
Then Harper. The word “equality” was stripped from Status of Women Canada’s mandate in 2006. Women’s Program eligibility was restricted to service delivery only — no advocacy, no research. The Auditor General found in 2009, then again in 2015, that GBA was applied inconsistently, late in the process, and with little evidence it had shaped any policy decisions.
Then the second rebuilding under Trudeau. Gender parity in cabinet “because it’s 2015.” WAGE elevated to a full department. The Canadian Gender Budgeting Act in 2018. The “feminist budget” of 2021 with its Annex 4 Gender Statement and its Annex 5 measure-by-measure GBA+ impacts. This was the high-water mark.
And within four years, it was gone.
The Carney 
CatholicThree-Step
What makes 2025 analytically interesting — as opposed to just grim — is the sequence. This is a government that read the playbook.
Stage one: eliminate. On March 14, 2025, Carney unveiled his cabinet and eliminated the dedicated Minister for Women and Gender Equality. The portfolio was folded into the heritage ministry under Steven Guilbeault. Gender equality was recategorized, with one cabinet announcement, from an economic and rights-based priority to a cultural one. The timing was astonishing: six days after International Women’s Day, on the same day as the United Nations Women’s Rights Summit. One veteran advocate observed that Canada had regressed more than fifty years, leaving it with less dedicated gender equality machinery than at any point in her lifetime of feminist advocacy — including before the creation of the Status of Women office itself in 1971.
Stage two: restore in form. Feminist organizing worked. A joint statement issued from New York during the UN Commission on the Status of Women grew from fifteen to nearly four hundred signatories within two weeks. In the May 2025 reshuffle, Carney restored WAGE as a full ministry. The international community and much of the domestic press read this as a concession. It was, but only a symbolic one. Men held five of the six most powerful positions in the new cabinet. The mandate letters contained no reference to women, gender, equality, or GBA+ — language that had appeared over one hundred times in mandate letters between 2015 and 2025. The throne speech didn’t mention gender equality either. The machinery had been restored in form. The commitment it was supposed to operationalize had been quietly withdrawn.
Stage three: hollow. Budget 2025, titled “Canada Strong,” completes the move. There is no Gender Statement annex — the first budget since the Canadian Gender Budgeting Act came into force to omit a document its own legislation requires. In its place are scattered “Gender and Diversity Impacts Spotlight” inset boxes. Systematic legislatively-mandated analysis has been downgraded to illustrative commentary.
WAGE itself is now parked on page 169 of Chapter 3, Section 3.3, titled “Protecting Canadian Culture, Values, and Identity,” alongside heritage preservation, arts funding and community celebrations. The section opens by noting that “since its establishment in 2018, the Department for Women and Gender Equality has empowered women and 2SLGBTQI+ people.” The past tense is not a typo. The new ongoing funding announced is $44.7 million — less than one-third of the $155.9 million the Women’s Program alone spent in 2024–25.
The Mechanism Is the Point
Here is the part that should be getting much more attention than it is.
The dismantling of the women’s state in 2025 was not accomplished through cuts. It was accomplished through the architecture of the funding itself.
WAGE grew from $72 million in 2018–19, its first year as a full department, to a planned peak of $407 million in 2025–26. Every dollar of that growth came from successive time-limited budget injections — the $100 million Capacity-Building Call for Proposals in Budget 2018, emergency COVID response funding in 2020, the National Action Plan to End Gender-Based Violence bilateral agreements, the first Federal 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan in Budget 2022, further injections in Budgets 2023 and 2024.
None of it was converted to permanent baseline funding. Every dollar required active renewal at every budget cycle.
So by 2026–27, planned spending for WAGE falls to $265 million as the GBV bilateral agreements and 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan expire. By 2027–28, planned spending is $76 million. That is roughly the 2018–19 baseline — before any of the feminist budget investments were made. Women’s Program funding, specifically, is projected to fall to $18.9 million by 2027–28, a decline of more than 90 per cent from its 2022–23 high — and 36.5 per cent lower in real terms than in 2014–15, the last full year of the Harper government.
Let me say that again, because it is the sentence that matters. The Carney trajectory takes the women’s state below where Harper left it.
The women’s state will not be cut. It will expire.
This is the structural argument rendered in numbers. Governments need not make a visible decision to dismantle the women’s state. They need only decline to renew it. The political accountability is diffuse, deniable and distributed across multiple budget cycles. The effect on the organizations and the people they serve is indistinguishable from a cut. The design — time-limited injections layered on a thin permanent baseline — is not neutral financial management. It is a structural choice that makes sustaining the women’s state contingent on continuous active political will at every budget cycle, while dismantling it requires only inaction.
In an era of fiscal constraint, inaction is always the path of least resistance.and makes the religious feel most saintly in their god-loving misogyny
The Outside Half
The 81 per cent cut to WAGE’s Grants and Contributions budget is not a cut to the department’s operating costs.
It is a cut to the outside organizations — the shelters, the legal aid providers, the anti-violence coalitions, the Indigenous women’s organizations — that formed the other half of the women’s state.
In 2024–25 alone, the Women’s Program invested $155.9 million in 361 projects reaching over 166,000 people and establishing over 3,300 partnerships. The Gender-Based Violence Program supported over 190 projects providing $118 million to organizations serving survivors of violence, including Indigenous women, racialized women, women in remote and rural communities, and 2SLGBTQI+ individuals.Religions hate those, catholic especially, they wanna rape as god desires them to, and get away with it.
These organizations will not receive a letter informing them that a political decision was made to defund them. They will be told that time-limited funding has expired.which is a catholic political Carney decision.
And this is where the Harper parallel is not just apt — it’s the whole point. In 2006, Harper restricted Women’s Program eligibility from advocacy and research to service delivery alone. He targeted the organizations whose political capacity the funding sustained. He did it through eligibility criteria. Carney is doing the same thing, to the same organizations, for the same ideological reason — he is just using a different mechanism. Time-limited funding expiring rather than eligibility restrictions. The restoration of WAGE as a ministry demonstrates that the inside machinery can be forced back under feminist pressure. The decimation of the Grants and Contributions ensures the advocacy infrastructure capable of forcing it back will not long survive to do so again.There is nothing worse and more dangerous to other species, air, water, land, food, health, women, girls and 2SLGBTQI+ people than religion and religious politicians like Harper and his offshoot, Carney
Form is preserved. Power is withdrawn.
What Would Survive a Carney
The reason I’m writing this paper — and the reason I’m writing this blog post — is that the lesson of 2025 is not that we need to rebuild what existed. What existed was not enough. Budget 2021 was the most robust expression of gender-responsive budgeting Canada has ever produced, and it was dismantled in a single fiscal cycle. The question is how to build something that cannot be dismantled in the same way.Rape religions and the disgusting raping Patriarchy rule the world with hate and vengeance; they’ll never allow equal rights for women, girls, 2SLGBTQI+ people, and care for environment and other species. They’d rather let life on earth be wiped out by human pollution and over population. Only when religions and the patriarchy are criminalized, will there be a chance for equality and justice for all, not just for white christian men.
The short version of what I argue in the paper is that five things, all at once, are the minimum conditions for a women’s state that survives a Carney:
First, intersectional distributional analysis embedded in fiscal decision-making ex ante — not after the decisions have been made. The revenue side of the budget, not just the expenditure side. The tax system produces gendered and racialized distributional consequences that accumulate across a lifetime, and Canada has never subjected the structural design of the income tax system to gender analysis. The Marginal Value of Public Funds framework gives us the technical language to do this in a form Finance Canada cannot dismiss as advocacy. MVPF is the foot in the door.
Second, the same analysis must cover the tax side, full stop. A framework for gender-responsive budgeting that examines only the expenditure side is analyzing half the problem.
Third, permanent statutory funding — for WAGE itself and for the Grants and Contributions that fund the outside organizations. The Canadian Gender Budgeting Act established a requirement to analyze. It did not establish a requirement to fund. That gap is the structural vulnerability the current architecture exploits.
Fourth, independent enforcement. Not a reporting obligation, but a positive duty — Northern Ireland’s Section 75 model, with an Equality Commission that has authority to investigate and mandate action plans when duties are not met. Three successive Auditor General reviews spanning thirteen years found that GBA+ was inconsistently applied and rarely shaped decisions. The Senate committee’s signature recommendation in response was to rename it. That, in miniature, is the entire history of GBA+: the substitution of visible action for structural change.
Fifth, a genuine analytical shift from GBA+ to Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis — a framework that does not begin with gender and add other factors, but treats the interaction of multiple systems of power, including settler colonialism, as the starting point. GBA+ was never genuinely intersectional. It was additive. Its iconography — the GBA+ “flower” with sex and gender at the centre — made the additive logic visible in the framework’s own design.
Each of these has been attempted in isolation. Each has failed in isolation. The argument is that all five have to happen simultaneously, because each one shores up the others. The inside machinery needs the outside organizations for political legitimacy. The outside organizations need the funding. The analytical framework needs the enforcement. The enforcement needs the independent advocacy ecosystem. No single part survives without the others.
This is what fifty years of Canadian evidence tells us. A women’s state designed to be dispensable will always be dispensed with when it is fiscally or politically convenient. We have run that experiment four times now. The receipts are in.
So Yes, It’s Harper Again. Only Worse.
Macfarlane was right. Mary Grace was right. When you add up the tax breaks, the AI spending, the military spending, and the cultural heritage cuts that include the women’s state itself — along with the mandate letters stripped of gender language, the Gender Statement missing from the budget, the Grants and Contributions being allowed to expire, and WAGE filed on page 169 under “Culture, Values, and Identity” — what you get is a Harper-era fiscal and ideological architecture, executed with more subtlety and more plausible deniability, and on a trajectory that takes the women’s state below where Harper left it.Christianity in all its evil anti-Jesus glory!
The difference is that Harper told us what he was doing. Carney is letting it expire.Harper is evangelical christian – their hatred against anything not white male christian is blatant; Carney is catholic christian, their hatred of anything not white male christian is subtle. Both are creepy, cruel and destructive as fuck.
That is the story of Budget 2025. And that is the story I will keep telling, in papers and in posts, until someone in Ottawa is required to answer for it.
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