'Liberals are engaging in bad faith politics': Feminist Conservatives fight back
Stella Mizak, an 18-year-old business student, says she was shocked by what she heard while door-knocking with Conservative party candidates in April's federal election. She heard it over and over from homeowners, she said: 'I can't believe you're supporting a party that wants to take your rights away.'
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It's perplexing, she sighs: A woman being told she's not a feminist because she's seen to be 'voting away my rights' by voting Conservative.
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'I think all women should have the right to choose what life they want for themselves,' Stella says, 'and being told that you have to vote Liberal, you have to think this way to be a woman, I think that's the opposite of what feminism is, and I think the Liberals are actually undermining what feminism is.'
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Stella is vice-president of provincial affairs for the University of Calgary campus conservative club, recruited as part of a drive to broaden the membership of what was once 'a boys club,' admits club adviser Seniru Ruwanpura, 'with the same 15 to 20 people showing up at every event.'
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Hundreds of new members have been added to the club's roster, which now has a female membership of about 30 per cent, reports Seniru, a 22-year-old software engineering grad.
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Seniru and Stella are acutely aware that political parties of the right are becoming increasingly male-dominated, and parties of the left increasingly female-dominated.
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I sit down with the two of them on campus — in a quiet boardroom on the fourth floor of the brand-new Hunter Student Commons building — to discuss what's to be done, at the University of Calgary or anywhere, to repair this gender gap. In the background, there's a buzz emanating from the nearby Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking; a place where ideas collide and give birth to tech startups. Our conversation is far more intimate.
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Stella says people are attuned to U.S. politics, and many of her female acquaintances raise questions about abortion, even when it isn't an issue in Canada. 'Liberals are engaging in bad faith politics on the abortion issue,' Seniru adds. These non-issues are being used to wedge people against each other, he says, as a way 'for the Liberals to retain power and maintain the status quo.'
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'It's very ironic,' Seniru explains, 'that older voters and people on the left, they were so concerned about the impacts of the U.S., about secession, about all this sort of stuff, but they don't realize how much American politics has permeated the discussion here.'
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