Inside the new global reckoning
on women and power
BBC chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet has just welcomed eighteen-year-old activist Natasha Mwansa to Canada from Zambia. The two are on stage together in Vancouver, seated in front of nearly 2,000 people. I can barely see either woman from the media section in the back of the cavernous ballroom, but I’m not about to complain. I’ve been waiting months for this massive, three-day conference. Dubbed Women Deliver, and held triennially in a different place around the world, this year’s gathering is centred around one equally massive theme: Power. The still-huge crowd I’m in is only a fraction of the conference’s 8,000 attendees, who have travelled to British Columbia from over 160 countries. Doucet is the moderator for the opening panel, “The Power of Us,” and Mwansa is one of seven speakers. To her left is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and seated next to him is the president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta. Also on stage are the president of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, and the president of Ethiopia, the only woman world leader here, Sahle-Work Zewde.
Luckily, there are giant screens on both sides of the stage that project the panellists’ faces to the crowd, rendering them into giants every time the camera lands on them. It’s a good thing. I doubt anybody would have wanted to miss what happened next.
Doucet turned to Mwansa, asking her first question after their brief hello. “You’re a young female activist, in a world full of men, who are” — she paused, smiling — “a little bit older than you,” she settled on, drawing out the “i” in little. “Let’s be polite.” A little laugh and another pause, this time, I think, for emphasis. “Do you really feel you have power?”
It felt like an odd question. I’m not sure what Doucet expected Mwansa to say. Perhaps that, no, she did not feel powerful. Perhaps that she’d like to, one day. Perhaps we all expected Mwansa to answer with humbleness, with a plea, with her own politeness. Surely, few in the room were prepared for Mwansa to exuberantly shame three presidents and one prime minister.
“I do demand for that power,” Mwansa responded, seemingly incredulous, swooping her arm. “I mean, look. I’m on the stage with president[s].” At this, the crowd began to cheer. “I think one thing that really has to be emphasized is that there is no way anything is going to be done for us without us. Because that’s just doing it against us.” By “us” Mwansa meant youth and women. She was tired, she added, of other people deciding what was best for her and then expecting her to go along with it. She told the crowd she had a “key message” — one she was going to share. It was clear she meant to go on, whether it had anything to do with what Doucet wanted to ask her or not. But first, there was something else. “Can I stand?” Mwansa said, not waiting for an answer as she rose to her feet and walked toward the centre of the stage. “I feel more powerful when I stand.”
From there, she continued on. She no longer wanted to see politicians making decisions about young people’s health, education, and more, without also letting them make the decisions, too. The way she saw it, world leaders expected people to benefit, but they gave them no power at all to decide how they might benefit. They were expected to say “thank you” and nothing more. Mwansa did not say this, but to me there was another implication in her message: if women and youth are expected to only wait for better policies and systems, then we’ll never close the power gap. They might receive better education and health care, but they’ll never decide for themselves what that looks like. They’ll always be second (or third, or fourth, or dead last). “We’re not [just] going to be beneficiaries,” Mwansa said. “That’s not happening anymore. It’s 2019. So give us power. We need positions of power.” She turned to the leaders. “We need gender equality, and we need this reflected in national priorities.” And with that, Trudeau rose to his feet, clapping. Then Kenyatta. Then the whole room.
The glorious moment didn’t last. Demands for power are a tricky thing among world leaders, even when they are self-professed feminist allies. It’s one thing for women and others to say we need seats at the table. It’s another, it turns out, to ask that they be given. For an eighteen-year-old to tell several world leaders, to their faces, to step up — well, that’s a thing that hadn’t been invented until right then.
At the end of Mwansa’s speech, Doucet turned to Ghana’s president, Akufo-Addo, who hadn’t yet had a chance to speak. First, she remarked positively on Mwansa, then on how closely Akufo-Addo had been listening. She asked him for his response. She might as well have said, Look, buddy, that’s a tough act to follow. The president made a broad gesture, moving his hands from a prayer steeple to either side of his body. He began to speak, pointing a finger at Mwansa. “She’s a politician,” he quipped. She is, he insisted. He named the two other men on the stage — apparently forgetting the president of Ethiopia — remarking that his fellow politicians would agree. And then he dug himself a hole.
“At the end of the day,” he opened, “communities or groups talking for themselves and being representative does not translate into power.” Power, he continued, is when you sit at the table where decisions are enforced; it’s the table where those decisions become the norms and regulations of a society. He seemed oblivious to his dismissal of the power of community leaders and social movements, many members of which were in the room. I remember dropping my pen and holding my breath. This was not in the male-wokeness script. For a few moments, we stayed in small-hole territory: it’s not wrong, I thought, watching thousands of Mwansa-inspired, fired-up feminists begin to murmur, to advocate for more women at the decision-making table. It’s not wrong to suggest that’s where we can make the most change. But, of course, that wasn’t his point. His point was this: women weren’t doing enough. The murmur became an outcry. He did not stop.
“What I’ve seen in the two and a half years that I’ve been in office,” he continued, “is that not enough movement is being made by the 52 percent of the Ghanaian population that are women to be able to be in the positions to make these decisions.” At this point, the panellist next to him, Dr. Alaa Murabit, a UN High-Level Commissioner on Health Employment and Economic Growth, made a face that was unmistakably amused, scornful. The giant screen captured her expression perfectly. I took out my phone to snap a picture, focusing on her face, which was smiling a smile that was not really happy, a face that I knew exactly mirrored my own. People have remarked on this smile of mine; I make it when I’m recounting something particularly awful, like I’m shielding myself from how bad things really are, how angry I really am.
As Akufo-Addo continued, Murabit’s face worked into one exasperated look after another. I heard other women around me laughing softly. Look at her. It wasn’t funny. We knew it wasn’t funny. But we could only laugh with her as he went on and on. “We’re not seeing enough dynamism and activism on the part of those who are seeking this new [power],” he said. “We’re not. We’re not. We’re not. I’m —”
And at this point Murabit shot straight up in her chair, words bursting forth. “I have to respond to that.” Her hand went up, finger raised.
“We’re not,” Akufo-Addo plodded on. “I’m talking about dynamism where it matters.” Murabit tried to interrupt again, but he spoke on. “Dynamic is not sitting around here talking and talking about electing people to parliament.” Dynamism is control. It’s being in office. In power. “We’re talking about decisions, not wishes and hopes.”
Murabit raised her arm again, but this time it was Doucet who interrupted the Ghanaian president. “Let’s not put all the problems, all the responsibility, at the door of women.” Men, after all, she added, hold the cup.
After the clapping subsided, Murabit tried again to speak. Her face looked open, friendly. Maybe she knew the crowd was on her side. “You know,” she started, “I just — you and I need to have dinner.” Then she reminded everybody that Akufo-Addo was not the only man who believed women were to blame for their own lack of power. A lot of people thought that way, she said. “It’s fundamental,” she continued, “that we begin to understand and we begin to explain in a way that people can actually understand how much systems have been shaped to ensure that women do not get to be in positions of power.”
Yes, the crowd thundered. Yes, yes, yes.
“It’s incredibly, incredibly important to recognize that there are dynamic, incredible women that the door remains closed to —”
“So how is it going to open?” interrupted Akufo-Addo. “How is it going to open?”
“I’m telling you. I’m telling you.”
“You’re not telling me. I’m telling you” — mansplaining at its best — “what you’re saying will not open doors.”
Exasperation. “Stop interrupting me and I’ll tell you.”
“What you’re telling me —”
Perhaps sensing a blowout, Doucet stood up. Akufo-Addo went suddenly silent.
“It’s incredibly important for male allies in positions of power, like yourself, to look around and recognize the incredible, impactful, dynamic women in their communities and amplify them,” Murabit said, her voice rising, at last no longer contained. “Not empower them — because they have agency — but amplify them and put them in positions of power. That’s how it changes.” She stopped, readying her voice for emphasis, loudness. “It’s on you, too.”
As the crowd stood once more, and as Akufo-Addo gawped, still saying nothing, Murabit, at last, smiled what looked like a real smile.
The preceding chapters in this book have argued that equality is not a DIY endeavour. Yes, there are amazing individuals who are leading themselves and their communities in a re-envisioning of power. They are pushing forward, against our systems, when the systems (inevitably) refuse to budge. They are saying, It doesn’t matter what we have always done, let’s do it this new way. Let’s try option B and C, all the way down to Z, and then let’s create a new alphabet, because the old one isn’t always working for us. We need more options. We need infinite ways of being. These new leaders are charting changes in technology, in politics, in business, in the arts, at work, in their cities, and at home. What they’re not doing — what we should all be sick of doing — is deciding that they need to fix themselves to gain equality. They are not saying, If only I were more of a girl boss. If only I just leaned in. If only I did it better, then I would get ahead. Sure, there’s always room for self-improvement. But we cannot improve ourselves to equality.
This is not a self-help book. It is not a book of easy answers and 10 Steps To a Better, More Powerful You. (Although, where along the line did we start believing this endless fixing of ourselves was the best solution for more?) It is a book that demands we open our feminist appetite for solutions to addressing the systems around us. To breaking and rebuilding them. It is a book that rejects what those like Akufo-Addo would have us all believe: that the reason we don’t have power, and the power to enforce equality, is because we simply are not trying hard enough. Or, put another, more insidious way: if women and other groups truly wanted power and equality so badly, they would have it. As Murabit said in her closing statement, after their exchange, “If a young girl does not feel like she has power over her own body . . . to go up to her and say, ‘You should run for parliament’ is ridiculous.” Which is really to say: you cannot spend the whole of history building a society designed to keep women and others away from power, and then expect them to one day rise to the top simply because they want to.
If anything, Women Deliver only proved how complex, and interconnected, the push for power is across the globe. The Vancouver Convention Centre became home to a microcosm of the world’s brightest, most tireless feminists. And I quickly learned that we had a lot to say. There were so many sessions, workshops, discussions, and big stage events to choose from that one person could have a completely different experience from another. I agonized over the schedule, often wishing I could clone myself and be in several places at once. I’d come to Women Deliver so that I could see what people from around the world were doing to challenge power structures and to upend traditional systems. I’d wanted to see what models they were using and developing, but also to hear what challenges they faced — where they were fighting hardest and how. Naively, I’d thought three days would be enough. It should not have come as a surprise that the most consistent comment I heard was that there simply wasn’t enough time.
Here’s some of what I did experience: I saw women and men from around the world discussing what’s next for the #MeToo movement; I listened as activists from Europe, Brazil, the United States, and more warned how the pushback against women’s progress was shaping their countries; I heard Procter and Gamble’s global director of diversity and inclusion, Deanna Bass, explain how her mega-corporation was trying to undo the “perfect housewife” image it had created; and I heard Melinda Gates push some of technology’s most innovative people to share how they planned to close the gender gap in their industry. That was just on the first day. I’d go on to hear Hina Jilani, an advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, describe how an abused woman seeking aid was once shot in her office. She was at a lunch session talking about how women leaders worldwide could rise to parity. I heard actors from the MTV show Shuga describe how the hit program helps raise sexual health awareness across all of Africa. And I heard wise advice from Lopa Banerjee, the director of the civil society division at UN Women: “Clearly what’s next on the trajectory [to power] is impatience.”
By far the most crowded session I attended was called “Building the pleasure movement: because she decides to seek pleasure.” The panellists spoke about the racialized stereotypes of who seeks pleasure — i.e., the idea that only white women care about it — and of tackling the patriarchy with pleasure. They reminded everybody in the room that pleasure-seeking is not wrong or dirty, and that all the shame and guilt and silence that’s wrapped up in it is really only another form of control. A scientist on the panel discussed why we still know so little about female pleasure, and how misconceptions are used to damage us. After all, if we don’t know what’s supposed to feel good, and we’re not encouraged to seek it out, how do we know when something feels bad? Near the end, we split up into four gigantic groups and wrote fictional advertisements for things like consent and contraceptives. The prizes for the winning group: vibrators, dildos, handcuffs, lube. It was fun and wonderful, but it was the question session that came after the laughter that stuck with me.
First, people asked about lube and vibrators and how to know what was best. Then, with a trembling voice, one woman asked for advice on pleasure for those who’d been forced to undergo female genital mutilation. What then? As the panellists fumbled for an answer, another woman in the crowd answered her: the advocacy centre she worked with had resources; she could supply them. They’d connect afterward. Another woman raised her hand: she’d had personal experience and she could help, too. Then came the next question. What do you do if you have PTSD from sexual trauma and you’re not at the point where sex toys look like fun? Heads nodded in agreement. Women called out suggestions and support. Some offered hugs. The woman beside me spoke up. She’d experienced childhood sexual abuse. She rarely spoke about it, but she felt safe in that room. A woman next to her rubbed her shoulder. Then another woman spoke. She’d recently enjoyed sex for the first time after her rape. The room cheered.
It reminded me of all our differences and also all our similarities. In this search for power, we could honour both. It wasn’t the only time I was reminded of how quickly distinctions could snap into commonalities, like a rubber band. One morning, I was leaving my hotel, my press badge on, when I ran into another woman with a press badge. With a small town’s worth of attendees, this was not uncommon. We started chatting. She was from Guyana, and excited to meet other women there from her country; there were some attending that she knew but had never spoken to, face to face. I asked her what she’d seen and if she felt the conference had provided enough on the biggest issues she felt women in her country faced. She said yes. What were those top issues? I asked. By way of an answer, she told me a story. In her newsroom, she said, she was one of the best editors. She was also one of the only women. She knew she made less than the other editors. “I’m sure they make twice as much as me,” she said. “And I work twice as hard.” Borders and distance do not change some things.
There is a simple revolution in women acknowledging that, all around the world, we need power. We need to redefine it, reimagine it, and decide, for ourselves, what that looks like. We need to help each other do it. From the outside, from the place where you’ve never had to work twice as hard for half as much, such a conference can look like inaction. It can look like idleness. From the outside, it’s hard to see how special it is that 8,000 women from nearly every single country in the world are meeting, unfettered, to discuss and inspire change. From the inside, it recalls the power of #MeToo: women from around the world talking together, sharing their experiences, finding anger and healing, and doing so all without the involvement of the systems that too often harm us.
Once, in between sessions, I wandered down to the exhibit hall. There, I saw a wall that asked: “How do you feel powerful?” People had written so many things: When I shine a light on injustice. When I speak up. When we work together. When I help young people achieve. When I know I’ve made a difference. When I empower others. When I let myself be seen. When I choose to lead. When I speak for change. And, with simple underline: All day every day.
Women Deliver was the second time in less than a year that I had seen Trudeau open a feminist conference. At both, he talked about Canada’s commitment to gender equality and the importance of embedding women’s rights into legislation and government funding. At both, he was charming and measured, as close to the perfect male ally that anybody could ask for — especially if that ally was currently running your country. This was, after all, the man whose face adorned the cover of a hot-pink book I’d seen earlier that year, on sale for $22.95: My Canadian Boyfriend, Justin Trudeau. On the cover, he’s making a heart shape with his hands over his own heart. Years after 2015, Trudeau was still a feminist meme brought to life. I was not surprised when the crowd at both events responded to him with wild applause and standing ovations. They seemed to love him. Most women I met seemed to want me to love him, too.
On the second day of the Women Deliver conference, Trudeau met with us journalists, in a small room, to announce that he would raise funding to reach $1.4 billion annually, starting in 2023, to help support women’s and girls’ health worldwide.368 Also as of 2023, he said, $700 million of that would go toward reproductive health rights. The goal, he stressed, was to “build on Canada’s leadership on global gender equality.” It was a good line, and he delivered it well. I sat in the front row and have dozens of pictures of his face, moving through the motions of what looks like sincerity, close listening, empathy — kind of like, yes, a person might imagine their ideal boyfriend looks at them when they’re doing something important. Many of the women beside me gushed over it, nodding along and smiling back. I couldn’t decide if I was a proud Canadian in that moment or if I thought he was a robot.
When he walked off the small podium, the reporters around me broke their silence. One woman from Finland remarked, “I just love him.” She continued, a little embarrassed, “I know I shouldn’t say this. I should be objective.” A woman from Costa Rica asked me, “How old is he?” When I said I didn’t remember offhand, she went on as if she hadn’t heard me. “He talks good.” They both agreed: he answered all the questions, not like their own leaders. Later, when I went to get coffee in the press room, people saw the word “Canada” on my name badge and congratulated me — as if I had single-handedly birthed Trudeau into office. One said, “I’m still so star-struck by your prime minister.” Another joined in, “He’s so charismatic.” The first continued, “To me, he is the definition of sexy.” Several more women nodded along. I was lucky, they told me. So lucky.
I wanted to be skeptical. I wanted to burst the Trudeau Perfect Feminist Bubble. This was only scant weeks after the SNC-Lavalin controversy first broke, and his treatment of Jody Wilson-Raybould, as well as the other female MPs who spoke out against him, was still on my mind. It wasn’t too long ago that his feminist star had been ready to hurtle from the sky; now he was back on top. Like many allies and superstars, Trudeau is adept at showing people — and particularly mainstream feminists — what he wants them to see: a man who cares. Of all the possibilities, this is not the worst thing. As Canadians, we only have to look to our closest geographical leader, Trump, to see that, comparatively, glossy feminism is much better than no feminism at all. In the coming weeks, Trump would respond to another rape allegation, this one made by well-respected advice columnist and author E. Jean Carroll, with the gut-churning comment: “Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened.”369 Within the same week, he tweeted about Team USA soccer star Megan Rapinoe, who, earlier, had told a reporter that if her team won the World Cup, she wasn’t “fucking going to the White House.” He wrote that “Megan should WIN first before she TALKS! Finish the job!” adding that she should “never disrespect our Country, the White House, or the Flag.”370 (The team won; Rapinoe did not go to Chez Trump.) Knowing the inevitability of these things (Trump has a pattern, after all), and knowing what other leaders had done in other places around the world, kept me smiling that day at Women Deliver. It kept me laughing with these women and sipping coffee. It kept me from telling them what I believed I knew: that a good man couldn’t save us.
I knew why they loved him. On the whole, Trudeau was at least doing something, consistently, for women and girls. Sure, maybe he just wanted political points. Maybe it was all part of a persona. Most likely, it was a mixture of sincere and surface, real and phony, all at once. But, at the end of the day, how much did that matter? Here I was, with a powerful male ally, and I wanted to throw him back. How ungrateful could I get? That was one way to look at it. And, yet . . . I thought back to Mwansa and her ground-quaking speech: we’re done with simply being beneficiaries. Yes, we wanted to see policies change, to see new legislation, to see governments budget for women and girls. We wanted action. The real question was, whose? I was done handing out feminist cookies to nice guys. I was exhausted from waiting for them to make change. And I didn’t want them to speak for what we needed anymore. You see, here’s the thing about spending half a week with thousands of powerful people who are not white men: you begin to see there are so many other options.
This is what I’d think of as the 2019 federal election approached in Canada: why is an ally the best we can hope for? Sometimes, I was glad Trudeau could proclaim his feminism, even if it often felt flawed. (To be fair, whose feminism isn’t?) The NDP’s federal leader, Jagmeet Singh, has also preached feminist values.371 Even then Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer once said he was a feminist.372 But in more than two years of looking deeply at power structures, and in speaking to dozens of people about how they were changing them, I knew that allies wouldn’t be enough. Better than nothing had trained us into believing that we couldn’t do it better. It had, however unintentionally, made us stand behind our allies — putting us second, even as it masqueraded as putting us first. This is what happened when decisions were made for us, without us. We settled for what little power we could get.
“The danger in cavalierly claiming feminism and feminist victories,” wrote two political science professors in March 2019 in the Ottawa Citizen, at the height of SNC-Lavalin, “is that it can mask the reality of little substantive change and can leave unchallenged Ottawa’s deeper, masculinized power structures.” The problem with that, they continued, is that “it can make it much harder to get important feminist issues on the agenda as change appears to have already been made.”373 Exactly how much Trudeau has benefitted from — and relied on — those deeper, masculinized power structures became evident as Canada headed into its 2019 federal election.
In September, two photos and a video dating from the 1980s to 2001 emerged of Trudeau in blackface and brownface. When media confronted him about the extent of his racist dress-up, he responded that he was “wary of being definitive” about how many times he’d done so — a fairly transparent effort to guard against the emergence of other possible evidence.374 He also apologized. Twice. “I have always acknowledged that I come from a place of privilege,” he said at a Winnipeg media conference, “but I now need to acknowledge that that comes with a massive blind spot.” Sure, but this is not like forgetting to check your mirror when you park. Blackface is one hell of a blind spot. By repeatedly engaging in such a profoundly racist practice, Trudeau exposed what can too often happen when someone believes in their own inherent power, their own innate privilege: they perpetuate some real bad shit. It’s not for me to know whether Trudeau has truly changed, whether he’s learned to confront his so-called blind spots, or whether he is, at his core, another over-woke bro who is just a little bit racist. What I do know is that it’s an arguably short journey from tokenizing people of colour for laughs at an event to tokenizing people of colour for votes in an election. In both cases, the targeted people and communities are reduced to a tool used to elevate somebody else’s brand, their vision — whether the goal is to charm other privileged people at a party or to charm them into giving you even more power.
Later research from McGill University’s Digital Democracy Project indicated that social-media discussion around Trudeau’s blackface surged when the news broke, but dropped dramatically after three days.375 A substantial amount of the Twitter activity came from Conservative partisans. But even they soon stopped tweeting about it. As we all know by now, Trudeau won the election. His victory speech was, unsurprisingly, textbook Trudeau. He talked about common goals, about hearing his critics, about doing better and bringing the country together, and about rejecting division and negativity.376 He will have to work harder now to make those sentiments appear authentic, but they are, on the surface, good sentiments. Still, I’d rather turn to Jody Wilson-Raybould for inspiration. In running as an independent candidate, she refused to give up her own power and chose, instead, to play by different rules. She won, too. In her own victory speech, Wilson-Raybould stressed the importance of tossing the Old Boys’ Playbook.377 “We accomplished showing Ottawa, showing our political process, that independent, strong voices matter and that we can do politics differently,” she told the crowd in her Vancouver-Granville riding, adding that business-as-usual politics won’t solve the country’s most urgent issues, including reconciliation and the climate crisis. “We need to collaborate, we need to come together, we need to, again, work across party lines to address these big issues and I know that we can do it.”
At the very end of Women Deliver, we danced. Angélique Kidjo, a Grammy award–winning Beninese-American singer-songwriter, took the stage, and it felt like pure joy. Her voice, transcendent, was everywhere, and people just rose. And then they swayed. And then they stomped their feet and raised their hands, singing and making noise even if they didn’t precisely know the words. They pressed to the front, and when Kidjo jumped from the stage to the convention centre floor, they followed her. She strode through the crowd, and it undulated around her. I saw people locked at the hips, their arms around each other, smiling wide. Some women passed out little flags. When Kidjo returned to the stage, preparing her exit, people kept on dancing. Even after the music stopped, they danced. It felt like a small moment of letting go, after days — or a lifetime — of hard, draining, worthwhile work. But even that’s not quite right. We weren’t letting go. Really, it was a moment of lifting up. Of looking around, seeing we weren’t alone, and feeling like, Okay, we’ve got this. We’ve got it. Let’s dance.
Throughout the conference, every moderator asked the same question at the close of the main stage panels: How will you use your power? At first, I thought it was heavy-handed, the kind of question privileged white women ask one another because they have the luxury of doing so. It seemed cheesy and perfunctory, too close to #GirlBoss creed for my initial liking. But as I heard more and more people answer, I began to change my mind. Viewed another way, this question was a way of reminding everyone there that they did have power, now, even if it didn’t always feel like it — even if their power didn’t look anything like traditional power. It was a way of telling everybody that what they did mattered. Community work mattered. Reproductive health care mattered. Politics mattered. Sports mattered. Technology mattered. Work mattered. Self-care mattered. All of it put a drop more power into this new bucket. It evened things out. It remade the world.
Those were the last words anyone spoke on stage that day: How will you use your power? I wonder if that question was on people’s minds as they slowly, slowly filtered out of the room, by the hundreds. Everyone seemed reluctant to stop celebrating. They lingered and swayed their hips, singing and humming. I heard people talking about what they’d tell their friends, colleagues, and fellow activists back home. I heard them saying they wished they could have seen so much more. I saw people hugging and exchanging contact information and rushing to catch flights. And, like I saw throughout the time I was there, I saw a long line of people gather at a sun-yellow rendering of the word “POWER.” Each letter stood as tall and as thick as me, a simple sculpture meant for selfies. Woman after woman stood in front of it, taking their pictures and their friends’ pictures. After each one, they looked down at their phones and smiled. Here, for a moment, was everything they needed.
368. Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada. “Government of Canada makes historic investment to promote the health and rights of women and girls around the world.” News release, June 4, 2019. https://pm.gc.ca/eng/news/2019/06/04/government-canada-makes-historic-investment-promote-health-and-rights-women-and.
369. Garber, Megan. “The Real Meaning of Trump’s ‘She’s not my type’ defense.” The Atlantic. June 25, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/06/trump-e-jean-carroll-rape-allegation-not-my-type-defense/592555/; D’Antonio, Michael. “‘She’s not my type’ tells us all we need to know about Trump.” CNN Opinion. June 27, 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/27/opinions/carroll-rape-allegation-trump-dantonio/index.html.
370. North, Anna. “Why the president is feuding with Megan Rapinoe, star of the U.S. women’s soccer team.” Vox. July 3, 2019. https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/7/3/20680073/megan-rapinoe-trump-world-cup-soccer; Helmore, Edward. “Trump congratulates USA on World Cup despite confrontation with Rapinoe.” The Guardian. July 7, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/jul/07/trump-usa-world-cup-win-megan-rapinoe.
371. NDP. “NDP: Liberals must match feminist rhetoric with actions for women’s equality.” News release, September 25, 2018. https://www.ndp.ca/news/ndp-liberals-must-match-feminist-rhetoric-action-womens-equality.
372. Boesveld, Sarah. “A Beer with Andrew Scheer: Conservative leader, popcorn addict . . . Feminist?” Chatelaine. August 2, 2017. https://www.chatelaine.com/living/politics/andrew-scheer-interview/.
373. MacDonald, Fiona, and Jeanette Ashe. “MacDonald and Ashe: Wilson-Raybould and Philpott are showing us what feminist governance looks like.” Ottawa Citizen. March 5, 2019. https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/macdonald-and-ashe-wilson-raybould-and-philpott-are-showing-us-what-feminist-governance-looks-like.
374. Walsh, Marieke, Michelle Zilio and Kristy Kirkup. “Trudeau apologizes again for wearing blackface, cannot say how many times he wore racist makeup.” Globe and Mail. September 19, 2019. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-new-blackface-video-surfaces-a-day-after-trudeau-apologizes-for-two/.
375. Max Bell School of Public Policy. Digital Democracy Project Research Memo #5: Fact-Checking, Blackface and the Media. October 2019. https://ppforum.ca/articles/ddp-research-memo-5/.
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