Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives aren’t exactly known for defending women’s rights, and their recently released 2025 election platform does nothing to change that.
Women and our interests show up just four times in the document: every mention appearing in the section having to do with crime prevention and punishment.
Under a Conservative federal government, intimate-partner violence will be “stopped” through “stricter conditions, first-degree murder charges, and aggravating factors for violence against vulnerable women.” And “women’s safety” will be promoted “by repealing Commissioner’s Directive 100, which allows male offenders to be housed in women’s prisons;” and by ensuring “women’s spaces and services remain protected in federal institutions and policy.”
What you won’t find in the Conservative platform is any commitment to fund programming or services directed towards women. Because of course you won’t. Conservatives are fascinated, in a disturbingly voyeuristic way, with violence against women—all the people and things that batter and bruise and kill us. But they don’t care one bit about women’s lives—about our lives.
It’s a problem. And if you needed another reason to vote Anyone But Conservative next week, it surely qualifies as such.
Death, inside
I have some familiarity with the realities incarcerated women—trans and cis—face in the federal carceral system because of my work as a student-at-law at the Calgary-based law firm Prison & Police Law. And the realities are brutal.
Commissioner’s Directive 100: Gender Diverse Offenders is the Correctional Service of Canada policy that allows trans prisoners to request voluntary placement in a federal carceral institution that aligns with their gender identities. Trans men can seek placement in a men’s institution and, yes, trans women can seek placement in a women’s institution.
But in practice, exceedingly few trans women are successful in this regard.
That’s because the commissioner’s directive includes an “overriding health and safety” exception that permits the Correctional Service to deny trans prisoners’ placement requests when there are “overriding health or safety concerns that cannot be resolved.” A white paper published in 2023 by Randall Garrison, then the NDP Member of Parliament for Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, found that the Correctional Service has used this exception to deny 83% of the trans women in its custody transfers to women’s carceral institutions. Indeed, the exception is so vaguely worded that the Correctional Service can cite almost anything as a reason to deny trans women gender-congruent housing, including transphobic myths and stereotypes.
The Conservatives want to repeal Commissioner’s Directive 100. And the policy should, indeed, be done away with. But not for the reasons the Conservatives think.
The fact is, the policy keeps trans women in men’s institutions, with severe consequences for their lives and safety.
Put aside the fact that discriminating against incarcerated trans women in this way—indeed, denying their very womanhood—dramatically increases their risk of dying by suicide. It is also the case that trans women in men’s institutions are substantially more likely to be assaulted, sexually assaulted, or even murdered than their cisgender peers.
If you want to promote violence against trans women prisoners, keeping them in men’s carceral institutions is a sure way to accomplish that.
Which is why it’s so disturbing that this has become a tenet of the Conservative election platform.
Women’s suffering is sexy
But I’m not going to assume that all my readers care about the suffering of trans women prisoners. There is, after all, a commonplace assumption that those who commit crimes deserve whatever they get behind bars.
So let’s pretend for a minute that trans women prisoners are simply getting their comeuppance when they’re raped and beaten and killed while in the care and custody of the Correctional Service of Canada.
It is still disturbing that the Conservatives only seem to care about (cis)women when those women are suffering violence at the hands of men.
For all that Conservatives talk about keeping males out of women’s jails, after all, you don’t hear them saying anything about the mass incarceration of Black and Indigenous women in this country; or all the ways in which incarcerated women are over-securitized, and incarcerated Black and Indigenous women specifically targeted for violence by guards.
For all that Conservatives talk about ending intimate partner violence against women in this country, you don’t hear them saying anything about increasing federal funding for women’s shelters or for programming designed to help women leave abusive relationships, let alone anything about promoting women’s flourishing when we haven’t been the targets of violence.
The reason is simple: Violence against women is sexy. It sells. People love to hear about it. Because like the Conservatives who pander to them, Canadians love battered women—but don’t care about women’s lives.
Women’s lives mean more
Don’t misunderstand me: Of course the federal government should be in the business of preventing harm from coming to women, be it in prisons or in homes. I’m not saying otherwise.
What I am saying is that the federal government, to say nothing of Canadian society more generally, should be investing in women’s lives even when we’re not the targets of abuse.
Women matter. Our lives matter. To be a woman is a wonderful and beautiful way to inhabit the world. And people should care about us, our concerns, and our needs for their own sake.
The problem with reducing women to being the targets of violence (usually but not always by men) is that it centres our abusers. It puts the focus on those who hate us and do us harm. And that takes attention away from the complexities of our lives as they are actually lived: it takes attention away from our hopes and dreams and aspirations, indeed, from the very things that make us people with lives worth living.
The Conservatives don’t care about women. Not really. They only care about the people who hurt us. Which is why, in the end, women only matter to Conservatives as a way of selling a tough-on-crime agenda.
And that’s why, in the end, I will never vote for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in this month’s federal election.
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