Trudeau promises gender parity in cabinet

Michael Moriarity wrote:

Pondering wrote:

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

Pondering wrote:

NorthReport wrote:

Unwise I think as it confirms the weak Justin meme the Conservatives have been promoting effectively for some time now The JNR Justin Not Ready ads have had an impact

quizzical wrote:

i thought it was soooooo cutesy wootsy of his mom to be out politicing for him and playing her poor little bullied boy schitck on Sunday's The West Block.

Interesting comment quizzical. Sounds exactly like what bullies say to silence anyone who would dare criticize them. Do you think Margaret Trudeau should stop writing books? Or do you think she should refuse interviews while her son is running or refrain from commenting?

Pondering, you still pretending not to do personal attacks on other posters here? Becuase that is one.

No it isn't. I am challenging quizzical's comment on Margaret Trudeau. Her comment is a putdown of Margaret Trudeau without any quote to back up the criticism of Margaret Trudeau's comments or behavior being "cutesy wootsy".

What do bullies do if a third party, especially a mother, defends their victim or criticizes the attackers?

Quizzical's commentary on Margaret Trudeau does resemble the approach bullies take. If anyone else defends the target it is used as proof that the target must be weak, especially if it is the target's mother or sister and the target is male.

Margaret Trudeau doesn't deserve to be attacked for her opinion. Trudeau shouldn't be attacked based on his mother's comments. She is not part of his campaign. The focus of the interview was her latest book on aging, not politics.

Perhaps Pondering doesn't understand the distinction between public figures who are not babblers, and babblers. A babbler can express almost any opinion of a public figure. Calling a public figure nazi, racist, homophobe, stupid, narcissist, or any other insult is OK. However, personal attacks on other babblers, such as calling one a bully, are not. Only the ideas in the post may be attacked, not the poster.

Now, I admit that I have failed that standard a few times, perhaps even with respect to Pondering, but I try to avoid such behaviour, and I expect to be criticized when I fail.

Listen to the interview. She talks about her book on aging except when she is directly asked questions about Justin. About bullying, she responds that when the boys were children she would go to the school and sort it out with the other mothers. Who should she go to now? The Governor General? The Queen? That's it.

I did not call quizzical a bully. I said:

Interesting comment quizzical. Sounds exactly like what bullies say to silence anyone who would dare criticize them. Do you think Margaret Trudeau should stop writing books? Or do you think she should refuse interviews while her son is running or refrain from commenting?

I think and hope that quizzical will agree with me. That her comment was unfair to Margaret Trudeau who didn't say anything out of line.  This:

i thought it was soooooo cutesy wootsy of his mom to be out politicing for him and playing her poor little bullied boy schitck on Sunday's The West Block.

was a cheap shot at Trudeau's mother and by extension him.

Should we get on Catherine Pinhas now? 

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/09/09/thomas-mulcair-catherine-pinhas-...

“They see him as a big brute — which is totally false. I could never be with a brute,” she says, her brown eyes flashing. “He is nice, he is kind. ...That, I would like people to know,” she says, grabbing his hand tenderly. He smiles at her....

She tells The Huffington Post Canada that she worries about Mulcair, and she hates seeing negative stories about him.

“I don’t like it at all,” she says, looking at Mulcair, as the waiter brings the fish sitting on a bed of spinach.

How sweet. It's like a Harlequin romance! Margaret Trudeau released a book on aging that has nothing to do with JT. It is inevidable that she will be asked her opinons on the election. Likewise, it is inevidable that Pinas will be dragged into the campaign even though she is a private person with no claim to fame. If she refused to discuss Mulcair at all then that would be the story.

Bullying is a real problem in our society and so is the degration of political discourse. The early Harper campaign against Trudeau was bullying.

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/stop-being-me...

Seven students from an Ottawa-area Catholic school have written to Harper asking that he pull Conservative attack ads, which began running within hours of Trudeau claiming the Liberal leadership last month.

The students join Margaret Trudeau, the Liberal leader’s mother, who earlier this month called out Harper for “bullying [her] Justin.”

The students’ letter-writing campaign comes as a new poll suggests the attack ads may have backfired.

Indeed, the ads were more likely to leave a negative impression about Harper and the Conservatives than they were about Trudeau and the Liberals, according to The Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey.

Teacher Natalie Casault said the idea came from the students themselves during a lesson on government last month. To the kids, she said the ads looked just like cyberbullying, which they’d learned about a couple of weeks earlier.

The ads feature video of Trudeau doing a mock strip tease for a charity event, his head surrounded by fairy dust as a narrator sneeringly recounts his past experience as a camp counsellor and drama teacher.

I'd like the kids to get the message that Trudeau's Mom is right and that political discourse should rise above bully style attacks.

quizzical wrote:

wow, i just saw this. what a fkn nerve pondering to call me a bully because  of how i viewed her  commentary. i never bullied margret trudeau in my commentary ffs.

 if she would stuck to flogging her fkn book, which has suscpicious release timing, and not ventered into her  "poor poor son" crap, there woulda been no comment from me at all.

so why don't you stop  bullying me or trying to... as you are actually doing the bullying in this situation.

I did not call you a bully. I said your comment is one that bullies use to silence criticism and it is. That doesn't mean you are a bully, you are not in a position to bully Margaret Trudeau. It means you are emulating a tactic used by bullies.

So defend your comment if you disagree. I watched the interview. Please quote what she said that earned your disparagement.

http://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-west-block

There is the interview, 5 minutes 27 seconds.

At about the 3 minute mark she is asked if "anyone" on parliament hill is listening to her and she laughs and says that Justin read it in one night and makes a joke about the part on sex then immediately starts talking about senior health. As soon as she finishes speaking Tom Clark again brings it back to JT by saying that she is also a mother. He goes on to say that she knows because of one part of her life where she saw sort of the meanest part of politics and now as a mother you know your son is going to be...

MT then says: Oh, bullying, Tom bullying, laughingly, and Tom says. "you don't seem to worried about that". MT responds I used to have to go to the principals office you know if one of the little ones was being bullied and sort it out with the other mothers and I don't know where I should go with this one is the Queen or the Governor General?

By asking if she should go to the Governor General or the Queen she mocked the notion that she was needed to defend him.

Where is the poor poor son part? 

There is nothing suspicious about the release of her book. It isn't her first. The death of her mother was a turning point for her as it is for many people. A friend was in a home because she alzheimers.

MT's history with mental illness has been used to disparage JT. JT doesn't need reminders of the scandals that swirled around his parents during his father's time in office. Even if that were not the case I don't see MT's book on aging impacting the election.

quizzical wrote:

Pondering wrote:

quizzical wrote:

wow, i just saw this. what a fkn nerve pondering to call me a bully because  of how i viewed her  commentary. i never bullied margret trudeau in my commentary ffs.

 if she would stuck to flogging her fkn book, which has suscpicious release timing, and not ventered into her  "poor poor son" crap, there woulda been no comment from me at all.

so why don't you stop  bullying me or trying to... as you are actually doing the bullying in this situation.

I did not call you a bully. I said your comment is one that bullies use to silence criticism and it is. That doesn't mean you are a bully, you are not in a position to bully Margaret Trudeau. It means you are emulating a tactic used by bullies.

So defend your comment if you disagree. I watched the interview. Please quote what she said that earned your disparagement.

http://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-west-block

There is the interview, 5 minutes 27 seconds.

At about the 3 minute mark she is asked if "anyone" on parliament hill is listening to her and she laughs and says that Justin read it in one night and makes a joke about the part on sex then immediately starts talking about senior health. As soon as she finishes speaking Tom Clark again brings it back to JT by saying that she is also a mother. He goes on to say that she knows because of one part of her life where she saw sort of the meanest part of politics and now as a mother you know your son is going to be...

MT then says: Oh, bullying, Tom bullying, laughingly, and Tom says. "you don't seem to worried about that". MT responds I used to have to go to the principals office you know if one of the little ones was being bullied and sort it out with the other mothers and I don't know where I should go with this one is the Queen or the Governor General?

By asking if she should go to the Governor General or the Queen she mocked the notion that she was needed to defend him.

Where is the poor poor son part? 

There is nothing suspicious about the release of her book. It isn't her first. The death of her mother was a turning point for her as it is for many people. A friend was in a home because she alzheimers.

MT's history with mental illness has been used to disparage JT. JT doesn't need reminders of the scandals that swirled around his parents during his father's time in office. Even if that were not the case I don't see MT's book on aging impacting the election.

 

ffs pondering even mentioning bullying inrespect to a leader of a party running to be the leader of a country is  over the top, and not just by a little. and it turns Justin into a victim, which is where she was selling the poor poor Justin meme.

she was there flogging her book on aging, on a political talk show. of course the timing is suspect. how many Canadians get on the West Block to flog a book on aging or anything else?

try to stop blowin smoke up my ass ok.

She was probably invited because she is Justin Trudeau's mother and the only reason she is well known is because she was married to Pierre Trudeau. That doesn't mean she accepted because of either or that she whipped up her book because JT was running. If she had been there to talk about Justin she would have spent more than 5 seconds out of 5+ minutes talking about him and she would have mentioned his name. Clark tried to get her on the topic twice and both times she brought the subject back to her book and aging within seconds.

The woman has to be in her seventies by now. I wasn't paying any attention to politics back then as I was involved in my own nightmares but it was impossible not to have some awareness of what was happening and Margaret Trudeau's "inappropriate" behavior was headline news. When Clark alluded to her having her own experience with meanness he was alluding to her own experiences in the spotlight.

She didn't deserve your comment. When she spoke of going to the Queen or the Governor General instead of the principal she was making the point in a joking fashion that it isn't her job to protect JT anymore and went back to discussing her book.

quizzical wrote:

lol. she sure did, and so did the Liberal machne who orchastrated this BS of her flogging her book on a political show and pretending "no big deal she's just flogging her book".

you're funny. not in a good way.  i'm done with you. no respect left. won't waste my time.

Well I still have respect for you. In another thread I referred to a young woman as a "girl" which wasn't appropriate even though I meant no disrespect to her by it. It doesn't mean I'm not a feminist. It just means I slipped up.

Likewise I never considered you a bully, but the way you sneeringly described Margaret's interview was in my view inappropriate and is reminiscent of something a bully would say. The Liberals don't run The West Block. Tom Clark invited her on, yes because of who she is, but she kept the interview to her book.

Mulcair has had family come forward too. If Catherine Pinas accepts an interview should I sneer at her too? Should I mock Mulcair for showing off grandchildren? Should I mock him for his "I walked to school uphill both ways" stories?

Margaret Trudeau stayed on the topic of her book. She didn't defend JT or say anything about meanness in politics. The families of politicians are used to humanize them. She didn't deserve your comment.

MegB wrote:

Pondering wrote:

NorthReport wrote:

Unwise I think as it confirms the weak Justin meme the Conservatives have been promoting effectively for some time now The JNR Justin Not Ready ads have had an impact

quizzical wrote:

i thought it was soooooo cutesy wootsy of his mom to be out politicing for him and playing her poor little bullied boy schitck on Sunday's The West Block.

Interesting comment quizzical. Sounds exactly like what bullies say to silence anyone who would dare criticize them. Do you think Margaret Trudeau should stop writing books? Or do you think she should refuse interviews while her son is running or refrain from commenting?

This is quite obviously a personal attack. And don't bother with the acrobatic backpedalling language that you used to rationalize calling a babbler a bully - it's wasted on me.

You're the boss.

quizzical, I apologize.

socialdemocraticmiddle wrote:

We're close to election time, so we're close to being able to verify each party's credibility on this issue.

PARTY: Male Candidates : Female Candidates = X:1 ratio

• CONS: 253:59 = 4.2 : 1
• BLOC: 38:15 = 2.5 : 1
• GREEN: 142:62 = 2.3 : 1 
• LIBERALS: 214:100 = 2.1 : 1
• NDP: 166:128 = 1.2 : 1

And yet the NDP is not promising gender parity in Cabinet where it matters. If they wanted to one-up the Liberals they could name the portfolios women would have with the NDP.

socialdemocraticmiddle wrote:

Another "optics" response. It's not always about the perception of "one-upping" in the middle of a campaign. It's about committing to something for years, and actually getting it done. How credible is a party that promises gender parity but has twice as many male candidates as they have women? Why is it that the Liberal party makes huge vague promises in the middle of a campaign, instead of working towards them over several years?

Completely credible. They don't need an equal number of candidates they only need enough talented women to form half the cabinet which they have. There is nothing vague about it either and the annoucement was not made during the campaign it was made months ago. Even if it were announced after that would be perfectly normal. Mulcair will also be making policy announcements during the campaign.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

Will he commit to gender parity in a shadow cabinet? 

I doubt it because he would not know how many seats he would have lessening his chances of having elected enough women to fulfil the spots. In any case I don't care because hardly anyone even knows about shadow cabinets and their members. The cabinet itself is far more visible and its members (theoretically) have direct power.