There are two good reasons why Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are once again accusing Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives of wanting to take away abortion rights. First, the Liberals are desperate. Second, as a political ploy, it works.
The federal government
announced this week that new legislation will require pregnancy counselling centres, many of which are faith-based, to tell patients up front whether they provide access to abortion and birth-control services. Those that do not provide that information could lose their charitable status.
The announcement has no real purpose other than to provide the Liberals with an opportunity to bring up the subject of abortion rights and then to bash the Conservatives.
“Many Canadians are rightfully worried that a Conservative government would not protect” a woman’s right to choose, Liberal MP Judy Sgro
declared Wednesday in the House. “It is alarming that women’s rights and freedoms are under attack by the Conservative Party.”
Mr. Trudeau emphatically agreed. “While we are protecting women’s freedom of choice, the Conservative Party is trying to roll it back.”
The accusation is false. You could call it a canard, a fabrication, even a bald-faced lie, though such language would be unparliamentary.
Instead, Mr. Poilievre denounced “the Prime Minister’s tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories and misinformation.”
He reminded the House that “It has been our 20-year-long policy in the Conservative Party that there will be no restrictions on women’s reproductive choices or on abortion.”
But the Liberals will, of course, ignore this fact, just as they have ignored it in the past.
For as long as the Conservative Party of Canada has existed, the Liberals have accused it of harbouring a hidden agenda to take away a woman’s right to choose
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For as long as the Conservative Party of Canada has existed, the Liberals have accused it of harbouring a hidden agenda to take away a woman’s right to choose. The Grits are particularly prone to making this accusation when they are behind in the polls.
When Liberal prime minister Paul Martin found himself at risk of losing to Conservative leader Stephen Harper in the 2004 election campaign, the Liberals released
one of the most effective, and most vicious, attack ads ever aired in this country.
As well as claiming that the Conservatives planned to buy aircraft carriers and abandon public health care, one segment showed two young women huddled in a hallway, while the female narrator declared that Mr. Harper “won’t protect a woman’s right to choose.” That ad helped turn the Liberal campaign around, securing a minority-government win.
Throughout Mr. Harper’s two minority governments, Liberals warned of a hidden agenda to limit abortion rights that Conservatives would impose if they won a majority government. In 2011, the Conservatives won a majority.
There was no hidden agenda.
That didn’t stop the Liberals, once back in government under
Mr. Trudeau, from attacking Conservative leaders Andrew Scheer and then Erin O’Toole of having a hidden, anti-abortion agenda, even though both of them repeatedly vowed they would never permit such legislation.
The attacks contributed to Mr. Scheer losing in 2019 and Mr. O’Toole losing in 2021.
Today, the Prime Minister is deeply unpopular – way down in the polls, with many of his own MPs in revolt against him. What’s a Liberal to do at a time like this? Just what you’d expect: accuse the Tories of a hidden agenda on abortion.
(Jagmeet Singh’s NDP also likes to jump on this mendacious bandwagon.)
It is absolutely true that some members of the Conservative caucus oppose abortion rights. But they submit to the party’s pro-choice stand because they know that eight-in-ten Canadians support a woman’s right to choose,
according to the polls.
That support is, if anything, likely to grow, in the wake of the American Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade, which protected abortion rights.
Horror stories are emerging in the U.S. of women dying because doctors refused to treat them for fear of prosecution if they aborted a fetus.
This is why there is all-party support in the House for a woman’s right to choose. That is why abortion rights shouldn’t be an issue.
But the Liberals are paying the price for public weariness with the flat economy, the housing shortage, the consequences of high inflation and interest rates. Their only hope is to invent bogeymen, and abortion is their favourite bogeyman of all.
The longer the Liberals languish in the polls, the more of this we’re likely to get.