February 9, 2025
Who else would have the empathy to interrogate our feminist PM?
In selecting the leaders' debate moderators, it would have been a fine thing to wander outside the privileged community that is the media.
In selecting the leaders’ debate moderators, it would have been a fine thing to wander outside the privileged community that is the media.

A stellar cast of central Canadian journalists, all of them eminently female, has been selected to moderate the first federal election leaders’ debate. They are three news anchors — Lisa LaFlamme, Rosemary Barton and Dawna Friesen — and two columnists, Susan Delacourt and Althia Raj.

There is no way of precisely knowing this, but I am confident that choosing all five exclusively from the XX chromosome class was a matter of some exultation, perhaps reaching to self-congratulation. Somewhere, in whatever closet these mysterious deliberations were conducted, surely at their conclusion there was a whoop of “You go girls!,” and surely, too, much high-fiving over the shards of another broken “glass ceiling.”

In the higher regions of Canadian journalism, soft “L” liberalism predominates, and a progressive attitude toward upper-middle-class feminism, the feminism of professionals, is as much standard equipment (for both males and females) as a laptop, an iPhone, and an envious glare to aim at Robert Fife (a male) as he goes off to bury another politician.

So the declaration of a “No Males Zone” around the moderation of the first debate has to be a “good thing,” achieving heights of fashionable correctness that would stir a gulp of envy even in the puritan confessionals (sound booths) of the third-wave sisterhood down south at National Public Radio (home of the hushed voice, where even the news is organic and “shade-grown.”) A high standard indeed.

And so I mix my “huzzahs” with millions of other Canadians at this milestone, the passing of the journalistic patriarchy, wrenching the control of our public media out of the unmoisturized grip of the Craig Olivers, the Evan Solomons, the Don Martins, that whole cabal of the testosterone-soaked boys-on-the-hill gotcha brigade. Primates, the lot of ’em.

Canada has not had such a moment of civic uplift since the Raptors’ victory or the promise of a ban on single-use plastics.

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See Also:

(1) Federal election leaders’ debate will feature five moderators — four of them from Ontario

(2) National Post View: The election debate should reflect all of Canada

(3) Trudeau needs to call the election now

(4) Goodale’s same-sex-marriage gambit is staggeringly arrogant and hypocritical

(5) A modest proposal for the Trump administration to buy Canada

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