Description
In 2009, the Canadian government made a widely criticised announcement which instructed the Ministries responsible for foreign affairs and international development to replace the term “gender equality” with “equality between women and men” in policy documents. A few years later in 2016, the launch of a Canadian feminist foreign policy and the introduction of gender-based analysis + (GBA+), to policy frameworks under the Trudeau government was celebrated by civil society, NGOs and academics. This paper argues that both of these shifts represented efforts to invisibilise the racialised and gendered inequalities of Canada’s international programming and policy. The last shift in particular has constructed a white liberal feminist vision as a radical and inclusive alternative, and reinforced the marginalisation and erasure of the gendered and racialised realities of women in Canada and abroad. Ultimately, Canada’s feminist foreign policy has little to do with a global vision of gender equality, solidarity and justice rather it rests on a desire of white liberal feminists to construct themselves as emancipatory agents.
