Description
The question at the heart of this paper is: what might we expect from the next decade in terms of Canada’s feminist values informing Canadian foreign policy? Drawing on literature that has examined Canada’s ‘feminist foreign policy’ (See Parisi, 2020; Rao and Tiessen, 2020; Tiessen and Swan 2018; Tiessen and Smith, 2020; Smith and Ajadi, 2020) and informed by some of the vast broader literature on feminist foreign policy (See Achilleos-Sarll et al, 2023; Aggestam et al, 2019; Thomson, 2020), I’m going to argue that the future, frankly, looks bleak.
Canada’s feminist foreign policy has centred on the Feminist International Assistance Policy and a variety of other initiatives ostensibly showcasing the feminist values informing Canada’s foreign policy. FIAP has been subject to criticisms ranging from a lack of intersectionality (Mason, 2019) to a lack of transformative feminism (Tiessen 2019), among other things. The idea of a feminist foreign policy for Canada, generally, has been criticized as hypocritical and lacking substance. All this to suggest that the discourse of a ‘feminist foreign policy for Canada’ and FIAP have been subject to critiques that question the degree to which the discourse and policies are actually ‘feminist’.
The record of the Trudeau government has not been stellar in terms of a transformative feminist foreign policy, but I believe that this could get worse if a Conservative federal government is elected in 2025. If that happens, I anticipate a roll-back of even the superficial inclusion of feminist values, reductions in funding for feminist non-governmental organizations, and the promotion of policies that harm already marginalized peoples. There may remain sites of hope and resistance, but the future of Canada’s feminist values informed foreign policy is bleak.
