Far be it from me to invite being labelled a Harper government cheerleader by Paul Wells, but I don’t see what the big deal about this article is.
The Ottawa Citizen reports that, contrary to earlier reports by the Harper government that it would absolutely not support abortion as part of their G8 maternal health program, International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda has said the government will fund “family planning”, generally considered a euphemism for abortion.
International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda seems to have returned from Africa with a more nuanced vision of how Canada can help reduce hundreds of thousands of maternal deaths every year than the one originally offered by her government.
Oda posted daily blogs on the Canadian International Development Agency website during part of her trip to Mozambique. In one she wrote about seeing a young pregnant woman at a rural clinic who had a severely malnourished one-year-old child. The mother had stopped breastfeeding the child, who Oda described as “only skin and bones,” when she became pregnant.
“With the interventions they were receiving, mother and child had a positive prognosis, but one realizes very quickly that, in addition to facilities and equipment, maternal nutrition and family planning education programs are also crucial.”
Citizen writer Elizabeth Payne, in a moment of “Aha!”, says that this is what maternal health advocates were saying all along. Which is further proof, extrapolates Mr.Wells, that the Conservative Party has been playing social conservatives “like a cheap fiddle.”
Maybe. Maybe not. As Conservative Senator Nancy Ruth sagely advised at the time, shut the f*** up on the issue. None of the prior controversy surrounding the G8 maternal health plan had anything whatsoever to do with maternal health.
It was a Liberal party wedge issue, as I argued at the time, intended to put the Conservative government between a rock and a hard place. The last thing that the Conservative government wanted to do was get into some polarizing argument between the polemics on both sides of the abortion debate.
If the Conservatives had agreed to play the Liberal gambit back in February, they would have been forced on record to either support or deny the concept of universal access to abortion. But I think if you look at the Conservative record over the past several years, it’s fairly clear where the government stands on the issue. Which means that “Family planning” was never in jeopardy after all.
So maybe everybody thinks Harper was playing Canadians like a “cheap fiddle”, but in the end it appears to have all been much rancor about nothing. Just like the detainees. Just like the census. Just like this whole minority government media watch.
