The CAQ vs. women: Gender equality is under attack in Quebec

I recently watched the sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale, and while I’ve always enjoyed the show, watching it after Donald Trump’s re-election and the steady erosion of women’s rights in the U.S. felt very uncomfortable for me. It turns out it’s difficult to watch dystopian fiction when it mimics reality a little too closely.

For those unfamiliar with the series, it’s based on the novel by Margaret Atwood, and is set in Gilead, a totalitarian society in what was once part of the U.S. Faced with a plummeting birth rate, Gilead treats women as property of the state.

“Surely, you’re exaggerating,” some will be quick to say. “The U.S. isn’t Gilead.” 

Well, no. But also, yes.

We’re living next to a country, after all, that just kept a dead woman’s body on life support for months to carry a nine-week-old fetus to a viable state. 

Adriana Smith was clinically brain dead. Yet, not only was this young black mom and nurse initially denied adequate care, but despite her family’s wishes, she was forced to remain on life support because of Georgia’s abortion ban laws. The state essentially made her a human incubator, denying her dignity and bodily autonomy.

Her baby, delivered via what they’re calling a “postmortem emergency c-section,” weighs about 1 pound, 13 ounces and is currently in the NICU. If he even survives, he will face a lifetime of complex, very expensive medical care that Smith’s family never had a choice about taking on. 

“There is no data on whether prolonged, technologically assisted incubation in a cadaver can produce a living, much less healthy baby,” writes Dr. Caplan, a bioethics professor. This nightmarish scenario truly highlights how the reversal of Roe v. Wade, and the fallout from the end of abortion rights has had catastrophic results for American women, proving that “pro-life” has never been about the sanctity of life, but about control.

The CAQ’s pretend feminism

Now, of course I’m not claiming that Quebec is Gilead or even the U.S. under Trump’s presidency. That would be silly. But that doesn’t mean we should remain complacent to the global rolling back of women’s rights and priorities, and the setbacks in legal protections, access to healthcare and political representation. Quebec is not exempt from this trend.

I’ve been writing about women’s rights, gender-based violence and the never-ending fight for reproductive rights for a long time now and I’ve been watching the political shift to the right in many countries with alarm. That shift is routinely followed by an increase in misogyny, inequality and greater suppression of minority rights, as well as the implementation of policies and budget cuts that primarily penalize women since they’re the ones disproportionately represented in lower income groups and experience poverty at higher rates than men.  

There are many insidious ways for anti-feminism to rear its head, and it doesn’t always manifest in direct attacks against our bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. 

Some may scoff at the insinuation that misogyny affects us in Quebec. After all, we’re a pretty progressive society and the CAQ government won’t stop proclaiming how much it values gender equality. In fact, CAQ politicians bring it up often — usually when they need to justify legislation like Bill 21, the province’s secularism legislation that has cost many Muslim women their jobs, and made them targets of harassment and hate, or when they loudly worry about immigrants potentially not having the same values of “equality between men and women.” 

The CAQ’s rhetoric is often a watered-down version of “femonationalism,” which involves “using feminist language to promote nationalist and xenophobic agendas, particularly targeting immigrants and other minority groups.” In this discourse, there’s always a juxtaposition between the “civilized” and “progressive” majority and “backward” and “uncivilized” minorities — and the women we need to protect from the latter.

Immigrants unable to understand “our Quebec values” of gender equality shouldn’t even bother coming here, CAQ politicians will tell us, as they slash budgets that pay teachers and early childhood educators (the overwhelming percentage of them women) and fight against nurses (overwhelmingly women) who want better living wages. As they categorically state there isn’t any more money for social housing (again, affecting women and single moms the most) or when the CAQ’s housing minister tells Quebecers that shelters for victims of gender-based violence are just too damn expensive. 

There are many ways to undermine gender equality while still declaring yourself to be a feminist.

Three decades later, the fight continues

Thirty years after the Bread and Roses March, the fight waged by Quebec women against poverty and gender-based violence, and for equal opportunities and access to affordable housing, remains as important as ever. 

While progress has certainly taken place, a strong global anti-feminist masculinist backlash is present here, too. A simple Facebook post about the city of Montreal’s inauguration of La Place du Pain-et-des-Roses, a public space honouring the 30th anniversary of the historic march, was bombarded with hateful messages by men, unhappy that a tiny public space was being allocated for this. 

In similar fashion, the public announcement of Canada’s new president of the Public Health Agency, Nancy Hamzawi, was accompanied by a barrage of vile online comments about her hijab and her weight, two things that have absolutely nothing to do with her qualifications and experience. The internet doesn’t just incite and normalize misogyny — it often mirrors it. 

Back to the CAQ. There’s no denying that this government’s austerity measures will have a disproportionate effect on Quebec women. Budget cuts in healthcare, childcare and social assistance inevitably impact women the most, affecting their access to services but also leading to increased work for them. When the government fails, it’s often women who pick up the slack with their unpaid labour, caring for children and elderly parents left with no resources.

Funds, not flashy declarations

It’s easy for the Legault government to claim they’re big fans of gender equality and feminism when it suits their narrative, but when women’s groups are begging them to fast-track construction of more women’s shelters, they refuse to allocate the money —  even while gender-based violence continues to dominate headlines. 

On June 17, the bodies of a 38-year-old man and a 32-year-old woman were discovered in what police believe was a murder-suicide. The incident marked the fifth femicide in Quebec in five weeks, and the tenth femicide of 2025.

SOS Violence Conjugale says it received 60,000 calls for help between April 1, 2024, and March 31, 2025. Almost 20,000 requested a room in an emergency shelter. Over half were turned away because there was no space for them. Funding simply hasn’t increased with demand. So, no, the government isn’t as big on defending women as it claims to be.

Even if Quebec women thank their lucky stars for not living in the U.S. or Afghanistan right now, these totalitarian theocratic regimes and their trampling of women’s rights shouldn’t be our baseline for determining feminist progress. 

We can’t afford to remain complacent. And we should shame any government that claims to support women and fight for their safety and well-being into proving it with funding, not fancy words. ■

This article was originally published in the July issue of Cult MTL.

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Read more weekly editorial columns by Toula Drimonis.