After trying four years to get in on the federal handouts to women’s groups, REAL Women (Realistic, Equal, Active for Life) has been promised a grant of $21,212 from the Secretary of State for an Ottawa Conference entitled “Equality Revised.”
Government grants to women’s groups amount to over $12 million a year. They are given exclusively to those who accept the feminist interpretation of equality. This interpretation includes the promotion of “reproductive” choice, choice of “lifestyle” and other anti-child and anti-family policies.
Anti-life feminists such as the Toronto Star’s columnist Doris Anderson and Louise Brown were enraged that their closed shop has been broken open. (Columnists.)
Campaign Life Coalition Vice-President Margaret Purcell admits that the grant is only a token. Still, it is a small victory for sanity, she says.
But she also feels that unless the Secretary of State is willing to radically revise his funding policy, and extend financial support to ethnic, religious and other traditional women’s groups, it would be better if all grants were to be cut. This would end the stranglehold of radical feminists over government policies.
In Ottawa, meanwhile, MP Mary Clancy, (Liberal, Halifax), the Liberal women’s critic, expressed disappointment with the government’s grant to REAL Women. Her NDP colleague, Dawn Black, MP for New Westminister-Burnaby, interpreted the decision as a rebuke to the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), a feminist organization heavily subsidized by the government. In 1988, the year it fought the government tooth and nail on its free trade deal, NAC received $591,000 in taxpayer’s money.
