NAC gets Knackered: Liberals' Skewing of Democracy in the Service of Buying Votes Ending?
The National Post (Mar. 9, 04), had two articles on The National Action Committee on the Status of Women or NAC. It appears that NAC, which makes the false claim of representing three million Canadian women and 700 affiliate organizations (calls itself an umbrella organization), is not only broke but NAC owes Revenue Canada $200,000 in back taxes. Gee, that is strange. How can you supposedly represent all these women and affiliates (associations ranging from the YWCA, business women, and lesbian groups) and not have any support -- other than from the government, i.e. Canadian taxpayers? The answer is simple. They have no support from these groups nor from the average woman in the street.
From its emergence under the Trudeau regime--"Give every embittered minority bags of loot to sue the government in court"--they have flamed out.
None of the presidents have even remotely represented the average Canadian female. First came Judy Rebbick, a transplanted New York City activist; next in line was a transplanted East-Indian, American activist, then a Barbadian-Canadian, then an Aboriginal, then to an obscurity whose name and nationality is known to only a handful of Canadian women.
But total irrelevance has never stopped the Liberals from funding a group. While probably 99% of NAC's adherents vote NDP, there is still that 1% who vote Liberal. Anyway it looks pro-women, a Martha Stewart "good thing". But like Martha Stewart it doesn't represent Janey Doe. [and certainly not me -- NJC]
Nobody is any more pro-woman than I, but NAC has been on the fringes of the loonie-left. In one of its manifestos it proclaimed the major concern was with Canada's "women of colour"; hence its multicult choice of presidents. To quote the Post's editorial,
This is a group, recall, whose last full annual lobbying day on Parliament Hill in 1998 resembled a freak show. Members visited MP's and harangued them in their offices. When other MPs agreed to attend a NAC briefing, they were booed and hissed and shouted at by the feminists in attendance. Is this how Canadians want their tax dollars spent?
Some of the charges they hurled at MPs were that prostitutes were not being afforded enough "human rights" and that the government was "waging a war of ethnic cleansing against Jamaican men". Stripped of its left-wing bafflegab, they are furious that wh***s and Jamaican gangstas are being arrested and jailed? I am sure that they are speaking for all Canadian women with these complaints.
It wasn't until the late 90's that this extremist lobby had their sugar daddy government allowance cut off. Their support is so low, even among "women of colour" that their president--Ms. Who?--is not salaried. Also, should you perhaps be one of NAC's few admirers, don't be bothered calling it to complain about the patriarchy, as nobody answers the phone anymore.
