Judy Haiven: “While many in the mainstream media called Lepine a madman (but interesting, never a terrorist, as they might have done today), Canadian feminists saw that something more sinister and more systemic had happened.”

let’s tend to the forests like prophets
encourage them to wilder in old growth
and watch them mature into being

raising forests is a poem by Mi’kmaw poet and story teller shalan joudry of L’sitkuk (Bear River First Nation). It’s from her latest collection, Waking Ground.

After 50 years of promises there still is no universal child care program in Canada. Meanwhile, the Covid shutdown has brought women to the lowest level of participation in the paid labour force in three decades. Women’s unemployment surpassed men’s for the first time in 30 years. Is there an economic war on women? I ask you to judge for yourself, writes Judy Haiven.