Many are delighted with the CAQ’s refusal to support a motion by Québec solidaire evoking “intersectionality”, and they ridicule in passing this feminist and anti-racist approach rigorously formalized by African-American lawyers from Harvard University in the 1990, including Kimberlé Crenshaw, and adopted by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, but also by the CAQ itself!
It is the sociologist Mélissa Blais, of the University of Quebec in Outaouais (UQO), who underlinesgait in The duty (February 22, 2023) that this term is found more than ten times in the Government strategy for equality between women and men 2022-2027, whose cover is decked out with the slogan “Your government”, ie the CAQ (intersectionality is also mentioned three times in the accompanying document “Overview — meeting of the partner groups”). It specifies (p. 20) that “the integration of the intersectional dimension” is “an addition reinforcing the approach […] pre-existing” of gender-based analysis (GBA+).
The Minister for the Status of Women, Martine Biron, and those who scoff at this approach would therefore learn by reading the CAQ’s intersectional strategy for gender equality.
The intersectional approach can also help to understand that it is discriminatory to suspend the application of the Charter by the notwithstanding provision in the name of secularism (and of “the majority”), since we know well that the objective — and the effect — is to exclude hijab-wearing women from positions of public office. That this veil is a symbol of women’s submission (which is sometimes true, but not always) does not make it less discriminatory to exclude these women.
The CAQ’s strategic plan even promises (p. 26) to “produce a reference document on […] the use of the intersectional approach within the framework of the Charter of human rights and freedoms in order to promote the exercise of the right to equality, particularly for women”.
Ironic, right?
To see in video