Donna Kennedy-Glans, Liberal saboteur

Rob Anders, the Conservative MP for Calgary West, is facing a challenge at his upcoming nomination meeting, as he has several times before. As Kevin Libin put it in the National Post, Anders’ latest challenger is destined for disaster as were the last ones.

Donna Kennedy-Glans is the next train-wreck in line. If Anders could hand-pick any opponent for himself, he’d have a tough time finding someone more politically unsuitable than she is. She’s a radical feminist lawyer, an anti-corporate scold and an apologist for radical Islam. Those things might sell in Tory nominations in downtown Toronto or Montreal – though I doubt it – but certainly not in Calgary, especially Calgary West.

Kevin’s blog had lots of good links, and they got me digging on my own about who Kennedy-Glans is and isn’t. I found this unintentionally hilarious letter by her to John Manley, giving him useful advice about the war in Afghanistan. Some excerpts:

We encourage you to look at Canada’s role in Afghanistan through a contemporary gender prism.

…Do people recognize our global future as shared - as one indivisible fate? For mothers, this sense of security is often dependent on the degree to which their offspring – and youth across the world - share this worldview.

…To co-create resilient global security, we will need more than troop surge. We will need a surge in rejuvenating maternal forces.

I’ve door-knocked in Calgary West before, and that kind of Marxist feminism, coated with a woolly layer of jargon and bafflegab, isn’t really a crowd-pleaser there. Or anywhere else in Canada that I know of, actually.

OK, I do know of a place where it’s a hit: at a dinner party in Oakville, Ontario. Here’s a poster announcing her recent speech there, where she promised to explain “ways to reconcile spirituality and patriarchy”. You will be shocked, dear reader, to learn that such a speech was sponsored by a couple of feminist divorce lawyers and a teacher’s union.

The funny thing about Kennedy-Glans is that she preaches feminism to Canadian audiences – but she’s an apologist for one of the world’s most misogynistic regimes: Yemen.

Kennedy-Glans went to Yemen as an executive with the oil company Nexen. After she left Nexen, she kept going back – some fifty times, she claims – to do “development work”. Fair enough. But she also does a lot of propaganda in support of Yemen’s dictator, who has ruled that country with an iron fist for 31 years. Read this laughable love-letter Kennedy-Glans wrote to that dictator. You’d almost think that Yemen was a democracy, not a murderous tyranny with a failed economy kept afloat by, well, companies like Nexen. Then again, if Kennedy-Glans had anything critical to say about Yemen, it’s not likely that it would have been published – it is explicitly against the law to criticize Yemen’s dictator, and his secret police go so far as to monitor cell phone text messages.

Kennedy-Glans tries to paint some sort of feminist picture of this women-hating regime. Here’s Freedom House’s rather more objective review of women’s rights in Yemen. It’s a detailed read, but suffice it to say, it’s a country where honour killings are smiled upon by the law.

Look, if you’re working in a radical Islamic hell-hole, sometimes you’ve got to tell some white lies to get ahead. (Well, actually you don’t, if you have a strong enough belief in democracy, freedom and the equality of men and women.) But not everyone is cut out to be a feminist. But Kennedy-Glans plays one back in Canada.

She never mentions the horrors of female genital mutilation and honour killings and the word “Yemen” together, certainly not in a Yemeni newspaper. And, as she wrote in this item for the Calgary Herald:

we may even be guilty of projecting our own values on Muslim sisters -- for example, assuming women in hijab are oppressed when it is very possible their individual choice to wear a veil or a chador is a manifestation of their faith.

Ah yes. We’re the guilty ones over here in Canada, aren’t we! And my favourite:

Women in the Middle East now taste the sweet victory of scoring human rights -- the right to primary, secondary and post-secondary education, the right to vote and to hold political office, the right of non-discriminatory access to work and to justice.

What planet is she on? Yemen is a dictatorship – their “vote” is about as real as the votes in Cuba. Other than liberated Iraq (and a wobbly Lebanon), the only democracy in the Middle East is Israel.

She ends with a flourish:

Canada must follow in the footsteps of many other countries that have followed our advice, acted on our principles.

We, too, must be a culture where limiting beliefs about equality are truthfully evaluated, both at a community level and within the hearts and minds of individuals. This I have no doubt we can do. Our Muslim sisters think so, too.

If you take out the annoying bafflegab, what is she saying? That Canada should “follow” the Muslim world’s example on how to treat women? That Muslim women – say, in Yemen – think we Canadians should be more honest about our sexism?

What a kook. She should save it for the government-controlled Yemeni press.

A women’s place in the world isn’t the only subject about which Kennedy-Glans saw fit to lecture Canadians from a Yemeni point of view. She co-wrote an article with this interesting Yemeni exchange student. Nice company.

They condemned the publication of the Danish cartoons, blaming “rogue news agencies”. I know that’s what they’re called in Yemen, but in the free world, they’re called “independent news agencies”, because they operate independently of government dictators. Kennedy-Glans, a lawyer, implied that it was criminal for the Danish newspaper to have done so.

The article is written in Kennedy-Glans’s trademark duckspeak; reading her “co-author’s” ESL blog entry, above, I’m pretty sure he didn’t write the thing. I mean, who even speaks like this:

This literary gunpowder added fuel to the smouldering anguish of a faith community that feels alienated -- pushed to the limits on a daily basis in wartorn communities where violence and death have become habitual, or struggling to reclaim normalcy within European communities where they experience mounting marginalization.

What an amazing amalgam of clichés. But it all covers up her malicious worldview: that the West is to blame, and Islamic riots in response to the cartoons are our fault.

This woman isn’t a Tory. She’s not really even a Liberal, other than the Denis Coderre wing of the Liberal Party. She most closely reminds me of Jennifer Lynch, another hard-left, politically correct feminist lawyer.

All of these are reasons why Kennedy-Glans should lose in Calgary West, and why she will lose.

But, if you’re a Tory – and it’s Tory party members who will choose the Tory candidate in Calgary West – forget all of the above. It’s interesting and revolting, but it’s not Kennedy-Glans’s biggest political flaw.

She’s a Liberal saboteur.

I first heard of Kennedy-Glans when I was working in the Tory war-room in the last election.

She and her socialist fellow traveler Bob Dickson had “bid” on a charity dinner with Anders. They despise everything he stands for; it was clearly a political scheme to get him to have a 90-minute conversation with them, hoping he'd say something embarrassing, and then they'd go public with it. Over dinner, they got talking about foreign aid and human rights. Not surprisingly, Kennedy-Glans took offence. (That’s quite something, given what she’ll abide in Yemen.)

But Kennedy-Glans didn’t go public with her “outrageous” “news” about Anders. She sat on it for four months, until the middle of the federal election campaign, when she suddenly decided it opportune to go to the press with her version of events. She said Anders made some inappropriate comments about foreign aid; he denied them, saying she took them out of context. For our purposes here, the truth is irrelevant. Because my point is: Kennedy-Glans is unsuitable for membership in the Conservative caucus.

Now, it is certainly Kennedy-Glans’s right to disagree with Anders. And it’s her right to scheme with the Liberal Party’s candidate in the riding, Jennifer Pollock, and to feed Pollock and the Liberal war room embarrassing information about Anders, and to go to the press, less than two weeks before the election day, creating a mini-scandal for the Tories.

It’s her right.

It’s her right to try to embarrass Anders. I doubt her stunt cost him any votes that he wasn’t already going to lose – and with Anders’ 57% of the vote, compared to Pollock’s 22%, her little media stunt had no chance of defeating Anders.

But it turned into a national media story, of course. It ran coast to coast – even though it was hearsay from a private conversation, reported four months after the fact, by someone scheming with the Liberal candidate. That’s how the media works sometimes in Canada.

So, while Anders was unscathed, 307 other Tory candidates had to wear the mini-scandal. And maybe in a few ridings that were awfully close, Kennedy-Glans’s stunt actually made a difference.

Again, that’s her right. And hats off to Jennifer Pollock and the Liberal war room for colouring the headlines for a few days.

But now – five months after knifing every Tory candidate in the back – Kennedy-Glans wants to join the team?

Now – after cooking up a scheme with the Liberal candidate in the riding – Kennedy-Glans wants to be trusted as the Tory candidate?

Now – after showing party disloyalty during the crucial final weeks of the campaign – Kennedy-Glans wants to be trusted as part of the Tory caucus?

Now – after inflicting two days of negative news stories on the party and the leader, she wants the party to accept her and the leader to sign her papers?

This, from the author of a book on “ethics”. Spare us.

Donna Kennedy-Glans isn’t suitable for Parliament. She’s a kook. She’s a bizarre cross between a radical feminist and an apologist for a women-hating Arab dictatorship.

That’s of concern to the 135,000 residents of Calgary West.

And that should concern the thousand or two Conservative party members there, too, of course.

Rob Anders has his flaws. But Conservatives ought to ask themselves another question: do they really want a Liberal saboteur as their Tory candidate?