On October 3rd, 2005, George W Bush nominated Harriet Myers to serve on the US Supreme Court. As with every Supreme Court nomination since the 1980s, much of the debate concerning her appointment centred on whether she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade and permit direct state control of women’s reproductive systems.
Unlike Canada, where the Supreme Court invited parliament to re-regulate abortion in 1987, following it striking the country’s anti-abortion law as too restrictive, the US Supreme Court did not invite further regulation of reproductive rights. In this way, the US anti-abortion movement has had to pursue a two-stage strategy to nationalize the uteruses of women of child-bearing years, first, through changing the composition of the nation’s highest court and, second, by passing restrictive laws through the national and state legislatures. In Canada, the Supreme Court has already invited parliament to legislate, and so keeping abortion off the floor of the Commons has become our main priority.
Until recently, however, there was a delicate dance that had to be performed by forced-birth advocates to stack the Supreme Court in their favour and obtain a majority that opposed Roe. v. Wade. The now almost-extinct species of “moderate Republicans” comprising Senator Lisa Murkowski, and almost no one else, held the balance of power in the US Senate and opposed the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
So, a candidate for the Court, or for the US Senate, whose members approved court nominees, had to signal they opposed women’s reproductive rights and wished to overturn Roe v. Wade without ever directly saying it. This entailed walking a tightrope of mobilizing the support of the forced birth movement without ever appearing to directly solicit it. This was effected, primarily, through coded communication or, as our political lexicon now renders this idea “dog whistles.”
A political dog-whistle entails communicating to a large discourse community comprising thousands or millions of people a clear and unambiguous meaning while communicating an unclear and ambiguous meaning or no meaning at all to those outside this community. Anglo America’s Christian Right has invested massively in creating a highly particular kind of civic literacy in its members: the development of a functional political vocabulary of coded communication, of dog whistles. Whatever one might think about this movement’s grasp of math, history or economics, there is no comparable ability to communicate in code among liberals, progressives or socialists. And this movement, especially those parts focused primarily or exclusively on the abortion question, flows right across the Canada-US border.
In this way, the Anglo American anti-abortion movement is both adept, because it is trained, at reading coded communication and, more importantly, expects to receive communication in code. They expect a set of obfuscations and contradictions from their leaders; in fact, certain types of obfuscation and contradiction are used to recognize and authenticate leaders as members of this group. I wrote, back in 2012, about how the “intentional gaffe” is a centrepiece of this system of coded communication.
A look at Twitter shows us that this understanding of the most important political communication is necessarily coded. When Donald Trump announced “I am the chosen one,” his most fanatical followers took no notice of it. That is because they know that if Trump were to reveal himself to be the messiah, he would naturally reveal that information in code. That is why those most committed to the divinity of Trump are most enamoured of and continue to use #COVFEFE in their communication. For those comfortable in this discourse community, #COVFEFE is the perfect term, at once benediction, in-joke and coded message that might mean anything. Its impenetrability has elevated it to the level of holy word, whereas, “I am the chosen one” has been ignored.
While #COVFEFE is the most emblematic of Trump’s communication, it is not typical. Normally, Trump’s way of communicating with his base is to assert something, walk it back, assert it again, walk it back again, “clarify” things through a spokesperson by putting forward some kind of non-existent nuance and then offering an intrinsically self-contradictory position. Does Trump hate Muslims? Yes! No! How dare you say he hates Muslims!? Muslims are awful! Trump is the only one who knows how evil they are! Look at Trump’s Muslim friends! Nobody has ever been a better friend of Muslims in history! Etc.
Everybody knows what Trump means and thinks about Muslims. He hates them and believes them to be an existential threat to America. This bizarre dance of self-contradiction is confusing only to those outside the Anglo American conservative discourse community.
Initially, when Elizabeth May and the Green Party’s national office began generating a series of gaffes, fuck-ups, contradictions and nonsense about abortion, I put it down to the party not being ready for prime time. But this has been going on for weeks now. And every time the Green Party abortion story dies down, May or the party starts talking about it on Twitter again and a new cycle of alleged gaffes begins.
But let us consider, for an uncomfortable moment, that this is the Plan, that May figures about 20% of Canadians are forced birth advocates who feel betrayed by Andrew Scheer, who promised to depart from the national consensus to decline the Supreme Court’s invitation to place abortion back on the floor of parliament. This might seem a dangerous game but, from hiring Warren Kinsella to advocating new oil refineries be constructed, it seems like May sees this as her last campaign and intends to throw every high-risk scheme including the kitchen sink at this final great effort.
When George W Bush told the Christian Right to mobilize in support of Harriet Myers, he had to make the case that she would overturn Roe v. Wade to his base, despite her never having directly denounced the decision. But, instead of saying “she secretly opposes Roe v. Wade,” he said, “I know her heart.” This phrase has become emblematic for those who study the power of coded communication in Anglo American politics and helped to inspire Stephen Colbert’s concept of “truthiness.”
When we see Elizabeth May insisting, as did Myers, that access to abortion is settled law or already decided or that she supports women’s right to choose, we also find her other statements that she is “personally pro-life” and that she doesn’t support “a frivolous right to choose.” In this way, she wants Canada’s Christian Right voters to “know her heart.” While the Liberal Party is desperate to convince these people that Andrew Scheer still secretly supports their agenda, May appears to be covertly competing for the Tories’ virtual monopoly on the serious misogynist vote.
For those who question whether the Greens really are trying to dog-whistle the Christian Right, let us consider the ways in which they have confused the issue:
- Whipped Votes: May and her party keep stating that the only reason their position on abortion is unclear is that they do not whip votes. They cannot, she explains, because the party constitution prohibits it. Except that I have a copy of the Constitution right here; it is buried on their web site. And nowhere in the document is there a prohibition on whipping votes. This constitutional prohibition is a lie May made up when she recruited NDP MP Bruce Hyer in 2013 and needed to explain his votes opposing gun control. Since then it has been such an oft-repeated part of Canadian political oral tradition that even the Greens’ sternest critics now believe this falsehood.
Second, one of the reasons this prohibition of whipped votes does not appear in the Green Party’s constitution is that it would be unconstitutional, and consequently unenforceable even if it were. As a lawyer, May knows this. The constitution of the corporation of a party cannot interfere with the supremacy of parliament or with the ability of MPs to choose with whom they caucus.
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Third, following the defection of Pierre Nantel from the NDP to the Greens during this election campaign, he expressed support for the Quebec Values Charter, the misnamed secularization bill that is actually a piece of Christian supremacist legislation. That was fine with the Greens. Then he expressed support for Quebec independence. May’s immediate response to this was to state that should Quebec independence come to the floor of the House of Commons, her MPs would be whipped to vote against it. In other words, during the same week that May falsely stated she was not allowed to prohibit a free vote on abortion by her MPs, she prohibited a free vote on Quebec independence. In other words, May would force her caucus to defend Canada’s territorial integrity but not women’s bodily integrity.
- Debatability vs Support: For the past twenty years and all of the twenty-first century, Canada’s major parties have established a national consensus around the debatability of abortion in parliament. There has been an agreement comprising the Canadian Alliance, Conservative Party, Liberal Party, NDP and Bloc Quebecois that no MP in any of these parties’ caucuses would be permitted to propose or debate abortion legislation on the floor of parliament. The reason for this is that some MPs in each of the major parties’ caucuses oppose abortion; indeed, the Prime Minister of Canada from 2006-2015 was just such a person. Stephen Harper opposes abortion rights but was part of this national consensus, threatening Tory MPs who raised this issue in parliament with expulsion. Even Andrew Scheer has reversed his position on this question, since becoming Tory leader, and now adheres to this agreement.
May and her party have sought to deliberately mis-describe the issue as being either a party’s support for abortion rights, an MPs support for abortion rights or a leader’s support for abortion rights. But this is not what the national consensus is about. Right now, May is the only party leader who is siding with groups like Campaign Life Coalition in calling for an end to this prohibition on debate and proposed legislation. By undermining this consensus, what May is really doing is pressuring Scheer to free legions of Tory backbenchers to nationalize my girlfriend’s uterus by giving him cover to join her in breaking the consensus that has been protecting women for a generation.
- Court vs. Legislative Authority: To further sow confusion about the abortion issue and more effectively mobilize a US-based discourse community, many Green candidates conflated the Canadian Supreme Court decision R. v. Morgentaler (1989) with the US Supreme Court’s decision Roe v. Wade (1973), arguing that the court had prohibited the House of Commons from legislating on abortion, making abortion a matter of “settled law,” as it was called in the US. But this is not the case. Whereas Roe v. Wade was explicit in prohibiting laws regulating abortion, R v. Morgentaler specifically invited the House of Commons to write new legislation restricting access. In this way, Canadian abortion rights are not protected by the Supreme Court but by the national consensus among parties and party leaders not to take up the Supreme Court’s explicit invitation.
Let me be clear that this cannot arise from ignorance or misinterpretation. Elizabeth May was both a senior civil servant in and a practicing lawyer for the Canadian government when the two Supreme Court decisions on abortion were handed down in 1987 and 1989. She knows the politics and legalities of this issue better than any political leader in our country today.
- Candidate Vetting: May and the Greens have taken another tack on this issue: they stated that during the candidate vetting process, potential candidates are asked if they support legislation that would criminalize abortion and, if they do, are prohibited from seeking a nomination. This was immediately challenged by past and current candidates who reported that May was lying and they had never been asked this question. Leaving aside the fact that people do lie and do change their minds, and that, consequently, this was no guarantee that Green MPs would not table anti-choice motions in the Commons, the claim was also immediately shown to be a bald-faced lie.
But May and the Greens maintained that they had. Then it came out that two candidates in 2015 had campaigned on an anti-abortion platform publicly and sought the votes of the forced birth movement, and that they had been re-nominated for 2019. May then stated that she would “re-vet” the party’s candidates, a process that she alleged she completed before the party’s filing deadline, except that the two candidates who had run in 2015, and were running again, are still on the party’s slate.
Then, there followed an investigation by the journalistic arm of the Broadbent Institute, Press Progress, an admittedly partisan organization that backs liberal and progressive candidates on the right wing of the NDP. Press Progress found additional Green candidates who opposed choice on abortion, including one who said that women seeking an abortion should need to obtain “permission” from another family member.
One would think, in the wake of all this confusion, that the Green Party would be seeking to lower the profile of its abortion position in the national electoral debate. But that is not what is happening. Instead, true to Trumpian form, the Greens are narrating how the NDP are persecuting them by raising these questions and how they are victims of others’ lies when in fact, nobody is a bigger supporter of women’s rights than they are.
What motivation could they have for talking up all the confusion they themselves have generated, by refusing to rejoin the national consensus and prohibit their MPs from proposing anti-abortion laws (something they still refuse to do)? The faint hope of pulling forced birth activists from the Tory party by staging the kinds of endless gaffes, contradictions and obfuscations to which they have been trained, since the 1980s, to respond to. And that is wrong, morally and politically. Riding the global wave of support for misogynist authoritarianism—even a little bit—is an unacceptable tactic that the Greens must reject.
If Green Party members, candidates and supporters want to stop these insinuations that they are pursuing a dangerous agenda putting millions of women’s human rights and bodies at risk, the solution is clear: don’t call me. Call Elizabeth May and tell her that women’s bodily autonomy and integrity is just as meriting of caucus discipline as Canada’s territorial integrity, or, ideally, much more so.
