TORONTO – Leaders live, by nature, in a tenuous environment. If they whisper a syllable of thought an eavesdropper might hear, all bedlam may break loose. Several leaders of various “weight”, at their chagrin, are finding out the hard way. Ask Pope Francis. He is tasked with laying out a path for us to becoming better individuals and better societies. 

The only ‘tools’ he has at his disposal fall into the category of intellectual argumentation and moral suasion. He “unwittingly” set off a firestorm of largely negative attention when he seemingly appeared ‘dismissive’ of the LGBTQ agenda as one bearing little consequence except to those who advocate the agenda.

Secular organizations – governments, for example – have substantive mechanisms (budgets and the law-making process, “reward and punishment”) at their disposal to influence behaviour. Several female readers have called to express frustration that a small number of people are receiving inordinate attention at the expense of the more traditional demands and needs of women – 50% of the population.

Finding ourselves in the middle of Budget debates, we referred to the Main Estimates tabled by the Ministry of Finance to ground the responses in facts and dollars. There is in fact a Department for Women and Gender Equality. In 2022-23, it had a total budgetary expenditure of $323,108, 817; for 2024-25, that sum is $371,460,417 – a 14.9% increase.

The attached table, derived from Tables 126, 127 and 128 in the Raison d’Etre for the departmental estimates, may be self-explanatory. That raison d’etre is a mandate to advance gender equality … investing in research and providing advice to achieve equality for people of all genders, including women. (emphasis added)

Based on this and the chart, one can draw inferences in respect of where the government’s priorities may be. Of some note, expenditures for federal Contributions to Women’s Program for the purpose of furthering their participation in Canadian society decreased from $186,246,454 in 2022-23 to $33,215,397 in 2024-25. Necessary to diminish public debt?

During the same period, contributions allocated to support Equality for Sex, Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression Program increased from $12,957,335 to $156,538,197 – a growth of $143,580, 862. Wow!

In April of 2022, Statistics Canada announced that the Census conducted the previous year revealed that Canadians above the age of 15 who identified as  [non-binary] represented one in three hundred of the population (1/300) – 0.003 %, roughly 133,333 individuals.