Interesting day on Parliament Hill. Many great points made by one Elizabeth May:

May takes a very different view. She put it this way, in relation to Warawa’s question of privilege.

“We are not here as teams. The principle of Westminster parliamentary democracy is that we are here are representatives of our constituencies and our constituents,” she told the House, “Incidentally, we are merely members of political parties. Political parties do not exist in our Constitution. They are not an essential part of our democracy. They have grown to be seen to be the most interesting thing going on and we have grown to see politics as some sort of sport. However, democracy is not a sport. We are not playing on teams, and each individual member has individual rights…”

This is what this is about. Do individual Members of Parliament have rights? I believe they do.

Here’s the info. It’ll live stream audio from 3.30-4.15 pm EDT and then the audio will cut out as the members deliberate.

(Perhaps let the committee members know you’ll be listening in…)

An accurate account of my comments to the National Post reporter Mark Kennedy on M-408. I do think there is pressure from the top, and I think the opposition parties will either want to keep M-408 out of the House as well, OR, they will desire to get it into the House to embarrass the Conservatives. Both are interesting scenarios. I do not believe M-408 will get through the subcommittee tomorrow, and therefore this will go to a secret vote in the House of Commons. (Three cheers for MP Mark Warawa, who isn’t backing down! Takes chutzpah, and I like people with chutzpah. I also like saying the word “chutzpah,” for anyone who cares to know.) Well, well, well. This will be interesting to watch. I do wish the Conservatives weren’t so keen on sticking it to pro-lifers, which is coming back to bite them in the behind because breaking rules ain’t cool.

Andrea Mrozek, executive director of the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, said there are ‘‘no clear reasons’’ why Mr. Warawa’s motion should have been blocked.

She believes the motion should be allowed and MPs should vote for it, adding that she suspects the prime minister’s office was involved.

‘‘I think there’s pressure that comes from the top on this issue.’’

Also, she said the opposition parties are ‘‘desperate’’ to block the motion because they want to avoid the embarrassment of voting against it in the Commons.

I just received an e-blast from Physicians for Life that clearly explains what’s happening with M-408 and what you can do.

UPDATE: Mark Warawa is appealing the non-votability decision on M-408 to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs (PROC) this Wednesday at 3:30 pm.

In addition to the emails you have been sending to your MP and letters to the editor of your local/national papers, there are some other ways you can respond:

[Edit: Contact Members of Parliament and the Prime Minister.] It’s always best to craft your own brief note.

You can also use a fantastic tool for writing to your MP and the MPs involved in this issue at the WeNeedALaw site. The form finds your MP’s contact information based on your postal code. Click here to send a customizable email.

Second – write or call your own MP and the Prime Minister’s Office: 613.992.4211. When you call, you will be able to say that you are calling regarding Motion 408. You will be redirected to a voice message system, where you can leave a message with your title, name, and a polite message indicating that sex-selection abortion is an issue that concerns you.

Third – if you are a Twitter user, you can tweet about it using the hashtag #M408. You can also let @MPmarkwarawa know that you support the fight against female feticide, and communicate with the following key people in the M408 conversation:

@CraigScottNDP (on the subcommittee that blocked M408)

@nathancullen

@NycoleTurmelNPD

@Armstrong_MP (on the subcommittee that blocked M408)

@ParmGill

@TomLukiwski

@CostasMenegakis

@ScottReidCPC (on the subcommittee that blocked M408)

@pmharper

This is cool. This link allows you to send a form letter, or your own letter, to your own MP and the members of the committee who will decide the fate of M-408.

Courtesy of We Need A Law, I’d encourage all PWPL readers to use it.

More info can be found here:

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We’ve been writing about the “Vagina Warriors” for over a week now and, in particular, about Mr. Ethan Jackson who dressed up like a vagina to shout down MP Stephen Woodworth.

Rex Murphy weighed in yesterday, and his article is hilarious:

And was not his — sculpture? puppet? tent? — a feeble thing? Those who’ve scorched their retinas with actually viewing it, either in person or in the news, unanimously agree it was, both architecturally and structurally, unpersuasive. One lady I spoke too confessed she first believed it was a large peanut, and kept checking to see where the “top hat” was.

Those of us who belong to the realist school of vagina impersonation, who believe private parts should be at all costs mute (and we are legion), were seriously nonplussed. A voluble vagina — and this one was chatty to the point of incontinence — was seen as a fanciful add-on, an app if you will, that seriously distorted the fidelity that should exist between art and its object. Not to mention that the implicit ventriloquism on display was feverish and amateur. Stay away from Yuk Yuks young man, unless they’re looking for a janitor.

Read on.

New York magazine recently ran an article entitled “The Retro Wife“:

This is not the retreat from high-­pressure workplaces of a previous generation but rather a more active awakening to the virtues of the way things used to be. Patricia Ireland, who lives on the Upper West Side, left her job as a wealth adviser in 2010 after her third child was born. Now, even though her husband, also in finance, has seen his income drop since the recession, she has no plans to go back to work. She feels it’s a privilege to manage her children’s lives—“not just what they do, but what they believe, how they talk to other children, what kind of story we read together. That’s all dictated by me. Not by my nanny or my babysitter.” Her husband’s part of the arrangement is to go to work and deposit his paycheck in the joint account. “I’m really grateful that my husband and I have fallen into traditional gender roles without conflict,” says Ireland. “I’m not bitter that I’m the one home and he goes to work. And he’s very happy that he goes to work.”

A lot of the new neo-traditionalists watched their own mothers strain under the second shift, and they regard Sandberg’s lower-wattage mini-mes, rushing off to Big Jobs and back home with a wad of cash for the nanny, with something like pity. They don’t want a return to the confines of the fifties; they treasure their freedoms, but see a third way. When Slaughter tours the lecture circuit, she is often approached, she says, by women younger than 30 who say, “I don’t see a senior person in my world whose life I want.” In researching her 2010 book The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work and Family, New York University sociologist Kathleen Gerson found that, in spite of all the gains young women have made, about a quarter say they would choose a traditional domestic arrangement over the independence that comes with a career, believing not just “that only a parent can provide an acceptable level of care” but also that “they are the only parent available for the job.”

The harried, stressed, multiarmed Kali goddess, with a laptop in one hand and homemade organic baby food in the ­other, has been replaced with a domestic Madonna, content with her choices and placid in her sphere…

There are a number of interesting research findings referred to in the article. It’s worth a read.

An article in Maclean’s expresses the concern well:

Here is where Mr. Warawa might get the support of those who otherwise oppose his views on abortion. Regardless of how one feels about his motion, regardless of how uncomfortable it might make the leadership of Mr. Warawa’s party, every MP and everyone who is represented by an MP should be concerned if Mr. Warawa is being prevented from putting a motion before the House simply because some people oppose its sentiment or would rather it not be brought forward. Never mind the very fraught matter of abortion, this now threatens to become a question about the nature of parliamentary democracy and the independence of MPs.

This to me is the heart of the matter; the question of whether the rules were bent to put the kaibosh on this motion. It seems clear that M-408 passed the votability requirements. So what happened?

We’re pro-life women, yet were not severe and angry-looking! Shocking! And even if Parliament won’t permit a democratic debate about sex-selection abortion and discrimination against women, you can bet that we will.

(Andrea Mrozek, Faye Sonier, Rebecca Richmond of National Campus Life Network)

Thanks to Rebecca for the awesome DefendGirls.ca t-shirts.

Did you know Andrea Mrozek is an award-winning model? She won the 2011 Ugly Christmas Sweater Contest and left the competition in her dust. Below, she models Blue Steel.

She recently confided in me that Zoolander’s Blue Steel is her main modelling inspiration. She clearly nailed the look. You go girl!

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Andrea adds: For the sake of accuracy, our readers should know it was in 2012 that I won an ugly sweater competition. This big win was won largely through use of my Blue Steel look on the ugly sweater runway.