International Women’s Day was yesterday – since it fell on a Sunday we’re entitled to celebrate it today.
Let’s start with the obvious.
Israel’s IDF killed more than 28,000 Palestinian women and girls from Oct. 2023 to May 2025. Israel murdered at least one woman and one girl on average every hour of Israel’s war on Gaza. More recent evidence suggests that number can be tripled.
The murdered women have children. In these conditions, with fathers themselves killed, or being tortured in Israeli prisons, the children become orphans. The number of orphaned children in Gaza stands at 56,000 or 7% of children under 16. By contrast, in Canada less than 1% (0.8%) of children live in “out-of-home” care because they have no parents.
Let’s look at last week’s US/Israeli bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, Iran. With 168 people – mainly school girls — dead and nearly 100 injured, this was the worst “mass casualty event” of the war so far on Iran’s civilians. Unesco calls it a “grave violation of international law.” Neither Israel nor the US has yet to take responsibility for it.
Israeli drones have been bombing Lebanon intermittently since Oct 2023. This week alone, the Israel killed 83 children, and 42 women – out of more than 394 dead. . In the one year from Oct 2023 to Nov 2024, Israel massacred more than 736 women and 248 children in Lebanon—out of 3900 people in total.
The Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability defines armed conflict’s effects on femicide:
“Both state and non-state actors perpetrate physical, sexual, and psychological violence against women and girls as a ‘weapon of war’. Such actions are typically intended to punish or dehumanize women and girls and to persecute the community to which they belong. They are also used as a method of instilling fear, domination, and control. Targeted killings are usually premeditated with lethal force intentionally used against selected victims.”
And women’s lot while not at war?
When at peace…
According to the United Nations, women today have only 64% of the legal rights that men hold worldwide. In core areas of life, including work, money, safety, family, property, mobility, business, and retirement – the law systematically disadvantages women. .
This has played out in Canada in these ways:
In Canada, 2024 statistics reveal that Nunavut, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia had the highest rates of killings of women & girls involving male accused. In that year, across the country at least 187 women and girls were killed by male assailants, in 77% of the cases by a partner or former partner, or family member.
In Nova Scotia, the new Substack newsletter The “NS Files, Unpacking feminicide, Exposing systems and Honouring victims” notes that
“44 percent of women who have been in intimate relationships report experiencing abuse. More than 30 percent of Nova Scotians report experiencing intimate partner violence at some point in their lives. Frontline organizations report that 86 percent of domestic violence cases they handle are considered high-risk for potential fatality. Police data shows that women and girls in NS represent nearly four out of five victims of intimate partner violence.”
In Sept 2024, NS premier Tim Houston first rejected the opposition bill to declare intimate partner violence an epidemic in NS, then changed his mind “in 20 minutes” and agreed to pass it. In Oct 2025 Houston fired his own Attorney-General Becky Druhan – she was dropped from cabinet. Druhan, one of the few Tory cabinet members with a law degree, had initiated the Ministers’ Table on Gender-Based Violence. Be The Peace Institute, a community group dedicated to ending gender-based violence (GBV) in NS, stated in a letter to the Premier
“… that you dispatched Minister Druhan from the role because her leadership and the dedicated, collaborative and serious action on the epidemic of GBV, [shows it] is not actually aligned with your priorities or your declaration of IPV as an epidemic that you care about. You have jeopardized the positive momentum of the work that was beginning to rebuild trust between community and government, potentially sabotaging the critical work ahead.”
Tories cut more than $130 million in community funding
The NS Files poses this question after premier Tim Houston tabled a budget for 2026-27 that proposes to cut more than $130 million in community funding much of which goes to helping at risk communities – such as women and families. NS Files asks, “What does it mean to declare an epidemic while simultaneously weakening the systems designed to prevent it?”
And we know that the money is there but it is used to prop up the military, provide tens of thousands of new jobs in the war industry for the boys and be a bit player in ongoing wars against civilians. Journalist Nora Loreto reports
“Canadian military equipment is currently being used in Gaza by the Israeli military, against Venezuelan fishermen by the U.S. military, and in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by federal immigration agents using Canadian-made armored vehicles. Canadian arms exported to the United Arab Emirates have been used in Sudan by the Rapid Support Forces, and there is photographic evidence that some light armored vehicles that Canada exported to Saudi Arabia have ended up in battle in Yemen.”
And the last days’ news revealed that no one knows how many in the Canadian military worked with – or sat in the room alongside – the US warmongers in the planning and dispatching of bombs on Iran.
We come back to wars on Iran, Gaza, the West Bank…
The list goes on.
But the big players in Europe, in the UK and the US are pushing the war agenda for all it’s worth. Even on International Women’s Day, there was no quarter for women – and children. Canada’s PM, other politicians, the heads of corporate Canada and their acolytes in the universities, and other institutional life in this country will never turn down profiting from war. Canada’s budget provided for $82 billion in new defence spending from Budget 2025, a 50% boost in defence exports, 240% industry revenue growth, 125,000 new jobs, and over half a trillion dollars in defence-related activity by 2035.
And the war on women continues to heat up – in war and peace.
Another ruined dinner party... 