Then last month, Wilson-Raybould resigned from the cabinet, alleging that Trudeau and his office had for months interfered inappropriately in a prosecution effort against SNC-Lavalin, a company employing thousands of Canadians that had been charged with corruption and fraud in connection with Libyan business contracts. The prime minister’s office was pushing for an unorthodox workaround, whereby SNC would get off with a fine, an admission of wrongdoing, and a pledge to do better. When Wilson-Raybould refused, the prime minister’s office, she says, didn’t take no for an answer. Wilson-Raybould says the pressure had been consistent and sustained until she was demoted in a cabinet shuffle in January. She quit the following month, and another prominent female colleague followed soon after.

At first pass, the SNC-Lavalin affair might not seem like an issue with a feminist underpinning. But the problem with running on a feminist agenda is that when two of your strongest female cabinet ministers resign, you face something of a feminist reckoning. Trudeau has earned international accolades for his vocal support of women’s issues; here at home, he has been criticized for virtue signaling. And the question of what it really means to have gender parity—not just in the cabinet or government, but at work, at home, and in society more broadly—is something for which Trudeau’s brand of feminism might not be able to provide a satisfying answer.

From across the aisle, one Conservative MP, Michelle Rempel, put it plainly. “Trudeau came out and asked for strong women, and he got them,” she told me in an interview last week.

Accounts of why Wilson-Raybould was originally demoted diverge, depending on whom you choose to believe. She says she was moved out of her post for standing on principle. Trudeau’s office says there was no pressure, that Wilson-Raybould simply interpreted their interactions “differently.” The prime minister first tried to move her to the indigenous-affairs portfolio, a shortsighted idea that would have placed the country’s most prominent female indigenous politician in charge of legislation, the Indian Act, that has for years perpetuated the country’s history of colonialism. When she understandably turned that offer down, he moved her to veteran affairs.

After Wilson-Raybould testified to a parliamentary committee in February, her colleague Jane Philpott resigned from her own cabinet post, as the president of the Treasury Board, in solidarity. In Philpott’s resignation letter, which she made public this month, she wrote that she’d lost confidence in Trudeau’s moral authority to govern. Since then, another rookie female member of Parliament, Celina Caesar-Chavannes, has announced that she won’t seek reelection. Some observers suggest more resignations might come before the month is over.