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The media is its own universe. It is not exactly homogeneous but it operates within a shared and actually quite narrow mentality. It resides in its own award-giving world and has an unhealthy appreciation of its own centrality to politics and to life. It would be a fine thing to wander outside that gated, privileged community.

They’re inside the world they are interrogating

There are all sorts of ways to constitute a panel that have nothing to do with the modish and now quite tiresome fascination of putting “women” as a qualifier. And to avoid as well this horrible detour into dead-end identity politics.

It would be fun to have a farmer of either sex (or even of the multiple gender options that are now available) to talk about canola. Someone from Prince George or Port aux Choix to speak of rural concerns, a logger, trucker, sales clerk, maybe even a hotel chambermaid to pass on to leadership candidates what life is like where real life is lived. Accountants, oil workers, women from the fish plants, immigrant taxi drivers, Aboriginals from the high north, a teacher, some people from an old age home. The press talks diversity but there are days its seems it really doesn’t know what it is.

In fact, to take hotel housekeepers as a modern example, here’s an “interest” that all the people — politicians — who stay in so many hotels, never seem to mention.

The press talks diversity but … it seems it really doesn’t know what it is

They are almost all women, almost all immigrants, and almost all some of the most pleasant and cheerful people one could hope to meet. It would be a wonderful thing to hear one of these workers tell the prime-ministers-to-be what their concerns are, what their lives are like on the lower ledges of society with no champions, even among the most overtly feminist and progressive. But like the sales clerks, the nannies, the women at the corner-store counters — these are all possibly a couple of glass ceilings too low.

I’ll end here. This is a great moment for feminism in journalism. And it is good to see it starts at the very top, where it is almost certainly least needed.