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Well, that’s it, then. Apparently, Justin Trudeau is a fake feminist.

It’s all over the online commentariat. Conservative MPs Lisa Raitt, Candice Bergen and Michelle Rempel have declared that he is. Daughters of the Vote in Ottawa recently turned their backs on him (or at least 15 per cent did). And conservative columnists Licia Corbella and Margaret Wente have condemned his hypocrisy in expelling from the Liberal caucus what Corbella calls “two strong women … of conscience and conviction.”

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The notion is neat and sweet, and it goes down very smoothly. It’s also hogwash.

Try as I might to discern Trudeau’s dark misogynous side — I say this as a lifelong self-declared feminist — what I see is a leader who is probably about as feminist as he’s ever been, despite all the nasty chaos of the Jody Wilson-Raybould/Jane Philpott affair.

Maybe it depends on definitions. Although my feminism was once dismissed as Second Wave and generationally out-of-touch, I keep framing it within an egalitarian context, women and men on equal footing. For me, it means righting historical and ongoing wrongs, such as gender-based violence, financial disparities, political and social imbalances … the list is long and familiar.