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Did our feminist prime minister just send Maryam Monsef back to the kitchen?

Justin Trudeau may not have stripped her barefoot but he did demote her.

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Or at least that was the prevailing wisdom earlier this week when it was announced Monsef was being shuffled from the democratic institutions file to status of women. It was said over and over that Monsef was demoted for her poor performance on the electoral reform file, and there’s no doubt her tenure in the post was ineffective. She mangled the message and belittled a parliamentary committee’s work to the point the prime minister told the Toronto Star editorial board she should apologize for her “outburst” when responding to the report in early December.

Conventional political lore is that status of women is a nothing ministry — which says a lot when it’s supposed to represent more than half the population.

“It says a lot about how we regard women’s issues (like pay equity, child care and violence against women) that it was sort of seen as natural that status of women is less important than democratic institutions,” said Erin Tolley, assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto. This despite the fact status of women “has reach all over government.”