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Mostly, it’s also unnecessary. If there are women in the aviation task force and support troops being sent to Mali, then of course they should go. If there aren’t, then so be it.

But of course for this government, that’s never enough.

Photo by Justin Tang/The Canadian Press

Thus, when the mission was announced, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, surely the smartest and most capable of Trudeau’s ministers, was obliged to remind the planet of the Elsie Initiative for Women in Peace Operations.

It’s apparently a Canada-led project, named after a Second World War mechanical engineer named Elsie McGill, “to test new ways of eliminating barriers to the participation of women police and military in peace operations.” I quote directly from the government’s press release of the day, because I’ve no real idea what on earth it actually means. And though it was mentioned in conjunction with the Mali mission announcement, it’s unclear if it will be part of that. In this regard, Freeland’s speech earlier this month to the UN didn’t much help.

It’s not as though women, born or made, in Canada are systematically oppressed or subjugated. Women who want to serve in the military can, and do; equality of opportunity is all that can be reasonably asked of a country, and that exists. And it’s not as though most people have time or inclination to worry about their pronoun of choice, least of all to demand that they be addressed by it.

This may not be a perfect country, but for women, it comes close enough that evolution, not revolution, is all that’s needed.

Most of us muddle along just fine, as indeed do the people who run the Service Ontario and Service Canada desks. The last thing they, or the rest of us, need or want is more gendered language instruction or social engineering from this strangely obsessed government.

• Email: cblatchford@postmedia.com | Twitter: blatchkiki