A growing movement is quietly reshaping how society thinks about women’s roles, power, and equality. In Canada, this cultural shift is now reflected in policy.
In November 2025, the Canadian government announced that it would no longer keep a feminist foreign policy. The announcement and action was done in such a nonchalant way that it showed a lack of prioritization of gender equality.
As Prime Minister Mark Carney stated at a G20 press conference in Johannesburg on Nov. 23, 2025:
“Yes we have that aspect… but I wouldn’t describe our foreign policy as feminist foreign policy.”
When asked directly, he confirmed that Canada “no longer has a feminist foreign policy.”
Under the previous Liberal government’s Feminist International Assistance Policy, Canada centered women’s rights, economic participation, and gender equality in global development. Global Affairs Canada’s “Feminist International Assistance Policy recognizes that supporting gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls is the best way to build a more peaceful, more inclusive and more prosperous world.”
Today, the reversal is already visible. Programs in Ukraine that supported women’s leadership in areas like landmine clearance have ended without commitments for continued funding. The HALO Trust confirmed that Canada’s $5-million grant ended in August 2025, and that they “currently have no ongoing Canadian funding for Ukraine”, despite the program supporting women miners and a Gender Working Group.
The Canadian government’s pledge of $660 million over five years to WAGE (Women & Gender Equality) sounds encouraging until the numbers are broken down. Advocacy groups have pointed out that yearly allocations will actually fall. The National Association of Women and the Law notes: “This represents a significant drop in annual spending from the current fiscal year.”
They add that the Women’s Program allocation of $76.5 million per year is “half of the $150 million recommended by the feminist sector.”
This threatens programs related to economic security, gender-based violence prevention, and support for racialized, newcomer, Indigenous, and 2SLGBTQI+ communities.
Culture Shift
While these changes are occurring, a niche audience online, mostly on TikTok and Instagram, has popularized the aesthetics of “feminine energy,” “soft life” minimalism, and the “trad wife” aesthetic, which for anyone wondering, stands for “traditional wife” identity. As one user puts it, tradwives are “Women who value being a traditional wife, subscribing to homemaking and conventional gender roles.”
This type of lifestyle content often romanticizes submission, domestic dependence, and rigid gender roles. It encourages women to shrink their ambitions and retreat from the workplace in favour of curated domestic perfection. The Guardian’s reporting on the “femosphere” notes that many of these influencers encourage women to: “Embrace feminine energy” so that “a man should provide for a woman financially.”
This trend mirrors conservative political movements in the United States that celebrate women as trophy wives and symbols of tradition, rather than equal participants in society. As Vanessa Scaringi for Time Magazine writes “The influencer-backed trend of soft girls and tradwives promotes curated messages around dependency and feminine roles that aren’t exactly rooted in reality.”
When government policy begins to reflect this cultural mood, the message is clear: gender equality is taking a back seat.
The rollback of feminist foreign policy and reduced WAGE funding suggest that gender equality is no longer seen as a priority, and that pushing women back into idealized but limiting roles is becoming socially acceptable. The alignment between political action and these online narratives is not accidental. Each emboldens the other.
Why is this important?
Because policies shape culture. And culture shapes behaviour, opportunities, and the next generation’s understanding of their own potential.
When liberals voted for Mark Carney, we expected that fundamentals that shape our culture and society, human issues we care about such as the climate, gender equality, and the economy, to be the government’s focus.
And while he can tell you that one of his priorities has been the economy, taking away gender rights and minimizing global issues can actually have a negative impact on the economy. There is an obvious disconnect between the government’s priorities and what we hoped for in voting for the Liberals.
Government policies shape and influence these trends and end up showing only one side of the conversation. They do not educate young women about the options available, nor do they support the full spectrum of choices women should be able to make.
This feminine-energy narrative is so glamourized on social media that if you were a girl or woman wanting the opposite, it can be viewed as unattractive or lesser than. On TikTok and Instagram, #tradwife is trending, where women are documenting, curating, and editing to perfection a lifestyle of the traditional wife whose life goal is to be at home and dependent on her husband financially.
This is all done without the mention of how hard this lifestyle is to maintain in our current economy, or the fact that many of these influencers are actually earning income online while promoting not working.
In her article, Tradwife vs. tradwife for Vanity Fair, Erin Vanderhoof discusses how this lifestyle romanticizes dependence, while also ignoring economic precarity for women. “The people pushing the tradwife life have never lived in poverty… They don’t know what it’s like to be a woman who then loses everything.”
Can a niche community on social media amplify making these choices while society still upholds gender equality? It all seems lighthearted until you realize that policies that once prioritized women no longer do.
How can we maintain and improve gender equality when our culture is losing its meaning and it’s not at the forefront of our government’s priorities?
If feminism is about moving forward and constant progress, when we diminish and take away our own rights in society, we take away opportunities women have fought to create.
Conservative liberalism
Canada needs to restate an explicit commitment to feminist foreign policy. Gender equality must again be a central principle in international assistance, supported by transparent reporting and measurable targets. This is essential for maintaining global credibility and ensuring that women and girls remain at the center of humanitarian and development work.
Canada also needs to restore and expand annual WAGE funding. Gender-equity organizations cannot operate effectively on inconsistent or declining resources. Increased investment is required to support women’s economic empowerment, community-based violence prevention, and programming for marginalized communities.
Gender-based analysis must also be fully integrated into federal budgeting. Equity should not be an optional perspective. It must be a required step in shaping policy and distributing resources in ways that close, rather than widen, gender gaps.
These steps are necessary if Canada wants to uphold its stated values of fairness and equality. Without them, policy will continue to drift toward cultural trends that romanticize inequality and pull women backward under the guise of glitz, glamour, and tradition.
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