Non-inclusive language makes me angry
I was doing a little light reading about Bill C-51, “An Act respecting foods, therapeutic products and cosmetic” and noticed this in the FAQ from the Government of Canada’s “Healthy Canadians” website:
Mothers? Really? You couldn’t go with something more inclusive like “parents”? Fathers raise kids too, you know, and sometimes, they give them vitamin C.
Also, DIN stands for “drug identification number“, so “DIN numbers” is redundant.
You’re right, but you might want to give Health Canada a break. They have been fighting the good fight against an unscrupulous supplement company
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-05-28.html#feature
that is fear mongering against the Bill. I hope that, as a doctor and science educator, you would be more angry about the lies and propaganda being spread by Truehope. If you want to critique a website that is an assault on people’s intelligence, you should go to the StopC51 site and pick any of their statements. Their disingenuity, overexaggeration and cherry-picking aren’t quite as mild as the points you highlighted above.
Err, I think my comment got eaten. If it gets posted again, I apologize.
The good part (and the only good part) about Stephen Harper calling the election is that Bill C-51 died on the table.
http://micheladrien.blogspot.com/2008/09/federal-bills-that-died-on-order-paper.html
Ditto for Bill C-10 (film tax credits) and Bill C-61 (copyright “reform”)
@Barry – I’ll have to check that site out. My comments here are meant exclusively to criticize word usage and are not a comment on the substance of the Bill. Which I’m only just now starting to read (as I don’t want to form an opinion on based only on second hand reports). Which, as Rebecca points out, may be pointless as the Bill is going to die right now due to the election call. But which may get re-introduced, so perhaps is still worth checking out.
I thought there was a super politically correct term that didn’t even involve genetics? Ward or something…
At least for a while the preferred term in Danish kid shows was “your grown-ups” (as in “maybe your grown-ups remember when…”) to accommodate for the many types of blended families.
I believe “ward” refers to the kid rather that the adult. Maybe “guardian”? I kind of like “your grown-ups” – it does accommodate people raises by parents and/or step-parents and/or grandparents and/or…. Hopefully every kid has at least one “grown-up” taking care of them!
That’s so quite insane… why in this day and age would a government like Canada’s use such 1950s myth of the nuclear family language?! Hmmn… I guess it could be the influence of the Conservative government. But more than likely it’s just ignorance.
“DIN numbers:” ha ha! Don’t send them your SIN number or let anyone see you using your PIN number at the ATM machine.