It might surprise you to learn that in the progressive city of Vancouver there remains a recreational athletic league that prohibits women from wearing shorts. The league is the Vancouver Women's Field Hockey Association; the uniform a lycra miniskirt.

The Vancouver Women's Field Hockey Association operates on public fields rented by the City of Vancouver and is the only women's field hockey league in the Greater Vancouver Region. In this league the rule is: wear a skirt or don't play, and I can tell you from experience it is strictly enforced.

I started blogging a few months ago because I'd had enough of the smear campaign against feminism that has been underway for many years. The #WomenAgainstFeminism phenomenon on Tumblr, wherein women post photographs of themselves holding signs that state why they do not need feminism, like, "I don't need feminism because my self-worth is not directly tied to the size of my victim complex," is one example. Or the recent Time magazine article which included "feminist" in a list of annoying words that readers could vote to ban from public discourse.

I recently attended a talk by the Right Honourable Kim Campbell, Canada's first and only woman Prime Minister. The talk was called, "Women's Voices: What difference do they make?" It was about women's unique life experiences and the consequences of ignoring women’s perspectives in politics, business and media.

I had never heard Campbell speak before, so I was eager to attend. I was disappointed to see that few Vancouverites felt the same way. Despite Vancouver’s population of over 600,000 people, the auditorium at Simon Fraser University’s Harbour Centre was only half full. To be fair, the event was not effectively promoted. Nonetheless, I was dismayed to see poor attendance for a talk about the importance of women's voices.

But I digress.

Today is Remembrance Day, a day we remember the men and women who have served and continue to serve our country during times of war, conflict and peace; men and women who sacrificed their lives "for their homes and families and friends, for a collection of traditions they cherished and a future they believed in."

We often take for granted the values and freedoms we enjoy as Canadians: the freedom of speech, the freedom to dissent, the right to privacy, the right to choose our government. Canadians who went off to war, did so in the belief that those values were being threatened. And so they went to fight in distant lands to defend those values.