Women and the New Parliament

This entry is the third in my continuing series on issues that have been pointed out by the most recent elections. This discussion will focus on the pathetic level of representation that Canada has of women in the House of Commons.

In the election of 2006 , of 308 MPs elected, 66 of them were women, or 21%. This put Canada in the lower tier of long-standing democracies for representation of women in the legislative branch of government. In the election just concluded, the number of women elected has increased slightly t0 68, or 22%. Embarrassingly, this is a historic high for Canada in the representation of women. The greatest absolute number of female MPs elected in the Conservatives with twenty-three, but this is simply a function of the fact that they have a caucus twice as large as the Liberals, three times as large as the BQ and three-and-a-half times as large as that of the NDP. The NDP has the greatest percentage of female members in the caucus, at approximately 36% (twelve members out of thirty-seven).

This situation is, frankly, pathetic. Canada is a country that has equality for women enshrined in the Constitution, and yet we can't seem to manage the election of women to the House of Commons in anything like their proportion to the population. Many other countries do much better, and some (like Rwanda) have even managed to achieve greater than 50% representation of women, giving women representation proportional to their share of the population.

Now, I'm not going to suggest that this problem in Canada is due to misogyny, but there are two important factors. The first is latent sexism in our society that fosters impressions of women as less capable or less devoted. I don't think, in most people, that this is a conscious prejudice, but rather an unconscious impression fostered by societal conditioning. The second factor is the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system. 'What?' I hear you ask. It works like this: a system of FPTP elections creates a situation in which the candidates nominated in the individual ridings must be those deemed to be most electable. Because of the first factor above, parties tend to believe that women are less electable than men, and in consequence, fewer women are nominated and of necessity fewer women are elected.

This problem is not one that is easily fixable, and both of the solutions require a ton of work, but I think both of them need to be done, and both are doable. First off, we need to work on wiping out the latest sexism in society. This means stamping on sexism wherever it occurs, whether it be in exploitative advertising or the "pink-collar ghetto." When we do this, it will help increase the representation of women within the FPTP system. Secondly, we need to change that FPTP system. In a PR system, the parties could much more easily achieve proportional representation of women through electoral lists. When the two means were combined, it would be a set of potent steps to address the problem of the under-representation of women.

In an ideal world, and I do believe that we should work toward an ideal world even if we don't get there (because you can't get there if you don't try), women would be represented exactly in proportion to their population, and this would be accomplished voluntarily by the political parties, both through their electoral lists and through their nomination processes. However until we get there, we first need to work on squashing sexism, and changing our political system. If we can bring an end to sexism, then any number of things in society will improve, from violence against women to the prosperity of society (since more women with low incomes will earn more money, injecting it back into the economy rather than concentrating it in the hands of old, rich white men who will put it in Swiss accounts and dodge taxes).

We can all do our bit, and hopefully when the next election rolls around, we will see a significant increase in the number of women elected. And hopefully a couple elections from now there will be some real momentum toward electoral reform.

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