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Gender representation has been a significant issue in Canadian politics.

The first woman elected to the House of Commons of Canada was Agnes Macphail, in the 1921 election. Although female representation in politics has increased since then, and several political parties have identified increasing the number of female candidates as an organizational and political goal, no major Canadian political party to date has achieved gender parity in the number of candidates nominated for election.

Political parties have occasionally achieved balanced representation in their elected caucuses, but mainly as a byproduct of a party collapse – for example, in the 1993 election, the Progressive Conservatives achieved gender parity in their elected caucus, but only by virtue of electing just two Members of Parliament nationwide and losing official party status. At various times, parties have also had 100 per cent female representation in their caucuses, but again only by virtue of having a caucus that consisted of just one or two members. The Yukon New Democratic Party attained the distinction, in the Yukon general election, 2011, of becoming the first party with official party status ever to have an elected caucus that was more than 50 per cent female, with four women and two men elected as MLAs.

The Alberta New Democratic Party attained the distinction, in the Alberta general election, 2015, of coming the closest that a governing party caucus has ever come to attaining gender balance — the party's caucus has 25 women and 28 men, representing a caucus that is 47 per cent female.[1]

As of 2010, Canada ranked 50th in the world for women's participation in politics, with women holding just 23 per cent of the seats in federal, provincial and territorial legislatures.[2] At the federal level, Canada was tied with Mauritania for 49th place.[3]

Women as federal representatives

See also: Women in the 42nd Canadian Parliament

In the 1921 election Agnes Macphail became the first woman elected to the Canadian House of Commons. Four other women – Harriet Dick, Rose Mary Henderson, Elizabeth Bethune Kiely and Harriet Dunlop Prenter – also stood as candidates in the same election, although they were not successful.

Macphail was reelected in every subsequent election until 1940. She was the only woman in the House of Commons until 1935, when she was joined by Martha Black. In the 1940 election, Macphail was defeated and Black did not stand as a candidate, but Dorise Nielsen was elected, and Cora Taylor Casselman was elected in a 1941 byelection to succeed her late husband. On March 13, 1944, Casselman became the first woman ever to preside over the House of Commons as acting Speaker, on an occasion when speaker James Allison Glen had to briefly step away from the chair and deputy speaker Joseph-Arthur Bradette was unavailable.[4]

Nielsen and Casselman were both defeated in 1945, but Gladys Strum was elected that year. Strum, in turn, was defeated in 1949, the only election after 1921 in which no female candidates were elected to Parliament at all. However, Ellen Fairclough was elected to the House in a by-election the following year.

In the subsequent 1953 election, four women – Fairclough, Margaret Aitken, Sybil Bennett and Ann Shipley – were elected to Parliament. Every subsequent election has had at least two women elected to Parliament, except 1968 when Grace MacInnis was the only woman elected.

Shipley became, in 1955, the first woman in Canadian history to introduce the formal motion to accept a Speech from the Throne.[5] Fairclough became, in 1957, the first woman appointed to the Cabinet of Canada; she was also named as Acting Prime Minister for two days in 1958 while John Diefenbaker was out of the country on a state visit, the first woman ever to be given that duty.

The number of women elected to the House reached double digits for the first time in the 1979 election, when 10 women were elected.

In 1980, Jeanne Sauvé was appointed the first female Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons.

Federally, the 2015 election holds the record for the most female candidates in a single election, with 533 women running for office that year.[6] Prior to 2015, the record had been held by the 1993 election, an election which was unusual for a record number of smaller upstart parties running alongside the established ones — of the 476 female candidates that year, 76 of them ran for parties which had entirely ceased to exist by the time of the subsequent 1997 election, in which the number of female candidates retreated to 408.[6] In terms of women elected to the House of Commons, the 2015 election also holds the record, with 88 successful female candidates.[6] As of 2015, 314 women overall have served in the House of Commons.

Of the major federal political parties, the New Democratic Party has nominated the most female candidates in every election since its creation, except in the 1962 election, when it tied with the Progressive Conservatives, and the 2008 election, when the Liberals nominated the most female candidates for the first time in their history. The Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada nominated more women than the New Democrats in 1979 and 1980, although they are a minor party who have never won a seat in the House of Commons. Between the 1935 and 1958 elections, the top ranking was consistently held by either the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation or the Labor-Progressive Party.

The New Democratic Party caucuses in the 39th Canadian Parliament, the 41st Canadian Parliament and the 42nd Canadian Parliament were all 40 per cent female, the closest that a party with official party status has ever come to attaining full gender balance. The party's slate of candidates in the 2015 election was also 42 per cent female, with 145 women constituting the largest slate of female candidates ever nominated by a single political party in a federal election.[6]

Leadership

Kathryn Cholette of the Green Party was the first woman ever to win the leadership of a federal political party, and Audrey McLaughlin of the New Democratic Party was the first woman to win the leadership of a party with seats in the House of Commons.

Canada has had one woman Prime Minister, Kim Campbell. She became Prime Minister before the 1993 federal election by winning the leadership of the governing Progressive Conservatives, but lost the subsequent general election. No woman has yet been elected Prime Minister of Canada in a general election.

Two women, Sheila Copps and Anne McLellan, have served as Deputy Prime Minister, although this is largely a ceremonial post with very little actual power.

Several women, including Mary Walker-Sawka, Rosemary Brown and Flora MacDonald, had previously run for the leadership of federal political parties. MacDonald unwittingly lent her name to a political phenomenon known as "Flora Syndrome" when even some of her own committed delegates at the Progressive Conservative leadership election, 1976 failed to vote for her, a loss of support which many commentators attributed to sexism.[7]

Three women, Deborah Grey, Nycole Turmel, and Rona Ambrose, have served as Leader of the Opposition. All of the women served as interim leaders of their parties during leadership campaigns; however, Grey was considered only an acting Leader of the Opposition.

Three other women have served as leaders of political parties in the House of Commons: Alexa McDonough, who succeeded McLaughlin as leader of the New Democratic Party in 1995; Elsie Wayne, who served as interim leader of the Progressive Conservatives in 1998; and Elizabeth May, who entered the House of Commons in the 2011 election as the leader and first elected MP of the Green Party.

Two smaller political parties which currently do not hold any seats in the House of Commons are also led by women:

This dearth of women in political leadership may, in some ways, be attributable to women's general exclusion from important cabinet positions that are seen as stepping stones to leadership. Women were largely excluded from Canadian cabinets until the 1970s.[8] Only in rare instances do women comprise a significant proportion of Canadian cabinets, as in the case of then-Ontario Premier Bob Rae's first cabinet in 1990, in which 11 of 26 ministers were women.[9] As of July 2013, the Harper Cabinet had 11 female ministers in a cabinet of 39, though most held minor portfolios;[10][11] in October 2015, Justin Trudeau became the first prime minister to appoint a fully gender-balanced cabinet with equal numbers of both men and women.

Senate

The first woman appointed to serve in the Senate of Canada was Cairine Wilson, in 1930.

Three women – Joyce Fairbairn, Sharon Carstairs and Marjory LeBreton – have served as Leader of the Government in the Senate. One woman, Céline Hervieux-Payette, has held the position of Leader of the Opposition in the Senate.

One woman, Muriel McQueen Fergusson, has served as Speaker of the Senate, a position she occupied from 1972 to 1974.

The Famous Five, a group of five women whose activism originally secured the right of women to be named to the Senate, were posthumously named as honorary senators in 2009.[12] The women – Emily Murphy, Henrietta Muir Edwards, Nellie McClung, Irene Parlby and Louise McKinney – are the only people in the history of the Senate to be given this honour.

Women as provincial/territorial premiers

Main article: List of female premiers in Canada

A total of eleven women have served or are currently serving as the premier of a province or territory in Canada. The first female premier in Canadian history was Rita Johnston, who served as Premier of British Columbia for seven months in 1991 after she won the leadership of the governing Social Credit Party, but the party was defeated in the subsequent general election.

To date, the most common path for a woman to becoming premier or prime minister has been to win the leadership of the party that was already in power, thus immediately becoming the incumbent first minister without a general election. Women who attained a leadership position in this manner have, however, had a mixed record of success or failure in their first general elections as leader; Campbell and Johnston both failed to win reelection, while several other women have succeeded. Only three women — Pat Duncan in Yukon, Pauline Marois in Quebec, and Rachel Notley in Alberta — have become premier of a province or territory by leading their party to victory in a general election in which they were not already the incumbent premier. Duncan was elected in 2000, Marois in 2012, and Notley in 2015.

Women achieved a significant breakthrough in the early 2010s, when a number of women won the leadership of the governing political parties in their respective provinces within a short time of each other. Several journalists christened 2011 as "The Year of the Woman" because of the breakthrough;[13] by September 2012, in fact, fully half of all Canadian provinces had female premiers. By early 2014, however, two of the premiers had resigned amid controversy, which some analysts attributed in part to gender issues. According to political scientist Brenda O'Neill of the University of Calgary, "I think there still is a double standard that’s applied to women versus men in terms of how they lead, the degree of support they are given and the degree to which is extended to them when they make mistakes."[14]

Nellie Cournoyea in the Northwest Territories and Eva Aariak in Nunavut have served as territorial premiers through a non-partisan consensus government system in which they were selected by their colleagues in the legislative assembly rather than by leading a political party to victory.

To date, six of Canada's ten provinces have had a female premier, but only British Columbia and Alberta have had more than one. All three of Canada's territories have had one female premier each. As of May 2015, Canada has three women who are currently serving as provincial or territorial premiers.

Upon winning the 2013 Ontario Liberal Party leadership election, Kathleen Wynne also earned the distinction of being the first out lesbian to hold a first ministership in Canada.

Women as provincial and territorial representatives

Main article: Women in Canadian provincial and territorial legislatures

At the provincial level, the first woman elected to a provincial legislature was Louise McKinney, who was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Alberta in 1917. Another woman, Roberta MacAdams, was elected in the same election – however, McKinney was elected to a conventional electoral district, while MacAdams was elected to a special temporary district allotted to soldiers in combat during World War I, and thus McKinney's victory was certified first.

The first woman to serve as a provincial cabinet minister was Mary Ellen Smith, who was elected to the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia in 1918 and was appointed to the cabinet in 1921. McKinney and Smith were also the first women in the entire British Empire to hold those distinctions, and MacAdams became the first woman in both Canada and the British Empire to introduce a piece of legislation for debate.[15] Nancy Hodges became the first woman in both Canada and the Commonwealth of Nations to be elected as the Speaker of a legislature — although Smith had also previously served a short stint as Acting Speaker, and was similarly the first woman in both Canada and the British Empire to do so.

Hilda Watson, who became the first leader of the newly formed Progressive Conservative Party in the Yukon, led her party to victory in the 1978 territorial election, the territory's first partisan legislative election – however, she was defeated in her own riding by another woman, Alice McGuire, and therefore did not become government leader.

Eight women are currently serving as leaders of political parties which hold legislative seats at the provincial level:

Clark, Wynne and Notley are currently serving as premiers of their respective provinces; Hanson and Marcelino are currently serving as Leader of the Official Opposition; Bokhari and Horwath lead third parties.

Two women are currently serving as Deputy Premiers, Elaine Taylor in Yukon and Deb Matthews in Ontario.

Because all legislators in the consensus government system of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut are elected as independent MLAs rather than as candidates of political parties, both of the territories consistently have the smallest percentages of female members of any legislature in Canada.[16] In the Northwest Territories, a woman has not been elected to any district outside of Yellowknife and Hay River, the two largest and most urbanized communities in the territory, since 1995.[16] Canada's other Arctic territory of Yukon, conversely, is governed under a political party structure and thus has much greater success in electing women to the territorial legislature; the Yukon Legislative Assembly, in fact, currently has the fourth largest percentage of female members of any provincial or territorial legislature in Canada.

Personal aspects

As in the United States, many of Canada's earliest women to hold political office attained their positions through the practice of widow's succession, in which they were appointed or elected primarily as a caretaker to political offices that had been held by their deceased husbands. This practice became less common as the number of women in politics, and their resulting prominence and power, increased over the course of the 20th century.

In 1985, Pauline Marois became the first woman in Canadian history to give birth to a child while serving as a provincial cabinet minister. She was followed in 2001 by British Columbia Member of the Legislative Assembly Christy Clark.[17]

In 1987, Sheila Copps became the first woman in Canadian history to give birth to a child while sitting as a federal Member of Parliament. In 1999, Michelle Dockrill became the first Member of Parliament to bring her newborn baby into the House of Commons.

Women in politics still sometimes face a double standard, with their personal lives subject to greater scrutiny than those of men in equivalent positions. In what some commentators have characterized as an example of sexism, Clark was asked by several journalists to explain how she could properly do her job as provincial Minister of Education while simultaneously raising a newborn child; her then-husband, Liberal Party strategist Mark Marissen, was not asked the same question despite holding a similarly busy and high-profile public position.

When Clark announced her candidacy for the 2011 British Columbia Liberal Party leadership race, she was again asked by journalist Bill Good how she planned to balance her role as a mother with the responsibilities of serving as provincial premier if she won – to which Clark answered,

Stephen Harper manages to go home for dinner with his kids every night, or most nights when he's in the country, and he has breakfast with them in the morning, and he's a pretty busy guy. He does a pretty good job. Every family has their own circumstances and makes their own decisions. I've talked about this with my family. My son is no longer a toddler. We've had this conversation. And we can handle it.[17]

Similarly, following Clark's victory in the leadership race, Global Vancouver anchor Chris Gailus was criticized for asking her in an interview whether her new job as premier would leave her any time to date.[18]

While sitting as a provincial MLA in Manitoba, Judy Wasylycia-Leis gave birth to a child in 1988, and was dismissed by another MLA as "a high-priced babysitter" when she set up a playpen in her office and took time out from a committee meeting to breastfeed.[19]

Both Copps and Campbell wrote in their autobiographies that their romantic and family lives were excessively scrutinized by colleagues and journalists. In the 2006 book The Secret Mulroney Tapes, Brian Mulroney – Campbell's immediate predecessor as Prime Minister – asserted that Campbell's romantic relationship with Gregory Lekhtman distracted her from conducting a proper campaign in the 1993 election. He did not, however, elaborate on how Campbell's personal life constituted a greater distraction to her political career than his own family life with his wife Mila and their four children did to his.

Similarly, when Belinda Stronach crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals in 2005, political reaction to her announcement took on a very different tone than similar moves by male politicians – while David Emerson, for instance, was criticized in a relatively civil manner for the ethics of his floor-crossing, Stronach was variously labelled a "dog", a "dipstick" and a "whore" by her former colleagues.[20]

In her autobiography Time and Chance, Kim Campbell claimed that her own campaign staff sometimes treated her more as a figurehead than as the actual leader of the party, even going so far as to keep campaign offices at Brian Mulroney's preferred room temperature even if Campbell ordered them to adjust the thermostat.[21]

Beauty and aesthetic critique

Criticism of female politicians in Canada has often occurred in terms of aesthetic assessment that has worked to connect ideas about a politician's beauty to their political and leadership abilities. Clothing, hairstyles and overall appearance have all been subject to scrutiny. For example, Conservative MP Rona Ambrose received extraordinary publicity that focused on her beauty rather than any element of her capacity to represent her constituency or work as an MP.[22] Also, former NDP leader Alexa McDonough was sometimes judged for wearing the same dress on multiple occasions, with magazines featuring headlines such as “Alexa McDonough, Call your dry-cleaner.”[23]

Belinda Stronach's run against Stephen Harper for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 2004 was labeled “Blond Ambition”;[24] Stronach later attracted more press for dyeing her hair brown and dating Tie Domi than for her actual accomplishments in politics or business.

Political aspects

Unlike the offices of state governor or President in the United States, Prime Ministers and provincial premiers in Canada are not independently elected by the general electorate. Instead, the position goes automatically to the leader of the largest party caucus in the legislature. This creates a significantly different campaign dynamic, which may unintentionally complicate the efforts of women to achieve higher office. For instance, while it is possible in the United States for voters to choose one party's candidate for President or Governor and a different party's candidate for their congressional or state representative, Canadians vote only for their local representative, and not directly for their premier or prime minister.

In the 1990s, parties led by women often fared particularly poorly in election campaigns, sometimes even losing elections their parties had seemed poised to win. This gave rise to extensive discussion of the double standards that the public applies to women in leadership roles; some commentators have noted, for instance, that when a party led by a woman loses an election, much greater blame is placed on the leader herself — or even on the entire concept of women as leaders — than when a man leads his party to defeat. Prior to the 21st century only one woman, Catherine Callbeck in Prince Edward Island, had ever won election to a first ministership in Canada — notably, she led her party into an election where the main opposition party was also led by a woman, Patricia Mella, and thus a woman would have been elected premier of Prince Edward Island in 1993 regardless of which party won. Political analysts have debated, however, whether either woman could have won the election if the other party had been led by a man. Further, Callbeck's government proved unpopular, and she held power for just three years before she was forced to step down in favour of a new leader.

However, as the number of women leaders has increased, several other women leaders have since led their parties to election victories.

Campbell's Progressive Conservatives and McLaughlin's New Democratic Party were decimated in 1993, both failing to reach official party status, and Lyn McLeod's Ontario Liberal Party lost the 1995 provincial election despite having more than a 10 per cent lead in the polls when the election was called. McLeod was criticized for a perceived tendency toward weak leadership and flip-flopping on the issues, especially after she withdrew her party's support from the 1994 Equality Rights Statute Amendment Act – PC election ads depicted McLeod as a weathervane shifting in the wind, and the party's popular support dropped almost 20 percentage points in the space of just 40 days.

Alexa McDonough led the New Democrats to a modest resurgence in the 1997 election, but lost seats again in the 2000 vote. Several women leaders of provincial parties, including Sharon Carstairs, Lynda Haverstock and Nancy MacBeth, proved unable to capitalize on early signs of popularity, all ultimately losing significant ground for their parties.

Pat Duncan, meanwhile, won the 2000 Yukon election against parties led by men, but her government lasted just two years before it was reduced to a minority when three Liberal MLAs resigned from the caucus – and in the resulting 2002 election, her party was nearly wiped out.

Some have attributed this to the belief that the voting public widely ascribes leadership qualities more to men than to women. Sheila Copps, for example, once noted in a newspaper interview that "if you're a woman and you're aggressive, you're a ball-buster",[7] Ruby Dhalla told an interviewer from Inter Press Service that women in politics have to be tougher, stronger and harder-working than men to reach the same level of achievement,[25] and Charlotte Whitton, one of Canada's first prominent women mayors, once famously quipped that "Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult."[26]

Andrea Horwath, the current leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party, has noted that she faced not just indifference, but active discouragement, from both men and women – based around the notion that at age 35, she was too young and hadn't earned the right to get into politics – when she first ran for Hamilton, Ontario City Council in 1997:

I found it was very paternalistic. From men and women, I kept hearing that I was too young and that it wasn't my turn. I was told I should wait until I was older, even though there were male councillors younger than I.[27]

Conversely, however, MP Martha Hall Findlay has asserted that one of the biggest barriers to women's greater participation in politics is their own fear of stepping into the public spotlight:

I can't tell you the number of women who say, I don't know if I have a thick-enough skin, or I don't know if I have what it takes. And I look at them and think: Okay, you told me you have three children. You started your own business. You now employ 73 people. And you tell me you don't have a thick-enough skin and you don't think you have what it takes? Look in a mirror. Why is it that some people who are so capable and so accomplished somehow still don't think they have what it takes?"[28]

Maureen MacDonald, a New Democratic MLA in Nova Scotia, has offered a similar assessment:

I’ve learned some lessons in my time in politics, and I learned women don’t come to the political arena easily. Generally speaking, women have a lot of uncertainty about whether or not they have the kind of skills that will not only give them success, but staying power. It is seen as a blood sport and you have to get the elbows up and there are many women who don’t want to participate in that way. (Women) never think they know enough to be a candidate. They think they have to have the answer for everything, where the male candidates are much more confident and are more prepared to wing it.[29]

Danielle Smith, the former leader of the Wildrose Alliance in Alberta, has also suggested that new opportunities have been opened for women due to recent changes in Canadian political culture. According to Smith, the fact that most governments in Canada have now instituted fixed election dates helps women, who still generally hold more responsibility for the care of children and aging or ailing parents than most men do, to plan more easily toward a goal of running for political office; and the fact that most political parties have now moved to a one member one vote system, instead of the more traditional leadership convention method of selecting leaders, has helped women because the grassroots are typically more willing to vote for women leaders than the "old boys network" inside a political party's establishment are.[13]

Conversely, commentators have also claimed that political parties in Canada have tended to turn to female leaders as an almost cynical ploy in times of crisis – in some cases, parties have been accused of relying on the "novelty" of a female leader as almost a substitute for creating a substantive policy platform.[7] Campbell and Johnston, for instance, both inherited the leadership of scandal-plagued and unpopular incumbent parties which were considered unlikely to win the next election even before each woman assumed the party's leadership. Due to the timing of the leadership campaigns, further, both became leader late in the fourth year of the government's mandate, just weeks before a mandatory election. As a result, both were left with very little time to demonstrate that their administrations could offer any sort of fundamental change, and thus remained vulnerable to the negative perceptions that voters held of their predecessors.

Meanwhile, women such as Pam Barrett, Joy MacPhail, Lynda Haverstock, Alexa McDonough, Sharon Carstairs, Elizabeth Weir, Karen Casey, Shirley McLoughlin and Carole James became leaders of provincial parties which had already been largely wiped off the electoral map. According to political scientist Linda Trimble, this made the leadership of these parties a "flawed prize" which a male politician would be seen as weak for even wanting[7] – and then those women who actually achieved a measure of success in reviving the parties often became vulnerable to internal leadership challenges once their work had returned the party to real contention for power, and renewed desirability as a prize for male politicians to pursue.[7]

Carole James had the most dramatic success of any woman leader in reviving a party in crisis, taking the British Columbia NDP from its dramatic defeat in the 2001 election – when it won just two seats and didn't even qualify for official party status – to 33 seats in the 2005 election. However, some critics dismissed her as being competent enough to bring the party's traditional core vote back following an unprecedented disaster, but not possessing the leadership skills necessary to take the party any further than its own base; in the subsequent 2009 election, the party won just two additional seats.[30] After a period of caucus infighting, she was forced to announce her resignation as party leader in December 2010;[31] notably, her (male) successor, Adrian Dix, led the party to a slightly worse result in the 2013 election than James had in 2009.

Political scientist Sylvia Bashevkin has noted the disparity between how male and female politicians are perceived by the public. In her book Women, Power, Politics: The Hidden Story of Canada's Unfinished Democracy, she explains that female politicians are far less likely to receive media coverage than their male counterparts. Moreover, in the cases where women manage to attract coverage, the media often tends to "[focus] on personal style and private life matters, rather than on public policy views."[32] Here, the 2004 Conservative leadership election may serve as a case-study: as Bashevkin observes, the media mentioned Belinda Stronach's marital status "four times as often as they did that of fellow contender Stephen Harper."[33]

Furthermore, many desirable leadership qualities are commonly associated with masculinity. As a result, a female politician who displays these qualities may be seen as off-putting and unfeminine. Kim Campbell, for instance, has commented on the uneasy relationship between leadership and gender: "I was called arrogant, aggressive and lacking compassion," she stated in 1997, "I don't have a typically female pattern of speech. I'm open and assertive. In men, those traits are perceived as leadership material. In a woman, they are denigrated".[34] Similarly, Sheila Copps and Sharon Carstairs have been accused of harshness and stridence, with Copps receiving the epithets of "baby", "slut" and "bitch" in Parliamentary discourse.[35]

Because male and female politicians are judged according to disparate standards, Bashevkin has suggested that many women may be discouraged from entering politics in the first place. She writes, "[E]fforts to recruit more female candidates often fall short once the individuals being wooed start to think about what happened to the few courageous pioneers who preceded them."[36] This might explain the general decrease of female representation in Canadian government in recent years—for instance, a major federal party has not had a female leader since Alexa McDonough resigned her post as head of the NDP in 2003.

Encouraging women's participation

Political parties at both the federal and provincial levels have often faced difficulty in boosting the number of women prepared to stand as election candidates. This may be in part because women may be reluctant to run for parliament because of the adversity and combative nature of work.[37]

Political parties which take a strictly hands-off approach typically find themselves unable to put forward a slate of candidates that is more than 20 to 25 per cent female – but parties which implement more active strategies often risk being criticized as "anti-democratic" if their programs too closely resemble affirmative action. For example, the British Columbia New Democratic Party has used a strategy in which a riding association whose incumbent MLA retires must nominate a woman in the resulting by-election or general election, in order to ensure that the party is placing women in "winnable" seats – however, this strategy faced criticism from some potential candidates who felt that the policy constituted reverse discrimination against them as men.[38]

Conversely, the federal New Democratic Party requires its riding associations to make at least a good faith attempt to find a viable woman or minority candidate whenever a nomination contest is held, but does not set a quota per se.

At various times, both federal and provincial parties have also been accused of tokenism, slotting a disproportionate number of women candidates in ridings their party has little chance of winning while doing little or nothing about the fact that the more competitive candidate selection process in "winnable" seats still tends to favor men.[39]

In addition to the underrepresentation of women in politics overall, younger women are typically even more underrepresented. While younger men are quite regularly elected to political office at all levels of government, women under the age of 40 holding office at the provincial or federal levels are especially rare.[40] This dichotomy has been attributed to a variety of factors, including women being reluctant to take on the responsibilities of a career in politics until their children are older, as well as the belief that younger women are especially likely to face sexist assumptions that their political and professional abilities are unequal to those of men in the same age bracket.[40]

The non-partisan organization Equal Voice, whose board consists of several prominent female politicians, works to assist women in running for public office through education, advocacy and professional networking. When former federal MP Belinda Stronach was given an award by Equal Voice for her role in advancing women's participation in politics, in her speech she identified some of what she saw as the barriers, including a lack of civility in the House of Commons, an excessive focus on women parliamentarians' appearance rather than their ideas and skills, and the need to take advantage of modern communications technologies, such as videoconferencing and Internet voting, so that both men and women in politics have greater flexibility to balance their job duties with their family lives.[41]

Prior to the Northwest Territories general election, 2015, the territorial Status of Women Council ran an educational seminar on women in politics, which was attended by all ten women who ran as candidates in the election campaign.[16] Given the consensus government structure of the legislature, one of the strategies that the women pursued was to not run against each other, in an attempt to avoid splitting the vote;[16] of the 19 legislative districts in the territory, only one had more than one woman candidate on the ballot.[16]

In 2015, MP Christine Moore gave birth to her first child during the federal election campaign.[42] In her first statement to the 42nd Canadian Parliament, she spoke of the need for parliamentarians to make the political environment more family friendly, stating that "I hope we can make the world a place where women and new parents do not have to choose between their careers and their families...It is important for society to make it easier, not harder, to achieve work-life balance."[42]

Municipal politics

Hannah Gale was elected to Calgary City Council in 1917, becoming the first woman ever elected to any municipal office in Canada. However, women had previously served as school trustees.

In 1936, Barbara Hanley in Webbwood, Ontario became the first woman ever elected as a mayor in Canada; in 1951, Charlotte Whitton in Ottawa became the first woman elected mayor of a major Canadian city.

Other prominent women mayors in Canada have included June Rowlands and Barbara Hall in Toronto, True Davidson in the former Toronto suburb of East York, Frances Nunziata in York, Dianne Haskett and Anne Marie DeCicco-Best in London, Hazel McCallion in Mississauga, Marion Dewar and Jacquelin Holzman in Ottawa, Jan Reimer in Edmonton, Gretchen Brewin in Victoria, Susan Fennell in Brampton, Jamie Lim in Timmins, Dorothy Wyatt in St. John's, Elsie Wayne in Saint John, Helen Cooper in Kingston, Janice Laking in Barrie, Lorna Jackson in Vaughan, Andrée Boucher in Quebec City, Dorothy Corrigan in Charlottetown, Moira Leiper Ducharme in Halifax, Susan Thompson in Winnipeg, Grace Hartman and Marianne Matichuk in Sudbury, Dusty Miller and Lynn Peterson in Thunder Bay, Ione Christensen, Kathy Watson and Bev Buckway in Whitehorse, Elizabeth Kishkon in Windsor, Yolanda Burkhard in Dawson City and Elisapee Sheutiapik and Madeleine Redfern in Iqaluit.

In 1984, Daurene Lewis was elected mayor of Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, becoming the first black woman to be elected as a mayor in North America.

A study released by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities in early 2009 found that women outnumbered men as municipal chief administrative officers or city managers – a position which is hired, not elected – in Canada. However, they still lagged significantly behind men as elected municipal councillors and mayors, representing just 23 per cent of all elected municipal officials.[43] Only in Canada's three territories, Nunavut, Yukon and the Northwest Territories, did women represent more than one-third of elected municipal officials at the time of the study, and the Yukon was the only province or territory in all of Canada where more than one-third of all mayors were women.[43]

One barrier to women's participation in municipal politics that has been commonly identified is that while a few of Canada's largest cities pay their councillors enough that city council can be a person's sole full-time job, most smaller cities pay their councillors only a modest honorarium or stipend, regardless of how many hours they work — making the council effectively a full-time job for only part-time pay, and thus largely restricting the role to people whose circumstances allow them to balance their council work with another source of income. In 2010, Greater Sudbury city councillor Evelyn Dutrisac told the Sudbury Star that she was only able to serve on city council because as a retired teacher she was able to support herself on her Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan income.[44]

The FCM has set the goal of increasing the number of women in municipal government to at least 30 per cent by 2026, and has identified a number of strategies to do so, including mentoring programs, active recruitment of women to serve on municipal boards and committees, and implementing work-life balance programs, such as day care services, to facilitate the participation of women with young children.[45]

Among major Canadian cities, women currently comprise the majority on Mississauga City Council in Mississauga, Ontario, with women holding the mayoralty and six of the 11 ward seats, and represent exactly half of Waterloo City Council in Waterloo, Ontario, with women holding four of the seven ward seats alongside three male councillors and a male mayor. Toronto City Council also surpassed the Federation of Canadian Municipalities' 30 per cent target in the 2010 election, with 15 women councillors representing exactly one-third of the full council.[46] Women have also represented around a third of elected members of Montreal City Council in recent years, but have approached or exceeded 50 per cent of candidates elected to the lower-level borough (arrondissement) councils.

Viceroyalty

See also: List of female viceroys in Canada

Canada is a constitutional monarchy whose head of state, currently Queen Elizabeth II, is represented in Canada by the Governor General and in the provinces by the Lieutenant Governors, who perform the ceremonial functions of the head of state in the Westminster system. The heads of state of the territories are Commissioners representing the federal government, not the Queen. All are ceremonial roles with negligible real political power. The Governor General and Lieutenant Governors are appointed by the Queen on the advice of the Prime Minister.

Canada has had two female monarchs since Confederation: Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II.

Jeanne Sauvé was the first female Governor General of Canada, appointed in 1984. Two other women have since served as Governor General: Adrienne Clarkson and Michaëlle Jean.

The first female Lieutenant Governor was Pauline McGibbon, appointed Lieutenant Governor of Ontario in 1974. Since then, all of the provinces except Newfoundland and Labrador have had female Lieutenant Governors, and all three territories have had female Commissioners. The first female territorial commissioner was Ione Christensen, who became Commissioner of Yukon in 1979. Helen Maksagak was both the first female Commissioner of the Northwest Territories (in 1995) and of Nunavut (in 1999).

Timeline of notable events

National

Provincial/regional

Ontario

Manitoba

Saskatchewan

New Brunswick

Quebec

Alberta

Nova Scotia

British Columbia

Prince Edward Island

Newfoundland and Labrador

Yukon

Northwest Territories

Nunavut

References

  1. ^ "Young MLAs, many of them female, will soon rule in Alberta". Toronto Star, May 9, 2015.
  2. ^ "Canada 50th in participation by women in politics". Toronto Star, March 8, 2010.
  3. ^ "Women in national parliaments". Inter-parliamentary Union, February 28, 2010.
  4. ^ "History is Made When a Woman Acts as House Speaker". Ottawa Citizen. March 14, 1944. Retrieved May 24, 2013.
  5. ^ "Ann Shipley". Globe and Mail. Canada. March 25, 1981. p. P20.
  6. ^ a b c d "Women Candidates in General Elections - 1921 to Date". Parliament of Canada.
  7. ^ a b c d e Jane Arscott and Linda Trimble (December 20, 2002). "Where have all the women leaders gone?". University of Alberta ExpressNews.
  8. ^ MacIvor, Heather (1996). Women and Politics in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. p. 283.
  9. ^ Byrne, Leslie (2009). "Making a Difference When the Doors Are Open: Women in the Ontario NDP Cabinet 1990-1995" In Opening Doors Wider: Women's Political Engagement in Canada (Ed. Sylvia Bashevkin). Vancouver: UBC Press.
  10. ^ "Women Members of the Ministry". Parliament of Canada. Retrieved April 13, 2012.
  11. ^ "The Ministry". Parliament of Canada. Retrieved April 13, 2012.
  12. ^ "'Famous 5' named honorary senators". CBC News. October 10, 2009.
  13. ^ a b "The Year of the Woman (in provincial politics, anyway)". CBC News, October 15, 2011.
  14. ^ "Did sexism play a role in Alison Redford’s downfall?". Global News, March 20, 2014.
  15. ^ Debbie Marshall. Give Your Other Vote to the Sister: A Woman's Journey into the Great War, University of Calgary Press, 2007.
  16. ^ a b c d e "A Few Good Women: The Gender Problem in NWT Politics". Edge YK, December 4, 2015.
  17. ^ a b "Christy Clark and the Woman Politician Thing". The Tyee, December 9, 2010.
  18. ^ "Premier or not, Clark sets the boundaries for her personal life". Vancouver Sun, March 2, 2011.
  19. ^ Kaj Hasselriis, "A Woman's Place is in the House of Commons". Herizons, Winter 2009.
  20. ^ "Stronach calls personal attacks on her a disgrace". CTV. May 22, 2005. Retrieved March 6, 2008.
  21. ^ Maclean's
  22. ^ "It's official: Conservatives are hotter". Toronto Sun. Retrieved April 13, 2012.
  23. ^ Goodyear-Grant, Elizabeth (2009). "Crafting a Public Image: Women MPs and the Dynamics of Media Coverage." In Opening Doors Wider: Women's Political Engagement in Canada (Ed. Sylvia Bashevkin). Vancouver: UBC Press.
  24. ^ Fraser, Sylvia (February 2006). "The Belinda Stronach Defense". Toronto Life. Retrieved April 13, 2012.
  25. ^ "Women leaders have to be tougher and stronger than men". Human Rights Tribune, March 6, 2009.
  26. ^ Susan Delacourt, "For female politicians, equality is hard work". Toronto Star, February 4, 2011.
  27. ^ "They called me sweetie – I was very uncomfortable". SooToday.com, July 8, 2009.
  28. ^ Egle Procuta. "The accidental symbol: How Martha Hall Findlay became synonymous with 'women in politics'—despite her best efforts." This Magazine, May–June 2007.
  29. ^ "Female representation in legislature inches upward". Metro Halifax, June 11, 2009.
  30. ^ "What Now? After bringing the NDP far in 2005, this time Carole James couldn't seal the deal". The Tyee, May 13, 2009.
  31. ^ Hunter, Justine (December 6, 2010). "Carole James standing down". Globe and Mail. Canada.
  32. ^ Bashevkin, Sylvia (2009). Women, Power, Politics: The Hidden Story of Canada's Unfinished Democracy. Don Mills: Oxford University Press. p. 58. ISBN 9780195431704.
  33. ^ Bashevkin, Sylvia (2009). Women, Power, Politics: The Hidden Story of Canada's Unfinished Democracy. Don Mills: Oxford University Press. p. 106. ISBN 9780195431704.
  34. ^ Bashevkin, Sylvia (2009). Women, Power, Politics: The Hidden Story of Canada's Unfinished Democracy. Don Mills: Oxford University Press. p. 81. ISBN 9780195431704.
  35. ^ Bashevkin, Sylvia (2009). Women, Power, Politics: The Hidden Story of Canada's Unfinished Democracy. Don Mills: Oxford University Press. p. 80. ISBN 9780195431704.
  36. ^ Bashevkin, Sylvia (2009). Women, Power, Politics: The Hidden Story of Canada's Unfinished Democracy. Don Mills: Oxford University Press. p. 11. ISBN 9780195431704.
  37. ^ Cool, Julie. "Women in Parliament". Parliament of Canada. Retrieved April 13, 2012.
  38. ^ "B.C. NDP to choose candidates through affirmative action". Vancouver Sun, November 18, 2007.
  39. ^ "More women, fewer chances in coming federal vote, says national advocacy group". Ottawa Citizen, April 8, 2011.
  40. ^ a b "Parliament gets a makeover: An influx of young women could help change Canadian politics for good". Ottawa Citizen, May 6, 2011.
  41. ^ "Belinda Stronach’s prescription for getting women into politics". The Globe and Mail, November 9, 2010.
  42. ^ a b "NDP MP Moore, who gave birth during campaign, wants MPs to ‘aim higher’ on work-life balance". The Hill Times, December 21, 2015.
  43. ^ a b FCM Municipal Statistics: Male-Female Gender Statistics. January 2009.
  44. ^ "Politics in Greater Sudbury lacks female voices". Sudbury Star, August 20, 2010.
  45. ^ "Getting to 30%". Federation of Canadian Municipalities.
  46. ^ "Porter: Female breakthrough on Toronto city council". Toronto Star, October 27, 2010.
  47. ^ "Trans candidate makes Canadian history in Ontario". Xtra!, September 28, 2011.
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