Women in Canadian Politics - Political Aspects

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 fact, Canadian political parties led by women have often fared particularly poorly in election campaigns. 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.

Notably, Catherine Callbeck led her party into an election where the main opposition party was also led by a woman, Patricia Mella, and a woman would thus 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.

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 still consciously or unconsciously ascribes leadership qualities much 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", 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, 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."

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:

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:

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

Danielle Smith, currently the 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.

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. 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 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 – 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.

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. After a period of caucus infighting, she was forced to announce her resignation as party leader in December 2010.