Women in Canadian Politics - Women As Federal Representatives

Women As Federal Representatives

See also: Women in the 41st 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. 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. 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 1993 election holds the record for the most female candidates in a single election, with 476 women running for office that year. In terms of women elected to the House of Commons, the 2011 election holds the record, with 76 successful female candidates. As of 2011, 254 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 Labour Progressives.

The New Democratic Party caucuses in the 39th Canadian Parliament and the 41st Canadian Parliament were both 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 2011 election was also 40 per cent female, with 123 women constituting the largest slate of female candidates ever nominated by a single political party in a federal election.