Silenced Majority
Politics as if women matter
BY Doris Anderson
Photograph byChris Wattie/Reuters
In the gut-wrenching play between Harper, Martin, Layton and Duceppe, and throughout the depressing slide towards a Conservative government and its possible women-harming policies, one undisputed certainty could be discerned amongst the pre-election fancy talk: men would continue to dominate Canada’s political landscape.
Once again, Ottawa’s House of powerbrokers stands on a lopsided foundation, with male MPs outnumbering females by five to one. Sixty-four women were elected in January—down from 65 in the last parliament. This imbalance continues in spite of vigorous efforts by women to improve it.
Most party leaders devoted much pre-election lip service to the need to get more women into the House of Commons. Liberal leader Paul Martin mentioned this need frequently in his public speeches but in the end the Liberals ran only 26 percent women. The Bloc ran just over 30 percent. Harper and the Conservatives made no special effort to recruit women at all, claiming that they were only looking for “good people.” In Quebec, where they felt they would win few seats, they ran many women. But in their stronghold of Alberta, they ran just two out of 28 candidates. Nationally they ran only 12 percent women.
Only the NDP has a set policy, launched when Audrey McLaughlin was leader in the early 1990s and backed by strong supporters like Pauline Jewett and Margaret Mitchell, to promote more women and minorities. The party now freezes nominations until riding organizations come up with at least one woman or a name from a minority group on the list. In this election the NDP ran 35 percent women candidates—more women than have ever run for any Canadian party.
Now consider this: women make up 52 percent of the Canadian population. Does it matter if only 21 percent of the House of Commons and our provincial legislatures are women? It does. Women often bring a different viewpoint and have different priorities than men. For decades, most modern democracies like Canada with a high percentage of women in the work force—such as Germany, Belgium and all the Scandinavian countries—have made sure they have excellent, government-supported child care. In Canada, although we’ve been talking about the need for better child care for over 20 years, with men MPs outnumbering women so heavily, it never seems to become a reality.
Canadians burst with pride in the 1990s when the UN twice declared our country the best in the world in which to live. But when the UN revised its standards to include more social issues, we plummeted to eighth.
Four of the reasons involved women: too many older women and single mothers living in poverty; the gap in pay between men and women was too large; inadequate day care, and too few women in our parliament.
Our poor showing politically is not due to lack of effort by Canadian women. In the 1970s, women formed an organization called Women for Political Action. We even established a women’s party and ran three candidates—unsuccessfully. We set up campaign schools to teach women how to win nominations, deal with the press, conduct interviews, canvass and cope with all the dirty tricks often used in nominations—such as backroom deal making, bussing in voters from other ridings and even changing the date of the nomination meeting without informing all the candidates.
In the 1980s and 1990s, another group, the Committee of ’94, had an even more ambitious agenda. Its lofty aim was to have half the House of Commons women by 1994. They ran more campaign schools, produced more sophisticated literature. But 1994 came and went without much change and the committee faded away. For the past four years Equal Voice, a fresh politically multi-partisan group with which I am involved, represents 30 different Canadian women’s organizations. Equal Voice has chapters in six major cities across the country and more forming. It has been vigorously lobbying party leaders, cabinet ministers and influential politicians with the same old objective.
Looking at the results, I suppose we can take comfort that without all this effort things might be even worse.
Internationally we are losing ground fast. We now rank 42nd in the world in the number of women in our parliament—far behind almost every European country. Rwanda and Mozambique with 49 percent and 35 percent women in parliament respectively put us to shame. As well, in January, both Chile and Liberia voted in female presidents, Michelle Bachelet and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, with Johnson-Sirleaf establishing a first for women (directly elected) in Africa and bringing the current world total of female heads of state up to 11.
In Canada, we only look good compared to the UK and the US who rank 50th and 67th.
One thing we all have in common is our antiquated electoral systems.
Over 85 percent of today’s democracies long ago ditched our First Past the Post (FPTP) system, adopted from Westminster, and replaced it with some form of Proportional Representation (PR). Almost all of them have from one third to one half women in their parliaments.
Under our FPTP system each candidate slugs it out for the nomination in each riding. Dr. Sylvia Bashevkin, political scientist and president of University College at the University of Toronto, studied the Canadian election process and wrote Toeing the Lines: Women and Party Policies, a book showing that women are deeply disadvantaged in the nomination process.
Men usually have access to more money in running for the nomination. If they have children or elderly parents they are not subject to criticism for running for public office—but women are. Although poll after poll tells us that Canadian men and women will readily vote for a woman, riding organizations favour men as being easier to get elected—preferably young professional men, married with two and a half children.
How does PR help women?
Under most PR systems you vote for your local candidate as you do now. But you also get a second vote for the party of your choice. Then each party gets exactly the number of seats it earned in total votes. If it gets 40 percent of the vote it gets 40 percent of the seats—not 50 percent or more, as happens frequently under FPTP.
Extra seats to top up the party’s share come from a list of candidates each party puts up. No party wants to post a list which has five times as many males as women—or a list with all the men at the top and women at the bottom.
Voila! Women get their share of the seats.
Countries that change from FPTP to PR have increased the number of women dramatically. New Zealand went from 16 women to 35 in 1996 as a direct result of adopting a PR system. Scotland is another example, almost doubling its representation of women after it brought in PR.
PR brings with it other advantages. It’s fairer. Under FPTP millions of votes simply don’t count in the final tally. Unless you vote for the candidate that wins in your riding, your vote is null and void. In fact, you might as well stay home, which is what a shocking number of Canadians do. Only one in four Canadians under 25 bother to vote at all, although in this last election the number of people voting edged up slightly.
FPTP also produces mind-boggling distortions. Parties like the Bloc and the former Reform party with strong regional bases do better than they should. But it takes four times as many votes for the NDP to win a seat in the House of Commons as it does for a Liberal or the Bloc. This is because the NDP vote is scattered all across the country but the Bloc and the Reform party votes are concentrated in one area where they scoop up most of the seats.
Although half a million votes in the Maritimes can result in 22 seats, half a million votes for the Green Party distributed across the country leave it with no seats at all. Under PR, all votes would count and all votes would count equally. Some northern and rural ridings would probably be larger than they are now, but the distribution would be fairer. FPTP doesn’t give us the governments we vote for on any level.
One of the most frequent reasons why people say they are afraid of PR is because PR often results in coalition governments. But almost all of our most progressive legislation — such as medicare, the pension plan, unemployment insurance—were the result of a minority government. Medicare first came in under the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation’s Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan and then under a minority Liberal government in the 1960s pushed by the NDP federally.
FPTP works when there are just two parties. But Canada has been a multi-party country for over 80 years. FPTP is a like some blunt instrument dating back to the 12th century and trying to cope in the technological age. It forces the voter to become a gambler who has to ask himself or herself, “How should I vote to keep such and such a party out?” rather than being able to vote for the party he or she prefers. It also gives the winners far too much unearned power.
Governments with big majorities under FPTP either come in like a wrecking ball—the Conservative Mike Harris government in Ontario comes to mind—leaving behind a scandal over contaminated water and a junked educational system, or, even more often, sits on its hands for four years and does very little.
Coalition governments, on the other hand, not only get more done, they do it much more cooperatively without all the raucous bar-room brawling we see every day on Question Period. Women, with their experience working collaboratively rather than combatively, would probably flourish.
The good news is that electoral change in Canada might be on its way. Five provinces and even the federal government have been seriously considering it.
PEI where they have often had governments with no opposition or only one member in opposition, set up a commission that recommended a change to PR. A referendum was held last November but lost, through lack of backing from the government. (Once governments get in power with FPTP they often resist change.)
Quebec has already decided to change to PR. Another commission in New Brunswick has also recommended the switch. Ontario is planning to set up a Citizens’ Assembly to look into the matter this spring. At the federal level, electoral reform was considered under pressure from the NDP, but shelved until after the election. (The Liberals, as the middle-of-the-road party in Canada, have been the great beneficiaries under FPTP and are not keen to change.)
BC set up a Citizens’ Assembly and held a referendum last May, voting on the switch to a rarely used system called Single Transferable Vote (STV). It is a complicated system to understand but adored by math nerds and academics. It also takes much longer to get election results and it is used in very few countries, only in Malta, the Isle of Man, Ireland and Tasmania. STV nearly passed, coming up short of the needed 60 percent of votes by only 2.31 percent.
Ireland is the best example of how it might work here since Ireland has a party system similar to ours, however, with STV, their system has never helped women. After 80 years, Ireland has only 13 percent women in its parliament in spite of its woman president. Malta is even worse with only 9 percent women. Ireland has tried to get rid of STV twice and failed. Local consituencies like it because elections are a free-for-all with candidates in the same party running against one another and local issues dominating policy. It is not a good atmosphere for women.
The Canadian political landscape looks much like it always has. All of our leaders provincially and federally are men and all our electoral bodies are 80 percent men. Without a change in our electoral system, experts predict it will take another four generations to reach anything like equality in the House of Commons and the legislatures. In the meantime the input women might bring to government is lost. Many women will continue to live disproportionately in poverty, endure unequal pay, still shoulder most of the burden of child care and other family care responsibilities. Their views on what we should be doing about the environment, our responsibilites to Third World countries and our relationship to our aggressive southern neighbour will not have an adequate voice. We do not have the mechanism by which to hear it.
More and more Canadians, particularly during this last election, have become aware of PR and its possibilities. It is most important, even under a Conservative government and a leader who says he is not interested in changing the electoral system, that we keep the momentum going. Join organizations that are pushing for change like Equal Voice and Fair Vote Canada. Visit their websites and find out what you can do. In provinces where electoral change is underway encourage your governments in their efforts by writing to them and even getting involved in the process, such as offering to serve on a Citizens’ Assembly. We can change this situation.
Until then, will Canadian women have to continue to organize and lobby just to stay where we are? Without a change to PR, I am afraid there is no alternative. And from one who has been at it for 40 years, it is like trying to roll a boulder up a cliff.
