There has not been a significant change in the number of women who ran in the federal elections since 2004, according to a report on Women and Elections from Simon Fraser University and the Parliamentary Library.
Out of 391 female candidates that ran in the 2004 elections, 65 won seats in Parliament. This year, 380 women were active candidates, and 64 actually won seats. Conservatives have 14 female MPs out of a 124-member caucus, and the Liberals have 21 out of 103.
The popular NDP candidate Olivia Chow did land a seat in the commons for 2006, but there are women who were and are in Parliament who played prominent roles in the evolution of Canada that many young people do not even know.
A notable woman in government was Jean Augustine, who was first elected to Parliament for the riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore in 1993. The first black woman elected to the House of Commons, she served for 12 years as Secretary of State and Minister of State for Multiculturalism and the Status of Women, and founded the “Augustine Amendment” to Employment Insurance which protects low-income families across Canada. Augustine did not run for re-election in 2006, stepping aside to make room for controversial Liberal candidate Michael Ignatieff. But she brought about change not just for women, but for citizens whose voices are most of the time left unheard.
Another prominent female figure in Parliament is Albina Guarnieri, who was re-elected to the Mississauga East-Cooksville riding this year. While in Parliament, through Private Members’ Bills and committee work, Ms. Guarnieri has promoted initiatives to retrain older workers, establish personal training accounts for lifelong learning, combat identity fraud by reforming the Social Insurance Numbering system, impose consecutive sentencing for multiple murderers, strengthen laws against child pornography, and lower middle-income tax rates.
Chow’s NDP party currently leads with a wide margin in the gender equality department. Of their caucus, 41.4 per cent are women, including 67 per cent of all new MPs. Of all the women running in the election, more than a third was NDP.
According to Chow, having female MPs depends on a party’s explicit policies of encouraging women to run.
“We have a policy that a riding association cannot nominate a candidate unless they can prove that they searched out women and visible minorities,” she said. “This number didn’t just come by chance.”
“We ran 108 women candidates, and we ran them in priority ridings, ridings that we could win. So it’s not the barriers, and all the other side things” that are the issue. “It’s the leader’s priority. If they don’t have that priority, it shows.”
