Trudeau urged to create gender-balanced Senate

Holding the Government to the spirit of the common wording in the mandate letters (“You are expected to do your part to fulfill our government’s commitment to transparent, merit-based appointments, to help ensure gender parity and that Indigenous Canadians and minority groups are better reflected in positions of leadership.”).

The previous Conservative government appointed 18 women out of 57 appointments (32 percent) and 9 visible minorities (16 percent – in line with the percentage of visible minorities who are Canadian citizens) by my rough count.

Good that this group has appropriately broadened their focus beyond gender parity:

The federal government is facing pressure to create gender parity in Canada’s upper chamber, two months after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attracted global attention by forming a cabinet whose membership is half female.

A group of prominent women from across the country has seized on Mr. Trudeau’s move to achieve gender equality in the cabinet and his promise of Senate reform, and is now calling on him to fill the 22 current vacancies in the Senate with women – which would create gender balance for the first time in the chamber’s history.

In addition, the group – led by Donna Dasko, co-founder and former national chair of Equal Voice, a non-partisan organization advocating for women in politics – is asking that the female appointees be from diverse backgrounds, such as indigenous women and those from minority linguistic, racial and ethnic communities. This, they point out in a letter sent late last month to the Prime Minister, is in keeping with the Senate’s mandate to represent minorities.

“This is an historic opportunity,” Ms. Dasko wrote in the letter that is signed by more than 80 women, including former Progressive Conservative prime minister Kim Campbell, former Liberal deputy prime minister Sheila Copps, actress Sonja Smits and Vancouver’s deputy mayor, Andrea Reimer.

Currently there are 83 senators, 30 of which are women – representing 36 per cent of the Senate. Appointing 22 women immediately would make the chamber 50-per-cent female. The group says in the letter that “future appointees could include both men and women in equal numbers.”

Paul Duchesne, a spokesman for Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef, told The Globe and Mail in an e-mail on Sunday that “we share the desire of the signatories to achieve gender balance in the Senate.”

Source: Trudeau urged to create gender-balanced Senate – The Globe and Mail