Canada cannot sell gender equality abroad without practising it at home
2025/10/29 2 Comments
Always surprised that these kinds of analysis and commentary fail to look at the intersectionality between gender, visible minorities and Indigenous peoples.
Here’s what the intersectionality between women and visible candidates:
However, Liberal women MPs form 45 percent of all visible minority MPs whereas for the Conservatives, it is only 11 percent:
….The idea is not new to Canada. In 2016, then-MP Kennedy Stewart introduced a private member’s bill that would have financially penalized parties that did not approach gender parity among their general election candidates. In 2019, the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women received evidence that quotas should be adopted to increase the number of women candidates.
A 2023 poll even showed that 50 per cent of Canadians would support gender quotas for federal elections.
Left to their own devices, parties cannot get the job done. Women comprised a dismal 22 per cent of Conservative candidates in the 2025 federal elections, but blame does not fall on Conservatives alone. Compared to 2021, the proportion of women candidates dropped in every party, save the NDP: by 11 percentage points for the Conservatives but also by eight percentage points for the Liberals and the Bloc.
Without quotas to make the parties perform better, Canada’s federal elections are failing voters’ expectations for what legitimate political institutions look like.
Public opinion speaks clearly. People do not mind gender quotas; what they really do not like is seeing men dominate politics. Canada has fallen behind other countries not just because it elects fewer women, but because it lacks any policy commitment to do better. The country cannot sell gender equality abroad without first practising it at home.
Jennifer M. Piscopo is professor of gender and politics at Royal Holloway University of London and a contributing researcher to Informed Perspectives’ Balance the Power Initiative.
Source: Canada cannot sell gender equality abroad without practising it at home
About Andrew
Multicultural Meanderings 
In my mind, I cannot surmount the following problem. Suppose there were a law that required any political party that had more than, say, 20 candidates to have an equal number of men and women. What would stop political parties from filling their unwinnable seats with women? For example, the Conservatives in downtown Toronto, or the Liberals in rural Alberta? In addition, there is the true difficulty of surmounting tokenism.
I agree that gender parity is desirable, but it works far better in a country using proportional representation or MMP. Then one could require that women constitute 5 of the top 10 names on the list, or something to this effect.
Good points. Jerome Black and I are in the process of analyzing candidates in terms of whether they are in competitive (less than 10 percent margin in 2021) or not competitive for women, visible minorities and Indigenous peoples along with their intersectionality. Stay tuned!