Politics not short on women...
But, probably short on competence...
A huge gender gap persists in all Canadian political parties, but the Tories trail the Grits in recruiting women candidates to run in this campaign.This is all irrelevent. Nothing is stopping more women from coming forward to contest ridings. What we need is NOT more women, but MORE competent candidates.
Nationally, only 32 of the 291 Conservative candidates nominated to date are female -- less than 10%. That compares to 75 of 262 candidates confirmed so far by the Liberals, or 28.6%.
The NDP wins when it comes to fielding women candidates, with 93 of its 264 candidates female, or 35%.
posted by GayandRight @ 10:11 AM
5 Comments:
Typical patriarch. Competence is a male and sexist value, based on one person or group winning and another losing. The same sad story of all of Western Civilization.
The only caring and equal way is to hold election lotteries and pick MPs by that means, so that everyone has a chance, regardless of oppressive social constructs like "competence".
......
Bwahahahahahahah!
You've clearly never been involved in a nomination battle at the constituency level. Try running a professional woman and there's a lot of "She needs to look after her children", or "We can win this one, we need a serious candidate."
No word of a lie, a former Liberal cabinet minister (provincial NB) once told me that she never would have won her nomination had the party hierarchy thought they would win the seat. Instead they thought she was going to be a sacrificial candidate. After that she spent nine years in cabinet.
Never underestimate the busybody factor in politics, especially in ridings with large memberships. There are lots of people who think they know what's better for a woman than she does. The NDP tend to, in my opinion, get around this because their riding associations tend to be smaller and, as they are usually running sacrificial candidates, there is no upside to challenging a woman.
I thought the NDP had a policy whereby they the party would only allow riding associations to run a white male if there were no female, gay or minority candidates available.
I'm serious.
"You've clearly never been involved in a nomination battle at the constituency level. Try running a professional woman and there's a lot of 'She needs to look after her children' etc"
What riding associations are you in? I'm involved in several riding associations in the Victoria area. That's not the way our female members decided not to run.
For starters, we have several old candidates from before the merger (I get rides to one board meeting with an old PC candidate); second, it assumes that our candidates a) have children, b) have children young enough to require care, c) that the husband won't take over.
In the case of Shirley Bond, who's now BC's Minister for Education, she was a mom of four who worked WHILE going to UNBC, and she decided to run for the BC Liberals. She got the nomination because she was an extremely good candidate, and stuck her husband with taking care of the kids ;)
In my experience, personally, those who have the hardest time getting involved are all our small businesspeople, simply because they're the ones who can't spare the time.
A disproportionately high percentage of the women on our boards are organizing monsters. They do the jobs of literally 4 or 5 male volunteers, and better. But when nominations came, they didn't even want to apply.
Some of it is because they felt themselves ill-suited to do the job. Others had personal differences with board members. In one woman's case, her refusal to run was because her husband was a Liberal and they had both decided that the candidacy of either would create too much strain in the household.
Getting back to the business thing, too, I know another husband-and-wife team where the husband is always running for elections simply because he has a desk job. The wife has a small business.
"I thought the NDP had a policy whereby they the party would only allow riding associations to run a white male if there were no female, gay or minority candidates available."
As far as I know, they simply have to have women nominated in 50% of "good chance" ridings.
Ever notice how the MSM is quick to point out something like this... that the Conservatives are behind in terms of gender distribution amongst candidates... but they NEVER point out that the Conservatives are ahead in the game in terms of ethnic distribution?
Geez. I wonder why?
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