Gender quotas are an effective solution
The Prime Minister may boast about his gender-equal federal Cabinet, but Canada is tumbling down the global rankings for women’s representation in parliament.
Women hold only 30 per cent of seats in the House of Commons, and Canada ranks a mere 58th of 185 countries with active parliaments, sandwiched between Zimbabwe at 57 and Viet Nam at 59.
Canada started the millennium ranked 27.
Progress then slowed and other countries pulled ahead. Countries like Mexico, Argentina, France, Spain and Belgium all outrank Canada, electing over 40 per cent women. The secret to their success? Laws that require political parties to run specified proportions of women.
These statutory gender quotas are found in over 80 countries, making Canada an outlier. And the success of quotas in countries like Mexico — that have strong parties and single-member districts — handily contradicts arguments that quotas are incompatible with Canada’s political system.
It’s time Canada got with the program and adopted gender parity for parliament.
Gender parity and democracy
Quota laws set different minimum percentages for women candidates, but the current state-of-the-art is gender parity — meaning gender-balance or 50 per cent women and 50 per cent men.
The European Union considers gender parity a matter of fairness and democracy. So do all 33 Latin American and Caribbean governments, who committed to gender parity in the 2007 Quito Consensus.
The reasoning — echoed by feminist activists across the globe — is that governments and policies cannot be representative without including men and women in equal numbers. Indeed, voters perceive gender-balanced decision-making bodies as more trustworthy and more legitimate than those dominated by men.
Five countries in Western and Southern Europe and eleven countries in the Americas currently implement gender parity. France, Mexico, Bolivia and Ecuador even have it in their constitutions.
Myth busting
Numerically speaking, gender quotas and gender parity also work. Argentina adopted the contemporary era’s first quota law in 1991, so scholars have extensively studied their effects.
Over and over again, studies show that countries with quotas and parity elect more women than countries without. Hard rules like statutory quotas are better at overcoming centuries of discrimination than soft measures like training women to run for office.
There’s also no evidence that quotas sacrifice merit. In fact, countries with quotas elect women who have better credentials than their male peers — and quotas even weed out the unqualified men. Quotas, writes political scientist Rainbow Murray, provide quality control, improving political representation for all.
An equally democratic means of candidate selection
Canadians might argue that quotas and parity violate party norms and lead to un-democratic outcomes.
The reasoning goes as follows: parties choose candidates via an organic sorting process that reflects the riding associations’ preferences. So, forcing parties to nominate women tramples members’ right to be represented by their chosen candidate.
Except most parties never achieve this grassroots ideal. The Samara Centre for Democracy found that, of the five federal election cycles between 2004 and 2019, only 17 per cent of House of Commons candidates emerged through competitive contests.
Parties simply appointed the rest. The majority are men.
In Mexico, parties often evaded quota rules by claiming they selected candidates via internally democratic primaries. The federal electoral court eliminated this loophole in 2011, ruling that gender equality was a democratic principle that could not play second fiddle to other democratic principles — like fair candidate selection.
Said another way, since Mexico and other Latin American countries view parties as responsible for enacting democracy, gender parity makes candidate selection more — not less — democratic.
Applying parity to single-member districts
Another fallacy is that quotas or parity cannot work with Canada’s single-member districts.
Most countries have multi-member districts where parties run lists of candidates and women can be integrated in the required proportions. But with one candidate per riding, which ones get the woman?
Again, Mexico has a solution. Across the entirety of the 300 single-member districts where parties field candidates, they must have gender balance.
Parties can choose where women run, but unlike in Canada, parties must field women where they can win. Mexico’s federal electoral institute uses the previous election results to divide each party’s districts into three tiers—winning, competitive and losing — and they look for gender balance within each tier.
Mexico has held three federal election cycles since parity first applied in 2015. The parties, once notorious for resisting gender quotas, now compete to look the best.
Take the 2019 constitutional reform known as “gender parity in everything.” When women senators introduced gender parity for the legislative, executive and judicial branches at the federal, state, and municipal levels, the parties all rushed to claim credit. The measure passed without a single “nay” vote in the house or the Senate.
Another world is possible
Mexico has the world’s most comprehensive gender parity norm, but Chile could steal that title. The new constitution — which goes before voters on September 4 — defines Chile as a parity democracy, conceptualizes 50 per cent for women (including transwomen) as a minimum, and requires additional mechanisms for non-binary individuals.
These innovations only push Canada further down the global rankings.
Canada has a feminist international assistance policy and undertakes gender-based policy analysis, but the relatively few women in parliament speak loud and clear. Trudeau may claim that Canada leads the globe on gender equality, but considering Mexico’s success, it doesn’t even lead North America.
Women senators have proposed that parties follow gender parity in nominations, or face fines. Getting that done would mean Canada actually starts walking the walk.
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