B.C. legislature No. 1 in Canada in female representation
For now, 34 women elected as MLAs in Tuesday’s election
Nearly 40 per cent of the MLAs elected Tuesday night are women, a record for B.C. and the highest number of any Canadian province.
“Both the B.C. Liberals and the NDP have been raising their numbers of women candidates since 2009,” Carolyn Jack of Equal Voice B.C. said Thursday. “The parties have decided that they want to get more women elected … and we are seeing the results of that at the legislature.”
Women represented 29 per cent of MLAs in 2009, 35 per cent in 2013 and 39 per cent this time — 34 of the 87 politicians elected.
The NDP — which has an equity policy to nominate more diverse candidates — leads the other parties with 19 of its 41 MLAs being women (46 per cent).
That compares with one-third of the MLAs from the two other main parties being female: 14 of 43 Liberals and one of three Greens.
“B.C. continues to lead the nation in the representation of women,” said Jack, noting the closest provinces are Ontario (35 per cent) and Alberta (33 per cent).
Postmedia News has also reported that in federal politics B.C. sends more female MPs to Ottawa per capita than any other province.
Jack speculates the reason for female success politically in this province is due to good role models, such as Grace McCarthy, the first female deputy premier in Canada; Rita Johnston, the first female premier in Canada; and Kim Campbell, the first female prime minister in Canada.
“Seeing women in leadership roles begets more women thinking they can be elected as politicians. We have that kind of history here, and we are lucky,” Jack said.
She noted every major party in this province has had a female leader: Johnson (Social Credit), Premier Christy Clark (Liberal), Carole James (NDP) and Jane Sterk (Green).
The NDP’s at-times divisive policy has two main elements: when a woman doesn’t seek re-election, she must be replaced by another woman; and when a man doesn’t seek re-election, he must be replaced by someone who is female, First Nations, a visible minority or from the LGBTQ community.
The NDP elected 11 visible minorities this time, compared with five in 2013, plus a First Nations MLA and a Metis MLA. The first transgender woman to run for a major political party in Canada, Morgane Oger, nearly won Vancouver-False Creek for the NDP, losing by only 400 votes to the Liberal incumbent.
The Liberals, who don’t have a similar policy, elected four visible minorities and one First Nations MLA this year. (Those numbers are similar to 2013.)
The Liberals, however, re-elected three high-profile candidates with disabilities. One NDP MLA has a disability.
Of course, some of these demographics could change due to recounts and the counting of absentee ballots. In Courtenay-Comox, for example, Ronna-Rae Leonard won for the NDP, but leads her male Liberal rival by only nine votes.
More than 100 women ran for office in this election, Jack said. Half of the NDP candidates were women, higher than the Liberals (41 per cent) and Greens (37 per cent).
An analysis by Equal Voice researcher Grace Lore suggests men are more likely to run in safe seats, and women more often run in ridings that either the Liberals or NDP had lost by more than 10 points in the last election, Jack said.
B.C. elected its first female MLA, Mary Ellen Smith, in a byelection in 1918 after her husband Ralph died in office. She was elected just one year after B.C. women got the right to vote in 1917. Smith became the first female cabinet minister in the British Empire in 1921 and, in 1928, the first female Speaker of the House in B.C.
The share of women in the B.C. legislature didn’t rise above 11 per cent until the mid-1980s.