A female premier, but business as usual
UNDER PAULINE MAROIS, PQ ran fewer women as candidates than in 2008 and she won’t guarantee gender parity in her cabinet
Celebrating Premierelect Pauline Marois’s Sept. 4 electoral win as a victory for women seems oddly beside the point.
Yet the French-language Châtelaine magazine has just printed a 45,000-copy special run on her career. Women’s groups in the province have called for solidarity with the premier-elect. Marois herself has underlined her place in history, the first woman to be elected premier of Quebec.
And, it’s true, Marois’s election is a historic milestone, coming as it does 72 years after Quebec women won the right to vote in a provincial election (and 94 years after women across the country could vote in federal elections). Her victory seems part of a new wave of women entering politics and winning the top jobs. She will become the fifth female premier in Canada, joining British Columbia’s Christy Clark, Alison Redford of Alberta, Kathy Dunderdale of Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nunavut’s Eva Aariak. Two years ago, only Dunderdale was a premier.
Quebec marked another historic milestone Sept. 4 with a record high number of women — 41 — winning seats in the 125-member National Assembly. They will make up nearly one in three policymakers in the province, a percentage second only to the Yukon’s 37 per cent.
But even with Marois as the first female head of government, it doesn’t feel like much has changed. The proportion of female MNAs has fluctuated around 30 per cent for the past decade. And Marois’s victory was so thin, celebrating it as a step forward for women feels like we’re grasping at straws, like there had to be something positive that came out of a campaign that put most voters on edge.
But in fact there was little in her program that felt like progress. The Parti Québécois does not come across as a party that wants to be part of the global economy or the free flow of ideas and people around the world. The PQ program, in effect, called for immigrants to be pushed farther to the margins of Quebec society, forced to prove fluency in French before running for public office. Members of religious minorities would be forbidden from wearing religious insignia if they wanted to work in the public sector. And only anglophones would have the right to college-level education in English.
One of Marois’s star candidates, Jean-François Lisée, made clear that the PQ’s nation-building efforts will be based, to the extent possible, on people whose maternal language is French. An immigrant from Belgium, Lisée said, is preferable to an immigrant from Shanghai who has learned French.
Marois’s historic win rests on having won 31.9 per cent of the popular vote and 54 of 125 seats, below the traditional 33 per cent to 35 per cent level of support for sovereignty in the province. The Liberals, in power for nine years, the last two marked by frequent accusations of corruption, won 31.2 per cent of the vote and 50 seats. It was the Liberals who scored the highest number of female MNAs — 18 out of a total of 50, for 36 per cent. The PQ ran proportionally fewer female candidates this time out than it did in 2008 — 31 per cent in 2008 and 27 per cent in 2012 — and its results reflect that: 16 women were elected under the PQ banner out of the 34 female candidates who ran.
It may be unfair to expect women to bring something different to politics, but Marois should at least try to match what Jean Charest did in 2007. When he came in as the leader of a minority government, he created a genderequal cabinet, the first in the country. Charest had already, in 2006, passed legislation requiring the boards of the province’s Crown corporations to be 50-per-cent held by women. By 2011, female board representation in the province had risen to 52.4 per cent from 27.5 per cent in 2006.
Throughout the campaign, Marois said she could not guarantee cabinet parity. She would have to see who was elected. It’s an answer that seems reasonable until you remember that she had control over how many women ran for the PQ, and under her, a female leader, the numbers dropped.
With her history of support for daycare and parental leave, Marois can’t be accused of not caring about women’s needs. But from the sidelines, it looks like she’s more concerned with keeping the Lisée faction of her party happy than building on her historic victory. Which is fine. It just doesn’t make her any different from any other politician.