Women bringing a lifetime of skills to the cabinet table
Our new minister of international development worked for CIDA in Benin and Morocco. Our new minister of health is a family physician. And our new minister for sport and persons with disabilities won three bronze medals at the Paralympic Games.
Who said gender parity would come at the expense of expertise? Oh, and that appointments to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet should be based on merit alone, as if to imply that female politicians would arrive with nothing more than push-up bras and the startled look of deer on the 401. How do you like them apples? As I watched each of the 15 smart, interesting, talented women walk up the gold carpet at Rideau Hall to take their oaths of office this week, the question that has been nagging me since the election nipped at my conscience.
What makes someone qualified to be a Canadian cabinet minister?
Marie-Claude Bibeau, our new minister of international development and La Francophonie, is the first minister — at least in recent history — to have actually worked in the field, spending 12 years working on development projects.
Science Minister Kirsty Duncan was one of the members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Carla Qualtrough served as president of the Canadian Paralympic Committee and was legal council to both the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal and the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal. If anything, she is overqualified for her new job as minister of sport and persons with disabilities.
I did notice that, leading up to this week’s unveiling of the new cabinet, few male pundits questioned the CV of International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland. Here is why, I think: she worked at The Globe and Mail, this country’s business newspaper, and Britain’s Financial Times, and she wrote a book about the world’s ultra-rich 0.01 per cent, described in the Amazon review as “smart, perceptive businessmen who see themselves as deserving victors in a cutthroat international competition.” There’s no doubt Freeland is whip-smart — she was a Rhodes scholar — but more importantly, she’s schooled in business.
Traditionally, the men of the Canadian establishment have liked their leaders to be bankers or lawyers, regardless of the portfolio.
Jane Philpott is Canada’s first health minister who is a physician. To boot, she has a master’s degree in public health. She also has management credentials: She was chief of family medicine at Markham Stouffville Hospital, overseeing some 100 family physicians. But what interests me more is her work in Niger — the country in the gutter of the United Nations’ Human Development Index. She spent nine years there, first treating patients for dysentery and meningitis, then training rural health workers. When she returned to Canada, she convinced her colleagues to donate a day’s wages to the Stephen Lewis Foundation’s work with AIDS-affected women in Africa. Her resulting charity, “Give a Day to World AIDS,” says it has raised more than $4 million since then.
All this, and she is the mom of four kids.
She clearly has courage, heart, ingenuity, agency and an impressive ability to multitask. . . . Those qualities are rarely touted on a resumé despite their obvious importance.
While in Niger, her first child, Emily, died at 2 of meningitis.
“My daughter was not the only child that died of meningitis that day in Niger,” Philpott told me by phone. “Sometimes Canadians are anxious about vaccines. Good evidence-based vaccine development is incredibly important in keeping us healthy.”
Critics might argue Maryam Monsef, the minister of democratic institutions, has little experience in the portfolio. But she can draw from her personal journey as an 11-yearold refugee, arriving to Canada from Afghanistan with her mom and two sisters. She has empathy and is sensitive to different perspectives, something not seen in Ottawa for years. She’s clearly a quick learner (she speaks three languages) and perhaps will arrive to work with a coil of panic in her stomach — never a bad thing when starting a new job.
“A good leader does not always know everything,” Bibeau said in an interview. “First, you have to have vision for the organization, you need to be able to listen to feedback, and have the capacity to make decisions.”
(Throughout the campaign, Bibeau was regularly referred to as the wife of Sherbrooke Mayor Bernard Sévigny. “Funny, now he’s being called the husband of the minister,” she said, chuckling.)
Never before has there been this many women at the table of power in Canada. We were ranked 20th in the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s world rankings of women in ministerial positions, as of last January. All things being equal, we’d jump up to fifth now.
Studies predict that all these women will provide more consensusbuilding and transparency to government — qualities central to Trudeau’s brand. We should also expect them to come up with new solutions to old problems, since women leaders typically consult broadly and listen well, says Equal Voice spokeswoman Nancy Peckford. And, we can expect that they will drag causes, long left to rot in the heap of so-called “soft issues,” into the public spotlight where they have always belonged — violence against women, poverty, affordable housing, for example.
To those who believed Trudeau’s quota system was unfair, these 15 cabinet ministers show the opposite. They make me wonder how many qualified women were overlooked by past prime ministers. How many are still overlooked by corporate boards, given fewer than one in five people in senior positions at Canada’s largest 500 companies were women in 2012, according to a Catalyst report.
Philpott says she hopes it inspires more women to run for office. I hope the ripple effect is even greater. As Peckford said, if the Prime Minister can find such quality in a pool of just 27 per cent female MPs, why shouldn’t the rest of us, where every other person is a woman?