Be Her or Support Her Campaign

Be Her or Support Her is an action campaign created to galvanize women into seeking elected office or to support another woman in doing so.

Please select one of the links (below) to explore how you can be involved:

Individual Action 

Community Action  

Party Action

STATISTICS

While we've made progress, we can do much more. Here's what's happened recently... 

In 2007, all parties accepted Equal Voice’s first Canada Challenge on the same day in the House of Commons.

During the federal election of 2008, nearly 28% of all federal candidates were women, a historic high for Canada.

In June 2009, the five major federal parties committed to Equal Voice’s second Canada Challenge: Building the Momentum to Elect More Women in Canada.  By participating in this challenge, federal party leaders have committed to promoting the recruitment and nomination of more women to federal Parliament.

Recent statistics indicate that Canada’s international rank with respect to the number of women in elected office has not improved significantly in the last decade.  According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Canada currently stands in 49^th place out of 189 parliamentary nations.

Federal

There are currently 68 women out of 308 Members of Parliament on the federal level, which amounts to 22.1%.  This is only a slight improvement to the 2006 election, when women accounted for 20.8% of the Members of Parliament, down from 21.1% in 2004.
 

Provincial

On the provincial level, 174 women are currently elected to legislatures out of 697 seats, meaning that women represent 24.9% of these seats. 

Territorial

In the territories, women represent 6 out of 56 seats in the legislature, accounting for 10.7%. 

Municipal

Municipally, women represent 13.5 per cent of mayors and 23.2 per cent of councillors for an average of 21.7 per cent, and a total of 5,320 women out of a total of 24,480 mayors and councillors.

With the launch of Be Her or Support Her, we aim to ensure that more women run, and win, in elections across the country.