Hon. Marie Bountrogianni,
Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs
Minister Responsible for Democratic Renewal

From Rosemary Speirs and Doris Anderson, Equal Voice

Oct. 20, 2005

Madame Minister:

As you know, Equal Voice is a national group of politically-active volunteers working with all major political parties for the election of more women.

Earlier this year we talked to members of the Ontario cabinet about making the election of more women a priority for democratic renewal.

I came to see you on Feb. 16, 2005, with my “rainbow” delegation of Frances Lankin, Janet Ecker and Kim Donaldson to argue that fair representation of women must be written into the terms of reference of Ontario’s Citizen’s Assembly. We made the same point in our brief to the Ontario Select Committee on Electoral Reform on Sept. 1, 2005, which I have attached.

Equal Voice asks your government to explicitly mandate the Assembly to make electing women a key consideration partly because of our experience in British Columbia.

When the chair of our B.C. chapter, Janet Wiegand, went before the B.C. Citizen’s Assembly to argue that any change in the voting system should encourage the election of more women, she found the Assembly did not think that was part of its job.

The B.C. Citizens’ Assembly had been mandated by the government to recommend whether a new voting model should be adopted by the province. No mention was made in the Assembly’s terms of reference, or the criteria the Assembly itself adopted, of the importance of electing more women or better reflecting the province’s diverse population. This happened despite the fact that half the 160 randomly-chosen Assembly members were women.

Now we have heard your government’s representatives, including the former minister responsible, argue that the government must not be seen to guide the results of the Ontario Assembly’s deliberations in any way. This is an argument for leaving it solely up to the Citizen’s Assembly to decide what values it wishes to incorporate in a new voting model.

We reply that including fairer representation for half the population (actually 52 per cent) is not guiding the result in favor of a particular political interest.

Instead, we would argue it is vital that the government put some guiding values before the Citizen’s Assembly, including fair representation for women. For several reasons:

One: As we have seen in B.C, there is no guarantee the Citizen’s Assembly will consider the impact on women’s representation of the alternative voting models. If the Ontario government chooses to leave women’s political equality to chance—as happened in B.C.—the result could well abrogate Section 28 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which protects men and women’s rights equally. As well, the province would have missed an historic opportunity to redress what we consider the most serious deficit in our “representative” form of government. There is really no point in reforming only half of our democracy.

Two: The B.C. proposal for voting reform, the Single Transferable Vote, did not excite enough voters to pass the 60 per cent threshold. We think it fell short—despite the strong public urge for a change in the way politics is done—because the Yes side was so weak that no real public debate ensued.

We think the Ontario government could excite voters more by putting forward in the Assembly’s mandate some of the values which voting reform would achieve: among them many more women in the Legislature, better representation of diversity, a result which more closely mirrors voters’ actual intentions, no wasted votes, and so on. Groups believing the new Legislature would be more inclusive would join the Yes side, giving life to a referendum campaign.

Three: Unless we get it right now, the cause of fairer representation for women will be damaged, and we’ll have to come back asking for remedial measures. We are already doing that in British Columbia because the voting model proposed, the Single Transferable Vote, has a poor history when it comes to electing women. STV is the voting method in Ireland (13 per cent women) and Malta (9.2 per cent women). It is also used in the Australian Senate and some states, but the per cent of women in Australian politics (overall 24.7 per cent) is deceptive because party quotas for nominating women elevate the number elected.

We believe the key to electing more women is a PR system which features large party lists. Countries with the best performances in electing women have either pure List PR systems (the Nordic nations) or Mixed systems which include a portion of PR seats (Germany, New Zealand). The point is that when parties must post lists of those they wish to elect, public scrutiny obliges them to produce representative lists better reflecting the actual makeup of the population, including the gender makeup.

(STV does not include this large list feature. B.C. STV, in fact, uses such small districts --two to seven seats-- that it is difficult to see why some of its proponents claim more women would be elected. For this reason, if electing women had been in the B.C. mandate, we believe a different model would have been chosen).

Four: At the time the B.C. Assembly was established, women’s organizations were not alert to the danger that an electoral reform could be proposed that would do nothing to close the gender gap in political representation.

We are alert now, mobilizing across the country, and closely watching whether Ontario will include women in “democratic renewal”.

Back To TopBack