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PRESS RELEASES Equal Voice, a volunteer group dedicated to promoting the election of more women, wrote today to leaders of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario asking them to reconsider the party's $1.5 million PLUS limit on candidate spending in the March leadership race. The letter to Premier Mike Harris and party president Reuben Devlin called the limit, which does not restrict polling or costs of the candidates leadership tours, a "new high'' in Ontario politics. Big spending in political campaigns raises an additional barrier to the participation of women, and others who lack the corporate links, says the letter. In 1985, after former Premier William Davis resigned, the four candidates to replace him--Frank Miller, Dennis Timbrell, Roy McMurtry, and Larry Grossman--each spent more than a million dollars on their campaigns. Their deeply indebted party then placed a $500,000 limit per candidate on subsequent leadership races. In 1990, Mike Harris exceeded the limit by $200,000 in his successful candidacy for the Ontario Conservative leadership. Now the governing party has tripled its former limit and established loopholes which will allow each candidate to spend $2 to $3 million. This will be the most expensive leadership race in Canadian political history and a field day for pollsters, consultants and professional phone bankers. Equal Voice argues that politicians should be levelling the political playing field, not creating new stumbling blocks, so more Canadians, particularly women, can get into the game. For expert commentary on campaign spending, please call Dr. Donna Dasko , senior vice-president Environics Research Group, 416-920-9010 or Helen Burstyn, senior vice-president of Advance Planning at 416-967-3702. Our expert on women's participation in politics, and money as a barrier, is Dr. Sylvia Bashevkin of the political science department of the University of Toronto, 416-946-3066. Challenge to the Canada Elections Act David Beatty, a law professor at the University of Toronto, has prepared a case going to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice challenging the Canada Elections Act, a challenge which we think women should be supporting. Prof. Beatty argues that the Act makes it more difficult for women to secure effective representation of their views, and therefore violates women's equality rights under the Charter. The official complaintant in the case is Joan Russow, past president of the Green Party, who argues the Canadian election system disadvantages her as a woman. Most democratic, developed countries have moved to systems of proportional representation, whose central characteristic is ensuring each vote carries the same weight in the assignment of seats in given legislatures. Many countries, including Germany, Japan and New Zealand, use a mixed election system, employing proportional representation as a tool to ensure the election of women and minorities and to guarantee a fair voice for smaller parties (such as Green parties). A very few countries, including Canada, the United States and Great Britain, still use the single member plurality system, based on the principle that whoever wins the most votes in a geographic riding wins a seat. This is called "winner-takes-all" and means most of our representatives are chosen by a plurality of less than 50 per cent of voters. The result is usually a strong majority government, chosen by less than half the voters. Prof. Beatty's argument to the court is that women (and minorities, like aboriginals), are far better represented in legislatures that elect their members based on systems of proportional representation. Women have gained the highest levels of representation in countries using PR such as Sweden, Norway and Germany. Although no one factor explains the systematic under-representation of women in countries like Canada, Great Britain and the United States, it is accepted as a fact among political scientists that the choice of electoral system is crucial, Beatty's factum will tell the court. He argues that in countries using both systems, three to four times more women are elected to seats based on proportional representation. One reason, he suggests, is that women are nominated much less frequently under winner-takes-all systems because parties trying to win a plurality vote try to nominate candidates they consider the safest and least controversial. In proportional representation systems, the pressures run the opposite way, creating incentives for parties to put women and minorities on party lists. Apart from the argument about women's equality rights, the case will also test Beatty's second argument that distortions in our electoral system give huge advantages to the one national party that wins the plurality and to regionally based parties drawing their strength from only one part of the country. (Conservative and New Democrat voters endure elections in which their votes are worth only a third or half of votes for the Liberals, Bloc Quebecois or Reform.) This part of the case will deal with the violation of voter's rights to an equal vote. But we are not proposing that we join this second part, only the first aspects of the case which deal with womençs political rights as protected by the Charter. Prof. Beatty calls it the Persons' Two case. (Persons' One got women in the Senate.) "This will double the women in the House of Commons," he says. |