For The Record, Kitchener-Waterloo
And Guelph Mercury
Feb 27, 2006

BY GEOFFREY STEVENS

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine. Imagine that women, who make up 52 per cent of the population, were fully represented in the Parliament of Canada.

What difference would it make if one-half of the MPs were women?

To start with the obvious, the improvement in parliamentary decorum would be striking. Debates would be more civil. Question Period might actually be informative.

On the policy front, if half of the members were women, Canada would already have a national daycare system, open to all families, regardless of their financial circumstances.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper would not be reneging, as he is now, on the previous Liberal government’s pledge to provide $5.5 billion over five years to the provinces for child-care spaces. He would not be trying to pretend, as he is now, that the Conservatives’ promised payment to parents of $100 per month per child under the age of six constitutes a daycare program. It may be a baby bonus, but it’s no answer to working families’ need for child care.

And if half of our parliamentarians, including Conservatives, were women, Harper would not have run around, as he did in the election, mouthing platitudinous claptrap about the best daycare in the world being good old mom and dad.

Daycare is the immediate example because the Harper government has served notice to the provinces that the deal negotiated by the Liberals will be terminated at the end of 2006-07 fiscal year. But there are other examples. Harper plans to reopen the same-sex marriage debate and has promised a free vote, if only to placate his religious right. If women made up 50 per cent of the members, he wouldn’t waste Parliament’s time; the anti-gay gang wouldn’t have a prayer.

Abortion is another case in point. Since the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1988 Morgentaler ruling, a woman’s right to choose has been unquestioned. Predictions by pro-lifers notwithstanding, the sky has not fallen, the country has not fallen into a swamp of immorality, and women are not using abortion as a substitute for birth control.

Many right-wing Conservatives are casting envious eyes at the United States where the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade faces imminent attack. Last week, the court agreed to consider reinstating a federal ban on what is known as “partial-birth” abortion, an infrequently performed procedure in the later (after 20 weeks) stages of pregnancy.

Also last week, the South Dakota legislature overwhelmingly approved a law prohibiting all abortions, other than to save the life of the woman. The legislators made no exceptions for rape or incest or the protection of the woman’s health. The new law will be challenged, but its supporters are already raising money to carry the fight to the Supreme Court where they confidently expect that the recent appointments of two new conservative judges will mean the end of legal abortion.

Although what happens in the United States doesn’t automatically follow here, many of the same socio-religious factors are at work. With the pro-life forces in the ascendancy in the U.S., it will not be long before our MPs come under pressure to legislate against abortion. Reality – the knowledge that our Supreme Court would almost certainly strike down such a law – would not discourage its advocates, the vast majority of them male.

The gender divide on public policy issues is described in the new 2006 Canadian Election Study by academic researchers Elisabeth Gidengil, Joanna Everitt, Neil Nevitte, André Blais and Patrick Fournier. They conducted 4,000 interviews. Women, they found, were 10 per cent less likely to vote Conservative than men were. Men rated corruption as the most important issue; women said health care.

Women were well to the left of men on all social issues. They were more supportive of same-sex marriage, more strongly in favour of gun control, less receptive to two-tier medicine, and more concerned about poverty.

The five researchers concluded that if Harper had made the Conservatives as attractive to women voters as to men, he would have elected a majority government.

He didn’t try very hard. Where the NDP made a determined effort to recruit and support women candidates – and it paid off with a caucus that is 41 per cent female – the Conservatives didn’t bother. Only 14 MPs, 11 per cent of the Conservative caucus, are women. And, overall, women account for not quite 21 per cent of the new Parliament.

There are reasons for that, and we’ll return to them another week.

Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens, an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail, teaches political science at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens@sympatico.ca.

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