The Hill Times, August 10, 2009
Harper government more connected to 'organized anti-feminism' than previous Conservative or Liberal parties
If Conservatives want to win a majority government, there needs to be 'a much more clear focus on drawing in much more activists to the party, who are from all kinds of backgrounds.'
By Cynthia Münster
The Conservative Harper government "is closer to organized anti-feminism than any regime in the country's history" and if it wants to win a majority, it needs to reach out to minority activists, including women, says University of Toronto political science professor Sylvia Bashevkin.
"In terms of the willingness of pragmatists to win out over ideologues, if pragmatists are going to prevail in the Conservative Party, it seems to me there will be a much more clear focus on drawing in much more activists to the party, who are from all kinds of backgrounds, be they aboriginal, or new Canadians, or women, or so on and, of course, women in each of those other categories and youth," Prof. Bashevkin said in an interview with The Hill Times.
Prof. Bashevkin, author of Women, Power, Politics: The Hidden Story of Canada's Unfinished Democracy, said that the number of contacts the current Conservative government has to the "organized anti-feminism" movement are "significantly higher" than previous Conservative and Liberal governments. She noted in her book, published by Oxford University Press, that the Conservatives' 2006 election victory "entailed far more than a perfunctory changing of the guard on Parliament Hill." When the Conservatives took power, they cut $5-million from the Status of Women budget and "the notion of fostering equality was summarily stripped from the mandate of the agency," while halting a national child care program begun by the previous Liberal government in favour of a $1,200 tax credit "designed to advantage households with single--and overwhelmingly male--earners."
This ideology that individuals are responsible for themselves and special designations should not be made for specific minority groups, will make it hard for the Conservatives to win majority governments, said Prof. Bashevkin, who received a Canada's Most Powerful Women: Top 100 award in 2005. "We find in many parties ... on the right of the spectrum, there is often people who have a very strong view that there should be a pure merit principle at work and therefore, there shouldn't be designated delegates, for example, who are youth or aboriginal or women to party conventions or party meetings or as party candidates and that often makes it difficult within those parties for people who are of the more pragmatic streak and just want to win elections. [It] also makes it hard for them to draw in voters and activists from those backgrounds."
Despite the ideology, Prof. Bashevkin told The Hill Times that women are disadvantaged when it comes to politics in general. Currently there are 69 female MPs in the House of Commons, making up 22.4 per cent even though women make up 52 per cent of the Canadian population. Prof. Bashevkin attributes this to the fact that Canadians are uncomfortable with electing women to powerful positions. This inequality makes our democratic system incomplete, she said. "If power is about commanding and power is about leading in a very hierarchical sense, then we often have a discomfort with the view that a woman would be a commander in chief or that she would be leading in the sense of giving orders. We see that as a highly masculine behaviour."
Why do you say women in politics are Canada's unfinished democracy?
"We haven't gone through a revolution recently, or ever. We haven't had a major transition following any internal strife of the sort that we've seen in other parts of the world. As a result we have a sense that things are quite complete as they are, yet I maintain that given the power in Canada of norms about democracy and equality going together and the fact that we have such low representation of women in our formal political institutions, I argue that this is an important part of finishing or completing the project of democratic renewal that many Canadians have been concerned about."
In the private sector and in the bureaucracy women have gotten at least closer to equality than in public, political life. How does your equation of women plus power equals discomfort apply to this? Does it mean we're just not comfortable voting them in?
"It's when we get to higher positions, for example, party leader positions--which one needs in a Parliamentary system in order to become leader of a government--where many other kinds of patterns kick in, which have to do with the public dissection of the individuals who are in the limelight.
"So we see this pattern of speech where we often speak about women in those leadership positions using their first names. ... We find this pattern of dissecting their appearance, their clothing, their hair, their style of speech, their personal lives. This is probably not just trivializing the women who may seek to run for top office but it also serves to discourage individuals from trying out those careers. It tends to dampen the supply of women as well as men who are willing to submit to that kind of public microscopic examination so part of it is the stakes that are involved.
"There is high stakes in all fields but very few of them are as exposed, stark, public inspection as public political leadership. ... So therefore, we tend to see women who become party leaders, leading parties that are really very weak and then blaming them when the party in fact turn in weak results in an election, which is entirely consistent with the fact that the party was in a weak position."
Why are we so uncomfortable with putting women in powerful positions?
"I think in part it goes back to a sense about a fairly masculine understanding of what power is, that if power is about commanding and power is about leading in a very hierarchical sense, then we often have a discomfort with the view that a woman would be a commander in chief or that she would be leading in the sense of giving orders. We see that as a highly masculine behaviour."
Wouldn't that discomfort apply to everything? Minorities, any non-white male Christian politician?
"I think we're much more uncomfortable with electing women from those backgrounds than we are with men and we can certainly argue that urban society in Canada is highly diverse and our urban leaders do not at all reflect the diversity of our population. For example, if you look at the MPs from Toronto right now in the House of Commons, they don't really resemble the interior of a subway car at rush hour. They are very different in terms of age, in terms of ethno-cultural composition and so on. ... We tend to be more comfortable with seeing men from those diverse backgrounds move forward and less so with women."
Still, we have had a female prime minister but I haven't seen a Canadian prime minister even being Hindu.
"I think it's true that we have had patterns in Canada whereby people from some demographic background tend to fit more with the norm than others but it generally is the case, when you look at groups breaking in, whether it's age or ethno-cultural background or sexual orientation or religion or so on, it tends to be men from those backgrounds breaking in ahead of the women, which suggests to me that there is this discomfort about women and gender which tends to transcend those various categories, whether it's about religion, ethno-cultural background, age or sexual orientation."
Why do you say that "the Harper government is closer to organized anti-feminism than any regime in the country's history?"
"I would argue that the numbers of contacts between staff people in the Prime Minister's Office, between caucus members in the Conservative caucus on one side and organized anti-feminism are significantly higher than they were in the Mulroney years or what we saw under the Liberals since 1993."
What do you mean by organized anti-feminism?
"I mean in particular to the positions of the group named REAL Women. REAL Women has had particular views, for example, about reproductive choice. They've had particular views about women in the workforce. They've had particular views about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that are really quite inconsistent with where most Canadians [are]. ... If you look at the patterns of contacts and the patterns of appointments and so on, you can see that the social conservative position of a group like REAL Women often find resonance more in this current government than in previous ones...
"In Canada, as in most parts of the world you are finding that overwhelming numbers of women who are elected are coming from the progressive side of the spectrum. There are relatively few women, as opposed to men, who are in the electorate of the hard right. ... This is reflected in the recruitment pattern to those parties. The percentages of women who are nominated as candidates and who are elected as MPs has been consistently lower in the Reform Party, the Alliance and the current Conservative Party."
Do you expect the Conservative tune to be changing at all in order to get more votes from women, who are less likely to vote Conservative?
"I'm not at all sure where the party is going to go but lately it looks like there may be more of a pragmatic view, which says it's important to win elections, it's important to move from a minority to a majority. At the same time I see no sign that the Liberals or the NDP are going to abandon their commitment to reaching out to women candidates and reaching out to women voters. ... Even if they were to change, even if the Conservatives were to become more pragmatic, it's not that easy to suddenly make a breakthrough when you have a long history of not wanting to move in that direction."
You propose political party quotas, proportional representation and mandatory voting as solutions to getting more women elected. These are not new suggestions and have been debated for years. Some parties already have quotas, but they have not produced results. Do you think proportional representation and mandatory voting will ever happen?
"I'm not sure that we will see those changes but I think they're worth raising as possibilities. They're worth debating because the more realistic options--including pressing party leaders to ensure open nominations so that lots of different candidates can actually run in the House of Commons--we come back to the more informal strategies, the more workable ones. ... The book does offer some more radical propositions as a way to stimulate us to at least focus on getting the more achievable and more incremental reforms implemented."
Women, Power, Politics: The Hidden Story of Canada's Unfinished Democracy, by Sylvia Bashevkin, Oxford University Press, 186 pp, $19.95.
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