Toronto – Women running to become leader of a political party in Ontario have an uphill battle, but one has been given a surprise lift.
MPP Andrea Horwath is running against three male colleagues, Michael Prue, Gilles Bisson and Peter Tabuns for the leadership of the New Democratic Party.
Women candidates normally are restrained from emphasizing they are the only woman in a race and parties have long discriminated against women by refusing to choose them as leaders, because this might imply they want to be given preference solely because they are women and lack more necessary credentials.
But Progressive Conservative opposition leader John Tory has unexpectedly focused attention on the way parties often relegate women to secondary roles. Tory has been without a seat in the legislature since losing an election in October 2007 and persuaded one of his party’s most promising women MPPs, Laurie Scott, to resign so he can run in her riding.
“...parties have missed opportunities to choose women who may have been successful leaders.”
Horwath was given an opening to charge that Tory forced one of the handful of women in his caucus to give up her career for a man at a time when the province needs more women MPPs and not fewer.
Tory claimed Scott volunteered her seat and he asked males in his caucus to give up theirs, but he took 15 months asking MPPs to yield and this shows some persistence amounting to pressure.
Horwath seized this opportunity to remind women make up 50 per cent of voters, but have only 26 per cent of seats in the legislature and are “under-represented at all levels of government,” which presumably includes leader.
Horwath obviously cannot ask New Democrats to make her leader simply because she is a woman, and she has shown other talents in frequent contributions to the legislature, but the issue of whether the party should choose a woman leader has now become firmly entrenched in the campaign.
The desire among parties also is to “choose change,” Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty’s winning slogan in the 2003 election, and if a party wants to change its look, the quickest way is to be led by a woman.
Ontario’s mainstream parties have had only one woman leader, Liberal Lyn McLeod in the 1990s, and it has to be conceded this did not bring more votes. The party’s establishment picked McLeod, who had been a competent minister, believing the time for a woman leader had come, so she had a relatively easy path to that role.
But McLeod had the misfortune to fight an election against Conservative leader Mike Harris at his most dominating, promising drastic cuts in government and spending, and she made a huge mistake in refusing on male advice to reveal Liberal policies until Harris had the election sewn up, and left an impression a woman was not tough enough and could be pushed around.
But parties have missed opportunities to choose women who may have been successful leaders. Bette Stephenson, a formidable Conservative minister and former president of the Canadian Medical Association, had the abilities and toughness of the male contenders and should have run for leader and premier in the mid-1980s, but judged her party not ready for a woman leader and stayed out.
Conservative minister Elizabeth Witmer was a worthy candidate for leader when Harris stepped down, and tough enough, having stared down angry unionists to impose Harris’s hard-on-labor policies, and her party should have given her more of a tribute than an early exit in the voting.
In the last NDP leadership race, which chose Howard Hampton, his main opponent, Frances Lankin, had shown as much ability, but critics characterized her as “the large lady” although no such comments are made about hefty men.
There obviously are pros and cons in having a woman leader and a party should not choose one solely because she is a woman.
But women also are as able as men and have been chosen leaders elsewhere – can anyone think of a good reason Ontario has not had more of them?
Eric Dowd is a veteran member of the Queen’s Park press gallery.
