[2] The non-partisan consensus government of the Northwest Territories achieved near gender parity across the entire legislature in the 2019 Northwest Territories general election, with nine women and 10 men elected as MLAs; at the first formal meeting of the legislative assembly, the MLAs selected a woman, Caroline Cochrane, as premier, and chose women for four of the six cabinet roles.
[3] After one of the 10 male MLAs resigned his seat in 2021, the resulting by-election was won by a woman, making the Northwest Territories the first jurisdiction in Canadian history to have an outright majority of its legislators be women.
[6] At the federal level, women first earned the right to vote in 1917, albeit in a limited capacity: the franchise was only extended to those who were in active military service or related to a man who was.
In 1984, her leader, Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau advised Queen Elizabeth II to make her the Governor General of Canada, which title she assumed (after resigning her seat in Parliament) on 28 January 1984.
Several women, including Mary Walker-Sawka, Rosemary Brown and Flora MacDonald, have run for the leadership of federal political parties.
MacDonald unwittingly lent her name to a political phenomenon known as "Flora Syndrome" when some of her own committed delegates at the 1976 Progressive Conservative leadership election decided not to vote for her, a loss of support which some commentators attributed to sexism.
[24] The women – Emily Murphy, Henrietta Muir Edwards, Nellie McClung, Irene Parlby and Louise McKinney – are the only people in the history of the Senate to be given this honor.
As of November 2023[update], seven women are deputy premiers: Diane Archie in the Northwest Territories, Siobhán Coady in Newfoundland and Labrador, Sylvia Jones in Ontario, Geneviève Guilbault in Quebec, Donna Harpauer in Saskatchewan, Jeanie McLean in Yukon and Pamela Gross in Nunavut.
[29] On July 27, 2021, following the resignation of Jackson Lafferty and the by-election victory of Jane Weyallon Armstrong, the Legislative Assembly had a majority of women legislators— a first in Canada.
Women in politics still sometimes face a double standard, with their personal lives subject to greater scrutiny than those of men in equivalent positions.
When Clark announced her candidacy for the 2011 British Columbia Liberal Party leadership race, she was again asked by journalist Bill Good how she planned to balance her role as a mother with the responsibilities of serving as provincial premier if she won – to which Clark responded: Stephen Harper manages to go home for dinner with his kids every night, or most nights when he's in the country, and he has breakfast with them in the morning, and he's a pretty busy guy.
Similarly, following Clark's victory in the leadership race, Global Vancouver anchor Chris Gailus was criticized for asking her in an interview whether her new job as premier would leave her any time to date.
Similarly, when Belinda Stronach crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals in 2005, political reaction to her announcement took on a very different tone than similar moves by male politicians – while David Emerson, for instance, was criticized in a relatively civil manner for the ethics of his floor-crossing, Stronach was variously labelled a "dog", a "dipstick" and a "whore" by her former colleagues.
McLeod was criticized for a perceived tendency toward weak leadership and flip-flopping on the issues, especially after she withdrew her party's support from the 1994 Equality Rights Statute Amendment Act – PC election ads depicted McLeod as a weathervane shifting in the wind, and the party's popular support dropped almost 20 percentage points in the space of just 40 days.
According to Smith, the fact that most governments in Canada have now instituted fixed election dates helps women, who still generally hold more responsibility for the care of children and aging or ailing parents than most men do, to plan more easily toward a goal of running for political office; and the fact that most political parties have now moved to a one member one vote system, instead of the more traditional leadership convention method of selecting leaders, has helped women because the grassroots are typically more willing to vote for women leaders than the "old boys network" inside a political party's establishment are.
Due to the timing of the leadership campaigns, further, both became leader late in the final year of the government's mandate, just weeks before a mandatory election.
As a result, both were left with very little time to demonstrate that their administrations could offer any sort of fundamental change, and thus remained vulnerable to the negative perceptions that voters held of their predecessors.
Meanwhile, women such as Pam Barrett, Joy MacPhail, Lynda Haverstock, Alexa McDonough, Sharon Carstairs, Elizabeth Weir, Karen Casey, Shirley McLoughlin and Carole James became leaders of provincial parties which had already been largely wiped off the electoral map.
In her book Women, Power, Politics: The Hidden Story of Canada's Unfinished Democracy, she explains that female politicians are far less likely to receive media coverage than their male counterparts.
Moreover, in the cases where women manage to attract coverage, the media often tends to "[focus] on personal style and private life matters, rather than on public policy views.
"[49] Here, the 2004 Conservative leadership election may serve as a case-study: as Bashevkin observes, the media mentioned Belinda Stronach's marital status "four times as often as they did that of fellow contender Stephen Harper.
Kim Campbell, for instance, has commented on the uneasy relationship between leadership and gender: "I was called arrogant, aggressive and lacking compassion," she stated in 1997, "I don't have a typically female pattern of speech.
[52] Because male and female politicians are judged according to disparate standards, Bashevkin has suggested that many women may be discouraged from entering politics in the first place.
She writes, "Efforts to recruit more female candidates often fall short once the individuals being wooed start to think about what happened to the few courageous pioneers who preceded them.
Political parties at both the federal and provincial levels have often faced difficulty in boosting the number of women prepared to stand as election candidates.
For example, the British Columbia New Democratic Party has used a strategy in which a riding association whose incumbent MLA retires must nominate a woman in the resulting by-election or general election, in order to ensure that the party is placing women in "winnable" seats – however, this strategy faced criticism from some potential candidates who felt that the policy constituted reverse discrimination against them as men.
[55] Conversely, the federal New Democratic Party requires its riding associations to make at least a good faith attempt to ensure that women or minority candidates are on the ballot whenever a nomination contest is held, but does not set a quota per se.
[57] The non-partisan organization Equal Voice, whose board consists of several prominent female politicians, works to assist women in running for public office through education, advocacy and professional networking.
[27] Given the consensus government structure of the legislature, one of the strategies that the women pursued was to not run against each other, in an attempt to avoid splitting the vote;[27] of the 19 legislative districts in the territory, only one had more than one woman candidate on the ballot.
Among younger women, the fact that family tasks such as child care are still not always divided equitably between fathers and mothers has been identified as an issue; a woman with young children will often have more difficulty finding the time to add a political career to her schedule than her husband does, and may in fact end up being even worse off financially as a councilor's salary may not actually be enough to cover the cost of paid childcare.