WAKAW — Out of 61 candidates running for Saskatchewan's 14 seats in the federal election, only 19 are women, and only three are incumbents: Rosemarie Falk in Battlefords-Lloydminster-Meadow Lake, Kelly Block in Carlton Trail-Eagle Creek, and Cathay Wagantall in Yorkton-Melville. Only one riding boasts solely women candidates, Carlton Trail-Eagle Creek.
Despite progress towards gender equality, women’s representation in Canadian politics continues to fall short. Even when women are willing to run, often party members will choose men over women as candidates. Some theorize that this might be because they believe the likelihood of men winning is higher than it is for a woman. In a 2016 Angus Reid poll, 84 per cent of respondents said that women and men make equally good leaders, and 40 per cent blamed the parties for the lack of women representatives, agreeing that “political parties don’t do enough to encourage women candidates.”
In the 2021 federal election, about 43 percent of candidates across the five main parties identified as women or gender diverse. () Following the election, women still filled slightly less than one-third of the seats in Parliament. Some will say, ‘What does it matter?’ However, when you have only a third of parliamentarians as women, there will just naturally be blind spots that go unchecked.
Arezoo Najibzadeh, founder and managing director of Platform, an organization that aims to help Black, Indigenous and other racialized women and gender-diverse people achieve leadership roles, says that many of our federal politicians come from an incredibly narrow segment of the population. They are still mostly men, still mostly white, and still mostly upper class. “Our political system is so inaccessible to people who don’t come from a certain cultural background, a certain economic background,” she states.
Would gender parity actually make the government better for Canadians? For this election, it remains a moot point. Perhaps one of the women seeking election this year will become a role model for the upcoming generations.
