Rise and fall

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/05/2022 (1603 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There are few occasions in which Canadians can hear women politicians speak unmediated by pundits, reporters and time constraints. Kate Graham’s No Second Chances offers this opportunity. Graham, a political scientist who lectures at Western University in London, Ont., interviewed 11 of Canada’s female premiers, and former prime minister Kim Campbell, to ask about their experiences in political life.

It’s an important overview of how difficult the glass ceiling remains for women in politics — a concept Graham understands first-hand. In 2020, she ran for leader of the Ontario Liberal Party and came in third. She will represent the Liberals for the riding in London North Centre in June’s provincial election, running against the NDP incumbent.

Graham is the creator and host of NoSecondChances.ca, a podcast about the rise and fall of women in Canada’s most senior roles. This book is the long-form of the interviews found in the first season of those podcasts, funded by Canada 2020, an Ottawa policy think tank which supported Graham as she travelled across Canada to meet with “the women who have led our provinces, territories, and country.”

In her introduction, Graham writes her hope is that “a Canadian picking up this book 50 or a hundred years in the future will find its contents foreign and peculiar. The experiences of women in Canada’s most senior political roles shed much light on the reasons why there have been so few of them in the first place.”

The interviews begin with Kim Campbell and then progress alphabetically, starting with Eva Aariak, Nunavut’s premier from 2008 to 2013; Catherine Callbeck, P.E.I.’s premier from 1993 until 1996; Christy Clark, who was B.C.’s premier from 2011 until 2017; the current premier of the Northwest Territories, Caroline Cochrane; the territory’s first female premier, Nellie Cournoyea, who held that post from 1991 until 1995; Pat Duncan, the premier of Yukon from 2000 until 2002; Kathy Dunderdale, Newfoundland and Labrador’s premier from 2010 until 2014; Quebec’s former premier Pauline Marois, who was in charge of that province from 2012 to 2014; Alberta premiers Rachel Notley (2015-2019) and Alison Redford (2011-2014); and finally, Kathleen Wynne, the premier of Ontario from 2013 until 2018.

As the book’s title suggests, female politicians are seldom given second chances in politics, a fact made very clear by the short timelines of each of the women’s tenures. As Graham points out, Canada “re-elect(s) political incumbents all the time — except when it comes to female first ministers. In fact, as of 2021, Canadian has never re-elected a female first minister.”

Graham qualifies this statement by pointing out Wynne’s 2014 win came after she had won the leadership race while her party was in government. But she didn’t win re-election after that. In B.C., Clark led her party to victory in 2013, but she didn’t win her own seat and had to run in a byelection. Her party won in 2017, but it couldn’t form majority government status and as a result a coalition was formed, after which Clark resigned.

There are no “second chances for women” who seldom serve more than one term as first ministers. Compare this to men, whose average run as first minister is roughly five years — and on average most serve two terms.

Graham asks Redford, Alberta’s first female premier and a Conservative, about why things seem to “fall apart” for women during their leadership. Redford faced considerable criticism because she had taken her child and a nanny along with her on government flights, although there were no rules against doing so.

“When men make mistakes, other men come to their defence,” Redford says. “For us as women, it’s pretty tough to go out there when we’ve been through the experiences that we’ve been through. If I went out tomorrow and stood up for a woman in politics who was having a hard time, the reaction would be, ‘Oh, yeah. But remember her. Remember what they said about her?’”

In her interview, Campbell says the federal Conservatives’ loss to the Liberals and Jean Chrétien in 1993 fell completely on her shoulders, including the disastrous negative ad campaign making fun of Chrétien’s face. Campbell tells Graham she hadn’t seen the ad until after it had run on television.

“As a woman, I was to blame for it all. Like Hillary Clinton, who people say was a flawed candidate. And I say, wait a minute, wait a minute, she got 66 million votes. She might not have been perfect, but she was amazing.”

There are some reassuring passages in the book, however. Aariak is asked by Graham why she thinks there are so many male premiers. “That is a good question that men should be asking themselves because women know the answers,” Aariak responds. “There are as many women as there are men who have the skills and knowledge and ability and strength to be in that position. Very much so. I strongly believe that we have enough women out there who can do it but getting there is the question… We just need to help them to get there and understand and support them and perhaps eliminate the barriers out there.”

“There’s an old adage,” Wynne says, “that you have to ask a woman three times and you just have to show the man the application form.” She continues: “I think it’s partly because they haven’t seen a lot of women in these roles.”

With the help of Graham’s book, women will be able to read about women in these roles — and perhaps get a better idea of why they should run.

Shannon Sampert is a regular columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press and a retired political scientist whose research area focuses on Canadian politics, women and media.