More women needed in civic politics

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/10/2021 (1807 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Calgary has a new mayor – Jyoti Gondek – and it’s the first time the Stampede City will be led by a woman. Gondek won the municipal election Monday night, defeating 26 other candidates vying for the job after outgoing mayor Naheed Nenshi chose not to run for re-election following 11 years in the role.

Gondek has Manitoba roots, by the way. She was born in the U.K. to parents who immigrated from Punjab, India, but she grew up in Manitoba, where she did one of her graduate degrees before settling in Calgary in 1997.

Women in the top job in municipal government are still somewhat of an anomaly in Canada, particularly in the big cities, despite efforts by organizations to increase women’s representation. The first woman to be mayor in Canada was Barbara Hanley, who in 1936 was elected in Webbwood, a town west of Sudbury. She served eight terms.

The first female mayor in Manitoba was Edythe “Edie” Brown, who was elected in Lac Du Bonnet in 1952. The city of Winnipeg has so far only had one female mayor — Susan Thompson — elected back in 1992 and re-elected again in 1995. The fact no woman has been elected in Winnipeg in more than two decades, despite the appearance of strong candidates as contenders, suggests there are problems.

Municipal politics are relatively bereft of party politics. While the candidates themselves may hold party affiliations, there is no party machinery in place to finance or recruit candidates when they run, no party platforms on which they can rely to form their campaign message and no data sets to help understand electors’ motivations.

Mayoral candidates are on their own, flying without a net. This can be both a blessing and a curse, because political parties are the gatekeepers for provincial and federal positions for women.

In recent years, the focus within some parties has been to recruit women and diverse candidates to ensure those parties are viewed as progressive. For example, the last federal election saw the highest percentage of female candidates ever, with all five major parties either maintaining or increasing the percentage of women and gender-diverse candidates that ran for them in the 2019 federal election.

This is a function of party recruitment strategies. But at the municipal level, there’s no such recruitment, which might be a factor in women not running.

There’s also no money provided by parties to help with an electoral bid. A mayoral candidate has to be well connected in order to run a campaign, which means she has to spend a fair amount of time seeking donations.

They need connections within the business community and need to be viewed as viable contenders. For women, this can be difficult; given their work/life balance and time constraints, fundraising may not be as easy for them to do. As a result, it may mean a mayoral bid is something they just cannot consider, particularly if they have young children.

There are other pressures, as well. Thompson gave an inside view of life as a mayor in her book Her Worship: Moments in History, Moments in Time, writing that she sometimes felt her soul and her spirit had been violated, overcoming the “old boys’ network,” death threats and mean-spirited attacks in the media.

For women in public office, particularly one as high-profile as mayor, it’s a difficult job to consider taking on — and even more so now in an era of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, where privacy is no longer available.

Katherine Sullivan, a PhD candidate at the University of Montreal, reports that in 2019, out of a total of 3,525 Canadian mayors, only 19.4 per cent were women. Her findings suggest smaller municipalities are more likely to have women mayors, as the highest proportions of women mayors in 2019 were in municipalities with populations of 10,000 to 49,999 residents (22 per cent) and 9,999 or less (19 per cent).

This makes sense. In smaller municipalities, the barriers to running — such as financial issues, time constraints and travel — are less likely to be a problem than they are in a large city. The bigger the city, the fewer women mayors you will find. In 2019, according to Sullivan, in municipalities with populations of 100,000 residents or more, there were only eight female mayors.

Why should we care that women still aren’t being represented at the big table in municipal politics? I argue city politics is the stage at which some of the most important decisions affecting women are made. Transit schedules for women who rely on safe, affordable ways to get home from work late at night; recreation facilities to help keep their kids out of trouble after school; libraries for affordable leisure activities; sidewalk clearing so they can manoeuvre baby strollers in the winter.

Public-policy decisions made at the city level affect us in the most intimate ways and to not have a woman as a mayor — except as an anomaly — feels like a missed opportunity.

Congratulations to Gondek for her historic win in Calgary and to every woman who stands as mayor in cities big and small in Canada. Let’s hope we will be able to elect Winnipeg’s second woman mayor soon. It’s time.

Shannon Sampert is a Winnipeg-based political scientist and the former politics and perspectives editor of the Winnipeg Free Press.

shannon@mediadiva.ca