Liberal Red-Light Committees - You Had An Option, Sir

This article first appeared in the McGill Tribune on October 3, 2007.

During the Liberal leadership race in 2006, Liberal leadership candidate Stéphane Dion announced that he had a plan for bringing gender parity to the House of Commons. The first step towards gender parity, he argued, was to ensure that 1/3 of all Liberal candidates running in the next election will be women. Dion’s plan included ‘green-light’ committees that have been empowered to take extraordinary measures in order to make sure that the 1/3 women quota is met. Let me tell you why this policy of reverse-discrimination is wrong for Canada.

When considering the appointment of female Liberal candidate, it is important to look at the opportunity cost. In appointing female candidates, the Liberal Party will be barring male candidates from a chance for the candidacy. In essence, this policy spits in the face of all the male candidates that want to run in the ridings that women will be appointed. In a free and democratic society, both women and men should be allowed the opportunity to put themselves forward as a prospective candidate and allow for the Party’s members in the riding to elect them in a legitimate candidate nomination process. But the Liberal Party doesn’t see it like that. In the Liberal Party’s view of Canada, ordinary citizens are not to be trusted with decisions like who should represent their party locally as a candidate. This is just another example of an overarching Liberal party concept that permeates many of their policy stances – individuals aren’t to be trusted with what must be the overwhelming burden of personal choice. In the Liberal Party’s ideal world, top-down and centralized decisions are the best ones, and God help you if you should disagree with the red-light committee.

Women should be insulted by the patronizing attitude that is illustrated in the quota policy. Surely women are not so fundamentally inferior as to be unable to contest a nomination and win it in a fashion that would allow for actual competition. Women do not need the Liberal Party to appoint them, and the Liberal Party members in the ridings where women will be appointed don’t need the Liberal Party to tell them who to support locally. Better representation of women is not necessarily achieved by increasing the number of women in the House. Instead, a way to allow for personal choice to continue while simultaneously increasing the \quality\ of the representation of women is to train them and get them engaged in politics at an early age. The McGill Political Science Students’ Association’s Women in House program (womeninhouse@gmail.com) is a channel through which this can be accomplished. In this program, women are sent on an all-inclusive trip to Ottawa to shadow a female Senator or MP for a day, allowing them an exciting opportunity to improve their understanding of the Canadian political system.

It is frustrating to hear others calling for such disparate categories of people to be made the exact same in every way. Though equal before the law, men and women are different, and as such will choose to make different decisions that lead to different outcomes. If the margins between these outcomes are not particularly egregious, then intervention is unnecessary, especially if the proposed intervention infringes on the right of others to be qualified for membership in the House of Commons. I am not suggesting that women cannot make excellent politicians (indeed, Thatcher is one of my favourite), but rather that if women go through a candidate nomination process and do not emerge victorious, it has more to do with a lack of political training than some inherent weakness that comes with being a woman. This being said, this whole argument may be a moot point come election time. With the way things are looking for Stéphane Dion, I don’t see him bringing many MPs to the House – male or female.