Another in a long line of firsts for B.C’s female MLAs

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VICTORIA — When the 47 elected NDP MLAs convened at the legislature this week, there were almost twice as many female faces as male faces in the government caucus room.

The New Democrats emerged from Election 2024 with 31 elected members who identified as women, only 16 as men, an unprecedented distribution for the party in government.

The NDP could partly credit the showing to their equity policy, adopted a dozen years ago.

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If a female NDP MLA retires, the party must nominate another woman as her replacement. When a male incumbent retires, his replacement must be a woman or a member of one of the other designated equity groups — persons of colour, Indigenous, LGBTQ, or the disabled.

Even without such a policy, the B.C. Conservatives managed to deliver a caucus of 18 women and 26 men, a 40-60 split. The Greens failed to elect their party leader, Sonia Furstenau, or any of the other women running under their banner. Their two MLAs are both men.

The result was a legislature with an unprecedented 53 per cent of the elected members identifying as women, making B.C. the first province in Canada to have crossed the 50 per cent threshold in female representation.

The breakthrough is in keeping with other milestones in B.C.

Mary Ellen Smith was elected to the legislature within a year of women getting the vote in 1917. She also became the first woman elevated to cabinet rank in what was then the British Empire.

Nancy Hodges was made Speaker of the B.C. house in 1950, the first woman to achieve that rank anywhere in the Commonwealth.

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Rita Johnston became Canada’s first female premier in 1991 after she narrowly defeated Grace McCarthy in that year’s Social Credit leadership convention. She lost the subsequent provincial election to the NDP’s Mike Harcourt.

Christy Clark of the B.C. Liberals managed the double feat of becoming premier by winning a party convention and then going on to win a majority in the next election.

Though the New Democrats have done much to advance representation by women, they have yet to elect one to the premier’s office.

Carole James gave them their best shot, coming close in the 2005 and 2009 elections. But the party forced her out as leader before she had a third run.

The makeup of the new house should provide a greater impetus to deal with issues that can disproportionately affect women in politics.

In the last house, New Democrats Melanie Mark and Katrina Chen took themselves out of cabinet in part because of the challenges they faced as single mothers with young children. Mark eventually resigned her seat. Chen did not run again.

The legislature assembly management committee has been mulling a plan to construct a $2 million child care facility on the legislature grounds.

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It would serve people working at the legislature as well as providing overflow space for the neighbourhood. The initial plan was to have it open next year. The need is overdue.

One question is whether the increased ranks of women in the legislature will change the tone of the place.

Parliament is by nature adversarial. The prime job of the Opposition is to hold the government to account and drive it into Opposition at the next election.

But the take-no-prisoners tone of the B.C. legislature has often been attributed to a “testosterone-driven” excess of male aggression.

One NDP cabinet minister from the 1990s said the realization came to her when, looking up from her chair in the chamber, she realized that the roof was being held up by the plaster sculptures of 36 women, all naked from the waist up.

They are nereids. Daughters of the god of the sea. You take your metaphors where you find them.

Nobody who squared off against Christy Clark or former NDP leader Joy MacPhail ever doubted that the women in the legislature could hold their own in debate.

Still, the place could use leavening from any quarter, given the bitter feelings on display from both sides after the election.

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Conservative Leader John Rustad vows to call out Premier David Eby when the house convenes.

“All the way through the campaign, David Eby, quite frankly, was a habitual liar about who we are, about what we did, about our platform,” he told reporters this week. “I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, it’s OK, that’s who he is.’ I’ll certainly be looking to call him out in the legislature.”

Eby says there are some Conservative MLAs “that we are just not going to be able to work with. ”

“Our values are just too different,” the premier told Al Ferraby on CFAX radio.

“The Conservatives under Mr. Rustad fielded some candidates that put things on the ballot that I never imagined would be on the ballot, around just open hatred and discrimination against Indigenous people, against people who are gay, women, Muslims, the list goes on.”

If the premier and the leader of the Opposition can’t put the campaign behind them, a lingering excess of testosterone won’t be the only obstacle to getting things done when the legislature resumes.

vpalmer@postmedia.com 

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