In response to the Liberal proposal of gender parity in cabinet, several of my friends and colleagues have expressed a concern about what this would mean for “merit” in cabinet appointments.
Let’s pause for a moment to let that concern settle in our minds, maybe take a look over the list of luminaries on the government’s front bench.
As quickly becomes clear, the definition of “merit” when it comes to high political office is broader than it might be in, say, the bureaucracy. Representation of various constituencies is a major factor, and always has been.
Yes, it’s often considered a bonus if the minister happens to know something of the file from previous life experience, but it’s also considered a Good Thing for Democracy if the prime minister shuffles people into new files from time to time, to prevent the ministers getting too close to the people they’re regulating. The assumption is that these people, who have almost always been elected to represent their fellow citizens as MPs, can get up to speed on a completely new portfolio – that it is, in fact, the job of the bureaucracy to get them up to speed. This is not a technocracy; it is not as if we can decide “merit” for public office based on who scores highest on an entrance exam.
So the concept of “merit” in cabinet is a mix that might include intelligence, skill sets such as bilingualism or ability to connect with certain constituencies, background, symbolic representation and life experience. (If we want to be cynics, we might say that the main qualification for cabinet these days is a willingness to say ridiculous things with plenty of faux outrage, but we are supposed to be discussing the very idealistic concern about “merit” in cabinet appointments here.)
Given that list, it seems to me that a disproportionately homogenous cabinet is a cabinet that does not represent or draw on the life experience of half the population, and is a cabinet sorely lacking in collective “merit.”
And if we accept that particular life experience is a good thing when we’re talking about, for example, finance ministers who know their way around Bay Street, or a minister of veterans’ affairs who has served in the military, why does the life experience of being a woman not count as “merit”? The government deals with gendered issues all the time and in many portfolios, from the prostitution law to sexual harassment in the armed forces.
The all-party opposition to the tampon tax happened because Conservative female MPs pushed for it within their own party, reportedly even said they wouldn’t show up for the vote otherwise. As the Canadian Press reported, some female MPs “said many male colleagues had never contemplated the issue posed by a tax on items … women use and just didn’t see it as something that needed to be dealt with.”
It is true that for a government to have gender parity in cabinet, it would help a great deal if they had sufficient numbers of men and women in caucus. I don’t see how that works counter to “merit”, either, given that Parliament is supposed to represent Canadians. Maybe if they had to think about a representative cabinet, parties would do more to encourage more than the usual suspects to run for office in the first place.
If my colleagues are really worried that in the typical government caucus of, say, 150 MPs, a prime minister couldn’t find 15 to 20 women of enough “merit” to fill half the typical cabinet, perhaps our cabinets might have to become a little less bloated. Perhaps if all cabinets were the size of Alberta Premier Rachel Notley’s, prime ministers might be able to find six women who can do the job as well as, say, Tony Clement or Pierre Poilievre. Difficult to imagine, I know, but we are being idealists here.
Kate Heartfield is the Citizen’s editorial pages editor.
