Let’s hear it for the Women in Da House

In honour of Stephane Dion’s fanfrickentastic policy announcement yesterday, I thought that I’d serve up this article and poll in the Washington Post today about Hillary Clinton as a possible presidential candidate. The figures are interesting.

(Please note a few major caveats to this post: 1) I have not stated which Liberal leadership candidate I’m endorsing – I want to establish some blogging street cred before doing that – so don’t take my endorsement of Dion’s policy as necessarily an endorsement of him as a candidate. 2) While I agree with most of Dion’s proposal, I’m still not sure what I think about bypassing riding selection to appoint candidates. 3) I am not necessarily backing Hillary Clinton as potential presidential candidate, either. Caveats in place, I invite you to read on.)

I want to comment on some of the responses in the blog world to Dion’s policy. There seems to be a big discontentment with the “affirmative action” quality of the announcement. Some bloggers are saying that there are tons of different minority groups that aren’t equality represented in the House. That’s a really fair and valid comment.

However, people seem to keep forgetting that women aren’t a minority group – they actually make up (and wait, I know this is a shocker): over 50% of the population! So let’s start treating them that way – and recognize that there is a serious and bizarre disconnect when it comes to the low numbers of women in parliament.

Rwanda ranks number one in the world in terms of number of female parliamentarians – and if Canada can’t do better than a country that has undergone a genocide and serious economic, political, and social strife – then we have a major problem. Let’s stop hiding our head in the sand with this one – call a spade a spade and take some real and concrete action.