Certainly about a decade and some ago the Lortie Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing suggested that financial incentives could be directed to parties that ran minimum numbers of women, so if you ran 40% or 30% women, you would actually receive a financial incentive to do that. There has obviously been electoral financing reform in Canada already, but very few, if any, of the measures actually address increasing numbers of women in the House.
I think you could structure your electoral financing regime in such a way that you would reward parties. For example, you could give them a larger percentage. Let's say you normally get $1.50 or $1.75 per vote; if you run a certain number of women, maybe you'd up that by 25ยข or something. Those incentives are part of the scenarios in many other countries, and they work. That's what we know: they work. Financial incentives tend to work well. The other thing you could do is quote us, but that's a whole other conversation--but financial incentives certainly.
The other thing I would say is that in all the materials I referred to this morning from the World Economic Forum and the gender equity index, when they are measuring women's economic empowerment, they always include political participation. They always couple political participation with women's economic advancement, I think for obvious reasons. It's an important consideration in all the analyses that are being done internationally and domestically.