I'll jump in, but my panellists may have something more to add.
You're right. In our experience, speaking to former MPs—and these are the people who won in the nomination process—they often called it a “black box” in terms of what goes on behind the scenes. There are a lot of ways for parties to manoeuvre in order to sort of help out certain candidates or to dissuade other candidates from running. That creates an uneven playing field or an uncertain information environment.
To emphasize the point made by Louise Carbert, transparency and accountability, as conditions in politics, are really helpful generally for women. If they know everyone is having the same rules applied to them with the same timeline, that can improve the experience.
What would it take to get there? One suggestion that has been raised in the past is to give Elections Canada a more formal role in monitoring nomination processes. That would be a fuller way of looking at the problem.
If you can't go that far, maybe have parties report on their nomination process and on how much notice was given in terms of when membership deadlines closed, etc., so that you can actually see if races were run equally and whether that might have disadvantaged a candidate, so that there is just greater illumination of this black-box process.