All right. Overall, we know that progress in women's candidacy in elections has been disappointing, but in the midst of that overall stagnation there are some changes and some bright spots that can inform new strategies that I want to talk about. In particular, there's an emerging shift across the rural-urban spectrum that I'm going to be talking about here.
This shortfall in rural women being elected has been identified going back to the 1950s in Canada. I went to update this material in the early 2000s and I found the same effect in the House of Commons and in the Atlantic provinces. A metropolitan district was consistently more than twice as likely to elect a woman than was a rural district. This effect is felt far beyond the strictly rural areas, going into small towns and small and medium-sized cities. It also crosses regional and partisan divides.
What's up with this? What caused it? I went out and interviewed 241 rural women leaders across Atlantic Canada and the western provinces. We had open-ended, wide-ranging discussions about leadership, public life, and running for elected office. My major findings were that there are more than enough qualified potential candidates to supply a significant increase. There's no evidence of rural traditionalism, and instead I had these three categories of barriers: an alarming reluctance to step forward on the part of the women themselves, intense competition for the high-prestige job of a politician, and the risk-averse gatekeepers.
I will say, though, that there was more enthusiasm and more curiosity about politics in those few areas where the local economy was thriving. That's significant, because it was really striking how often these conversations came back around to the mechanisms by which a fragile local economy added to those barriers. It came around to the fact that many non-metropolitan communities depend on single-industry resource extraction, and it's also a fact that the second-wave feminist movement that brought more women into public life in the 1980s and the 1990s coincided with a long slide in commodity prices and an ecological crisis. I came to the realization that bad timing in global markets exacerbated the rural deficit in women elected, and that was from my interviews in the early 2000s, when there really didn't seem to be much hope in rural Canada.
Now, fast-forward to today. Global markets turned. There was a broad resurgence in commodity prices, and here you have the Bank of Canada commodity price index above trend from 2005, and strongly below trend in the 1980s and 1990s. This is different commodity prices together. This is not just oil. That resurgence in commodity prices had a broad impact throughout Canada. This is not just oil. This includes Quebec as well. It had an especially strong impact on resource-rich areas in rural Canada.
It's fascinating to see, after all those decades of lagging behind, that suddenly rural Canada is starting to elect more women. This is a visual representation put together by Miranda Sculthorp over the last four federal elections.
Now let's put it on a more quantitative footing. Here we see the 18 women who were elected from the most rural districts in Canada according to Elections Canada designations. You see there that it's 24%, which is almost at the national average of 26%. Now of course we're not happy with 24%, but it's really quite a remarkable change from the early 2000s, when the ratio was approximately 10% rural women to 30% metropolitan women.
This isn't just a transition that's in the House of Commons. It's showing up in some provincial legislatures as well.
Here's Nova Scotia in 2017, when we had nine women winning the 31 seats from outside of Halifax. That's 29%. You see it's all three parties. Again, that's a big change from 2003, when there was only one woman from the 34 seats outside of Halifax.
At the other end of the country, we have British Columbia, and by my count we have 37% women. That is 12 women elected from the 32 most rural districts. Again, this is a big change from the early 2000s.
Other recent provincial elections have had mixed results. Manitoba is an exception here. Party motivation really has become key, which leads to the question, why are motivated parties making a difference now and not earlier? The Liberals have made a big reversal here.
I think the EDAs, the electoral district associations, are much more receptive now than when Paul Martin was leader. As you will remember, Martin and Chrétien used to talk about promoting women as well. The NDP has always been the most woman-friendly party, and it's winning more non-metropolitan seats and forming provincial governments where we haven't seen them before. We're also seeing glimpses of the mainstreaming of the agenda among a broader array of parties; you just saw the Nova Scotia Conservatives and the B.C. Liberals.
All in all, it speaks to a growing quality of democracy that erodes barriers.
One contributing factor is the easing of economic distress. Another factor is a growing emphasis on transparency and accountability, and that's important for women. Another factor is that civil society organizations are really making an impact. Here I'll add that we had our Nova Scotia Daughters of the Vote event, and it was really interesting to see how the Nova Scotia Conservatives were just so keen to be included and participate in that event.
If I'm going to wrap it all up, I would recommend that initiatives recognize that there are recent changes in the patterns and that electoral prospects outside the big cities really are improving, but at the same time, I don't think urban districts are immune from backsliding. Also, any direct initiative should be balanced by attention to the pervasive forces that are crucial to electoral prospects and governments should build economic vitality in every part, because pockets of distress harm the quality of democracy, to women's detriment.
As well, continue to build accountability and transparency.
Finally, nurture a multipartisan culture of recruiting more women candidates.
Thank you very much, Madam Chair.