Status of Women Committee on June 12th, 2018

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

I call the meeting to order.

Good afternoon, everybody. We have quorum. Welcome to meeting 108 of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women. This meeting is being held in public.

Today I would like to welcome our four guests. We have Jane Hilderman, executive director of the Samara Centre for Democracy. As individuals today, we have Louise Carbert, associate professor of political science at Dalhousie University; Sylvia Bashevkin, professor from the political science department at the University of Toronto; and Jeanette Ashe, chair, political science, Douglas College.

Today each of our witnesses will have seven minutes, starting with Jane.

Go ahead for the first seven minutes, Jane.

[Jane Hilderman, Executive Director, Samara Centre for Democracy]

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you about the barriers facing women in politics.

I am the executive director of the Samara Centre for Democracy.

Samara is a non-partisan charity dedicated to strengthening Canada's democracy. Its action-oriented research and programming are aimed at making our parliamentary system more accessible, more responsive, and more inclusive.

Samara believes that a House of Commons that better reflects the diversity of Canadians and their experiences will generate a more resilient and responsive Parliament and can improve Canadians' willingness to participate in public life, yet many groups, women among them, remain under-represented on Parliament Hill and in public life. Samara welcomes this important discussion about what is necessary to help create the conditions for a diversity of Canadians, women especially, to enter politics.

With this in mind, I want to use my time with you today to draw on some of the research that Samara has conducted over the years and that provides insight on the obstacles women face. I will do this from three vantage points: at the level of elected leadership, at the level of the broader political workplace culture, and at the level of everyday political citizenship.

Let's begin at the level of elected leadership.

Samara undertakes exit interviews with former members of Parliament out of a belief that they are uniquely placed, having served on the front lines of our democracy, to provide advice and insight about the health of our democracy. The results from our latest round of exit interviews include the perspectives of 54 MPs from across the country and across the political spectrum who all sat in the 41st Parliament. Of the 54 we interviewed, 23 were women.

The first report in the series was published today. It's called “Flip the Script: Reclaiming the legislature to reinvigorate representative democracy”. We plan more reports to follow, including a deeper look at the role of gender. For today, I'll share some unpublished insights from the men and women we interviewed.

These interviews revealed several key themes that generally align with other research on women in politics.

Broadly speaking, many of these women reported that they felt their credibility and their authority as a candidate and as an MP were often more open to doubt than those of their male counterparts. The sexism they experienced often took subtle forms. Women reported that they felt their opinions did not carry as much weight as those of their male counterparts, whether this was in caucus or in this very committee. This double standard tended to be even more acutely felt by MPs who were young women.

In response to this environment, women reported that they were compelled to work harder, prepare more, and speak twice as loud in order to be taken seriously and to be heard. Even this tactic did not solve some of the more shockingly basic difficulties that women face in Parliament, including inadequate washrooms, the need for more changing tables for babies, and there being no room left in Parliament's day care.

More evidence from Samara finds that the experience of women in politics is also quantifiably different. A year ago, we surveyed sitting MPs—you—on the topic of heckling, and 84 of your colleagues responded. This research showed that despite sitting in the very same room, 67% of women MPs reported gendered heckling versus just 20% of their male counterparts.

Samara is currently collaborating with the all-party democracy caucus to survey sitting MPs once again. This time, the survey asks you, as members of Parliament, to indicate your interest in different reforms to the way Parliament works, some of which have been raised as possible means to improve the experience of MPs with young families—for example, changing Friday sittings. We are pleased to share with you that to date 60 MPs have completed the survey. We hope more will before the end of the sitting. We'd be pleased to report back to the committee on the results.

Let's take it to a wider level and talk about the workplace culture around women in politics.

We know that in the last year the #MeToo movement has disrupted every sector. Politics is no exception. Earlier this year, Samara partnered with The Canadian Press on a survey of Hill staff. Never before had Hill staff been systematically surveyed about their experiences with harassment, and sexual harassment specifically. We had 266 staff respond, and 122 of those identified as women. The results were pretty sobering: one in four indicated that they had directly experienced sexual harassment while working on Parliament Hill.

These results suggest that the workplace at the heart of our democracy can become and must become a safer space. This is not a problem isolated to political workforces—far from it—but we know that it can have a particularly severe repercussion for democracy if certain groups are less likely to feel that they belong in politics.

Those groups remain less represented, not only in elected office but also in the ranks of political staff and campaign volunteers, those who also shape the decision-making of our country.

Finally, let's talk about everyday political citizenship.

For the past five years, Samara has put out an annual call to recognize what we call everyday political citizens, ordinary people who are involved in their community and just trying to make a difference. Several hundred nominations pour in from across the country, and a jury helps us whittle the list down to 15 finalists.

Here's the good news. Since the start of the project, women have consistently made up over half the finalists every year. In short, many women are the mobilizers, organizers, advocates, and educators in our communities.

However, too often, when we speak to these nominees about being recognized as an everyday political citizen, many say they don't think the work they were doing was very political. An entire group of leaders in our communities seem to overlook the link between the work they do in the community and formal politics. It is incumbent upon us to try to rehabilitate what it means to be political, and to better help women connect their democratic engagement in their communities to formal politics.

Samara welcomes this discussion on measures to overcome these barriers and improve the substantive representation of women in politics, and I'm very glad this committee's approach is considering multiple sites and different stages of women's involvement in politics, be they civic education, candidate recruitment for public office, or changes to parliament itself.

Thank you.

I will be pleased to answer your questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you very much.

We're now going to move over to Louise Carbert for seven minutes.

[Professor Louise Carbert, Associate Professor, Political Science, Dalhousie University, As an Individual]

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.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you very much. That's excellent.

We're now going to Sylvia Bashevkin. You have seven minutes.

[Professor Sylvia Bashevkin, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, As an Individual]

Thank you.

I commend the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women for its interest in barriers facing women in politics, and I appreciate the opportunity to appear today.

Thanks to the support of the SSHRC, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, I have been able to study for an extended period many of the questions that face the committee. Given the open, public availability of my findings, I will not repeat here what I have stated in print.

What concerns me today is our neglect of very powerful brakes on the supply of women candidates. These obstacles come into play long before the formal recruitment and nomination processes begin. In particular, I want to highlight the threats to personal security that face many women in public life, which in turn discourage potential participants from entering the political process.

Many Canadians have heard about and are concerned about violence against women, including the particular challenges faced by aboriginal women. Many may have also read news reports about the 2003 assassination in a Stockholm department store of the Swedish foreign minister, Anna Lindh, who ranked among the most high-profile supporters of Sweden joining the euro zone in the European Union. Some Canadians will likely recall the shooting in 2011 of U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in the parking lot of a Tucson supermarket where she was holding a meeting with her local constituents. More recently, Canadians may remember the murder in 2016 of the British Labour MP Jo Cox, a proponent of Britain's remaining in the European Union, when she was outside a local library while on her way to meet with her constituents.

We rarely discuss or even acknowledge acts of violence against women legislators in political systems that are similar to Canada's, even though these events should haunt us. We know that men parliamentarians in Sweden, the U.S., and the U.K. have also faced violent threats, but historically there were far more men than women in elective office, so the probability of the assassination or attempted assassination of a woman politician, assuming such attacks are random, would be much lower for a woman than for a man.

At the time of the incidents I described, Anna Lindh, Gabrielle Giffords, and Jo Cox were all mothers and they were all progressive politicians with very high public profiles. The subsequent investigations indicated that each was explicitly targeted by a male assassin. This pattern is consistent with international data gathered by the National Democratic Institute, which is a non-profit, non-partisan organization based in Washington, D.C. The mission of the NDI is to strengthen democratic political institutions. In March 2016 the NDI launched a social media initiative known as #NotTheCost, Stopping Violence Against Women in Politics. If we read the NDI website, and I quote:

Over the last few decades, gender equality in political life and public offices has grown substantially, bringing with it a host of positive effects for women, democracy and society. However, as more women have emerged as activists, elected leaders, officials and voters, they have encountered increasing levels of harassment, intimidation, psychological abuse — in person and, increasingly, online. This backlash discourages women from engaging politically, creates a serious barrier to their ability to freely and safely pursue their rights to political participation, and undermines democracy.

The text of the website continues, and I quote:

Violence against women in politics fits within the international definition of violence against women. It encompasses all forms of aggression, coercion and intimidation against women as political actors simply because they are women and is used to control, limit or prevent women’s full and equal political participation. This violence is both physical and psychological in nature, and includes the growing trend of cyberbullying and other forms of online violence. Women who are victims of violence may know their attackers, or the perpetrators may be unknown — even anonymous or acting across national borders, in the case of online violence.

While political violence happens against both men and women, violence against women in politics targets women because they are women, in ways that apply particularly to women (e.g., sexual violence and sexist attacks), and discourages all women from political activity, with a particularly negative impact on young women or new entrants to politics.

The website of the National Democratic Institute encourages readers to report incidents of violence against women in public life and flags the reported incidents on a map of the world. I looked at the map yesterday and I was struck by the fact that the entire map of Canada remains entirely free and open, uncluttered by any indication of even a single incident. I bring this matter to the attention of the committee because a survey by two Canadian scholars finds that women members of the House of Commons have avoided posting on the Internet the names and photographs of their children because of safety concerns.

Also, I'm currently editing a book that examines the 11 Canadian women who have led our provincial and territorial governments. The media reports that have been used in that research show that two contemporary women premiers in Canada have faced unprecedented levels of hostility, and they are both leaders of progressive governments. Data from the Ontario Provincial Police and the Toronto police, cited in a 2017 article, show that Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne was the object of particularly venomous threats because of her sexual orientation. A 2017 report on Premier Wynne's social media accounts presents in detail the grotesque, often highly sexualized, messages that she received.

If we look at a 2017 report, we see that Alberta Premier Rachel Notley was the target of at least 11 death threats during her first three years as provincial leader. That story details 386 pages of what the Alberta Department of Justice calls “occurrence summaries” that document, and I quote, “...an alarming tweet, vulgar email, threat or call aimed at an Alberta politician—most often Premier Rachel Notley” during her first two and a half years a premier.

Alberta Justice also compiled a longitudinal record of threats against all Alberta premiers who held office between 2003 and 2015. It found that Premier Notley was by far the most threatened premier during that period. In the roughly seven months between winning a majority government and the end of 2015, Rachel Notley was the subject of 19 threats outside of social media out a total of 55 for all premiers, and these threats were logged over a 12-year period. We know from these data that former Alberta Premier Alison Redford was the target of 16 threats between 2012 and 2014. In other words, two women premiers in Alberta who were only briefly in office during the period that was studied accounted for about 56% of the threats.

My purpose in bringing these data about women MPs and provincial premiers to the committee's attention is to shed critical light on the assumption that all is well with the security of women in Canadian public life. Notwithstanding the map of Canada on the website of the National Democratic Institute, there have been many troubling incidents in this country. I recommend to the attention of committee members the work of the NDI and of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which has also published online the findings of research about violence against women in public life as well as recommendations to address it.

The IPU report concludes that as is the case with the general issue of violence against women, no action on problems affecting political women can occur unless members of Parliament and members of the public acknowledge there is a problem that warrants civic attention. In the words of the IPU authors, “...once the phenomenon is visible and recognized, solutions either exist or can be found or invented.”

As long as we continue to live in denial of this phenomenon, the challenges will continue to be considered the private troubles of public women. Given the mandate of the House of Commons, notably for Canada-wide action in the areas of public safety and crime, I urge members of the committee to begin at the very least a directed national conversation about the security climate facing women in politics.

Thank you for your consideration.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Excellent. Thank you very much.

Jeanette, you have seven minutes. Thanks.

[Jeanette Ashe, Chair, Political Science, Douglas College, As an Individual]

Thank you for inviting me here today. My academic specialty is political recruitment, and I publish and advise parties on how to increase women's representation in legislatures. Today I'd like to make three key points about the barriers facing women in politics.

First, I'll talk about the problem. In terms of political representation, Canada is doing comparatively badly.

Second, I'll explain why Canada is doing badly. Party selection processes are the main cause of women's under-representation. There's a misconception that women's under-representation is caused by a lack of supply rather than a lack of demand. The opposite is true. Women do come forward in sufficient numbers, but party selectors and officials disproportionately select men.

Third, I'll tell you how we can improve. Because the problem is more due to demand, demand-side solutions will work best. The biggest difference that the Canadian Parliament can make is by legislating quotas for political parties, meaning that parties would be required to run 40% to 50% women candidates. If this isn't possible, Parliament should financially incentivize parties to run more women candidates. At the very least, Elections Canada must collect more information about nomination races and report this information to Parliament to increase the transparency of these processes and the accountability of political parties.

Point one is that comparatively, Canada is not performing well. Women hold 27% of the seats in the House of Commons. That puts us at 61st place out of 193 countries. As women are 50% of the population, fair selection processes would mean that they would win 50% of the seats. That's 169 seats, 78 seats more than the 91 they currently hold. Why does this happen?

Point two is that party selection processes are the problem. We need to better understand supply and demand. To get elected, women must first get selected as candidates. In 2015 women won 26% of the seats and were 30% of the candidates, a historic high. This means that 67% of the candidates were men. Looking at percentages can be misleading. It leads many to believe that women's under-representation is a problem of supply, but the raw figures tell a different story. Of the 1,792 candidates, 535 were women. We only need to elect 169 women to get sex parity, yet 535 women stood for office. That's a surplus of 366 women.

I want to repeat that: in the last election, we had a surplus of 366 women candidates. That means it's not a supply problem.

These data reflect only one stage of the selection process. Let's dig deeper and look at when people put their names forward to become candidates.

While Elections Canada doesn't collect all the data we need on nomination contests, we can use other academic work to estimate what happens during candidate selection processes. Although we know that some candidates are acclaimed, we also know that local party members vote in contests to select their candidates. Many of you in this room have been through it.

Let's imagine, because we don't have the full data, that two competitors vie for each of the 1,792 candidacies, for a total of 3,584 coming forward in the hopes of getting selected. That's the supply. To repeat, I estimate that about 3,500 people came forward to stand as candidates in the last election, but only 1,792 were selected. That's the selection process. That's what the filtering or winnowing process does. If 30% of those coming forward were women, the supply of women would be over 1,000. That's 1,075 women coming forward when we only need 169 for sex parity, so we have more than enough women coming forward. This should help undermine the idea that supply is the problem.

Of course, what this analysis is missing is the impact that parties play on selection process outcomes—that is, who gets selected as candidates. My own research shows that in some Canadian cases, men are six times more likely to be selected as candidates by party members than are women.

I want that to sink in: men are six times more likely than women to be selected as candidates, and that's when everything is held constant, so again, it's not supply; it's more demand. It really comes down to the will of the parties, regardless of the electoral system that we use. If party leaders want more women candidates, they'll make it happen.

Since the problem of women's under-representation is due more to demand, point three is that we need to consider more fully the demand-sized solutions. In an ideal world, Canada would bring in sex quotas for women, and this is already done in more than 100 countries. For example, some countries entrench reserved seats or legal candidate quotas in their constitutions, while others simply pass new laws.

As Canada is unlikely to change its constitution, changing electoral law would seem to be the most palatable way forward. For example, under Belgian law, parties that fail to run sex-balanced candidate lists are disqualified from participating in the elections. The mildest option is to financially incentivize parties to run more women candidates, as is the case in Ireland and France.

This mildest of measures was rejected by this Parliament in 2016 in the form of Bill C-237, the candidate gender equity act. I would strongly advise this committee to revisit the measures proposed in Bill C-237, but if doing that isn't possible, then at the very least empower Elections Canada to compel political parties to provide additional data on candidate selection contests on all those who come forward to stand for selection and on all those who win and on all those who lose so that the two pools can be compared.

More specifically, I recommend that subsection 476.1(1) of the Canada Elections Act be amended to make mandatory the provision of intersectional data on all aspiring contestants who participate in selection contests, including information on sex, gender identification, race, indigenousness, physical ability, sexual orientation, and so on.

Right now you're actually amending the Canada Elections Act through Bill C-76, the elections modernization act, and you can easily make these changes so we can better understand how women fare in selection processes.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you very much.

We're going to start our rounds. We'll start with seven minutes for each of the participants, beginning with Pam Damoff.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thanks, Chair.

Thanks to all the witnesses for being here today.

I want to ask a little bit about the nomination process because a couple of you have touched on it, but we don't really have good data on how many women are coming forward to run. We know how many actually end up running.

I can't recall now the name of the book, but after the 2011 election, someone did another interview with a number of candidates. At that meeting there were a number of people, and there was a former MP. She said, “You have to change the nomination process.” Part of that was financial. I wonder if you could touch on that. A lot of women seem to not come forward because of financial barriers.

Memberships are sold, and all parties do it. There are those who buy memberships and use their own funds. Even though it's illegal, it happens.

With regard to the financial barriers, including around the nomination process, is there anything we can change or anything further to encourage more women to actually be selected by the party?

[Jane Hilderman]

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.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Ms. Ashe is chomping at the bit to say something here.

[Jeanette Ashe]

Yes. I did a study a few years ago in the U.K. I got access to three general elections' worth of party census data on everybody who sought to be a candidate for the British Labour Party. I also got some data from the Conservative Party and from the Lib Dems as well. This included everybody who came forward, both people who were selected and people who were not.

I did some surveys. I put together about 44 variables that we associate with the ideal candidate type and tested those. I tested things like ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, income, profession, education, and how much money was spent on nomination processes—all those kinds of things.

Only three variables of the 44 mattered in terms of who was selected and who was not. The first was sex: party members were much more likely to select men over women. Again, all of the variables were held constant and were controlled for. The second was being local to that constituency. The third was having a seat previously on local council, which is another kind of local measure.

Of the 44 variables that we think matter, only three really do, with sex being the most important, and in all seat types.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Did anyone else want to add to that?

Okay. To Samara, I attended the event you had when you released your report on heckling. You have data on what I have seen in the House, that it's different depending on who is answering the question.

We had someone here last week who talked about being at a model parliament that was so overwhelming that she didn't want to be a part of it. I witnessed a model parliament at Queen's Park many years ago when my son was in university, and it was horrible.

How do we change the culture? Have you seen any change since you released your report a year ago?

[Jane Hilderman]

Well, this was the second time Samara surveyed MPs. We surveyed them in the 41st Parliament and now in the 42nd. I think there was a change in the sense of awareness of this problem.

There seems to be a cultural change around how heckling is perceived, from a moment when it was seen as just a traditional part of politics to something that is recognized as a tool that can shut down voices, and that for some people even may be seen as a form of harassment, or at least at a minimum a technique used to shut down others. I think that has changed.

In terms of the frequency of it or its intensity, I don't think we've seen a change in our politics. At Samara, we have tried to say that there are a few different ideas we could use and experiment with, with the emphasis on “experiment”, because we're not really sure exactly what will happen. For heckling, many people point to the fact that it really grew as a practice when cameras were introduced in 1970s, and I can assure you that's not what people in the 1970s thought would happen when they introduced cameras. They thought it was going to open up the Commons and raise the level of debate. When we introduce change, we don't always know what will happen.

Among some of our suggestions, one we've included is to experiment with camera angles so there is less anonymity for hecklers. We've suggested—

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I don't have much time left. Would showing people other than the Speaker help?

[Jane Hilderman]

That's a suggestion we think we should try, because I think anonymity is certainly letting people off the hook when they do heckle.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Right.

Is that my time?

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

No, you're still good. You have another minute and a half. We had a little bit of a clock issue here, but we're good. We're thinking it's about six minutes. Where are you?

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I'm at seven minutes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

We're a little behind. How about we go with one minute extra?

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

That's fine.

Ms. Ashe, you mentioned quotas. There are very polarized views on that. Obviously the private member's bill did not pass. I was quite proud to sponsor it, but....

You've done research around the world on the effect of what happens in terms of people being elected. Could you share that? Where there has been a quota in place within a party, what has been the impact in terms of—

[Jeanette Ashe]

We use the same electoral system as the U.K. The British Labour Party uses all-women short lists. It's permissive legislation, so all parties are allowed to use this kind of party quota. Now up to 50% of the party's target seats or safe seats are set aside for women. The first time it was used, in 1997, there was a 100% increase in women elected.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Excellent.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Could you give us—