Mr. Speaker, I want to ask a question about political representation here in the House of Commons.
We know that in this Parliament the NDP has the largest representation of women among political parties in the House at 41%. In the last election, the statistics are pretty interesting: the NDP had 108 women candidates, which was 35% of the total; the Liberals had 79 for a total of 26%; the Conservatives had 38 women for 12%; and the Bloc had 23 women candidates in Quebec ridings for a total of 30.6%.
In the NDP we have a process that encourages women and minorities to seek nominations in the party. In fact, we cannot go ahead with an NDP nomination meeting until there is a representative of a minority community or a woman standing for the nomination. That is part of the process that our party engages in and this has resulted in our better record of representation of women, not that it is where we want to be. We want to ensure that we are at least 50% in the not too distant future. Tomorrow would be best. Today would be even better, but we are constantly working toward that.
I wonder if she could talk about what the Bloc is doing to encourage the participation of women in the political process in Quebec.