In the last federal election, a record 88 female MPs were elected to Parliament. With four more having won recent byelections, women now account for around 27 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons.
While Churchill-Keewatinook Aski NDP MP Niki Ashton is happy to see that the rate of female representation is on the rise, she believes that more can be done to achieve gender parity in the realm of Canadian politics.
To help make this goal a reality, Ashton spearheaded the Our Movement campaign throughout the summer of 2018 – a series of webinars designed to give aspiring young women a crash course in how to run for elected office at basically all levels of government.
“I’ve been involved, for many years, in encouraging women to run,” said Ashton. “But I think it’s really important that we share skills, knowledge and tools, not just a vague ‘You should do it.’”
From July 16 to Aug. 8, Ashton’s team ended up streaming seven sessions in total, which ran for at least two hours apiece and covered a wide variety of topics ranging from campaign managing to media training to fundraising.
While Ashton hosted the first lecture, titled “MP and Candidates,” she handed off the rest of the webinars to a diverse collection of community organizers and activists in the hopes of reaching women from as many different backgrounds as possible.
This group of lecturers included public figures like Kiana Saint-Macary, current co-chair of Canada’s Young New Democrats, and Bilan Arte, who made history in 2015 by becoming the first black woman to be elected as the national chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students
”You hear that women don’t see themselves doing this kind of work and that’s where they need a role model and encouragement,” said Ashton “It’s so critical to let women know that not only can they see themselves doing this work, but we need them to be doing this work.”
Ashton went on to say that young women in this field still need all the help and encouragement they can get in 2018, since they continue to face unique barriers that don’t hinder their male counterparts to the same degree.
One of the biggest challenges is balancing career ambitions with familial responsibilities, since Canadian women spend more than double the amount of time, on average, looking after their children compared to men, according to Statistics Canada.
“It’s certainly something I hear from women who have a young family,” said Ashton, who gave birth to a pair of twins this past October. “It’s interesting for me, now, to have that vantage point, the challenge of balancing childcare with some of this work.”
Following Our Movement’s final session on Aug. 8, Ashton told the Thompson Citizen that around 800 people watched these live streams across the country, which bodes well for the kind of social change that her team is trying to perpetuate.
“We got incredibly positive feedback,” she said. “We had people that are keen to follow up as they consider running, whether municipally or provincially or even federally, so we really sparked something and I have no doubt that we will see women running and women getting involved as a result of this initiative.”
Even though they don’t have any immediate plans, Ashton said she is open to continuing this campaign sometime in the future, especially with the next federal election set to take place in the fall of 2019.
In the meantime, anyone interested in rewatching Our Movement’s training seminars can do so for free via Ashton’s website.
