Feminist Trudeau names women to half of his new Canadian cabinet

Justin Trudeau promised in June that half his cabinet would be female if he was elected Canada’s prime minister.

On Wednesday, he got the job, the women - and the bruised egos of a few experienced men who didn’t get the nod.

Trudeau named 15 women to a cabinet of 30, including Jody Wilson-Raybould, an aboriginal lawyer from British Columbia as minister of justice and attorney general; Chrystia Freeland, a former journalist as trade minister; and Jane Philpott, a first-time member of parliament and family doctor, at health. 

Asked after his swearing-in ceremony why an equal cabinet was important to him, Trudeau said, “Because it’s 2015.”

“It’s a message to Canadian women - and young women in particular - that this world is about you,” said Jean Charest, the former premier of Quebec who put women in half his provincial ministries in 2007. “You have to move beyond the old boy’s network.”

Trudeau’s “parity cabinet” is a first in a country where women started voting in 1916, four years before similar rights in the US. It ends a centuries-old habit by leaders of large English-speaking countries, including the UK and US, to name men to a large majority of government posts. France, Italy and the Nordic countries already have had parity cabinets. Canada has been slower than others to elect women, ranking No 50 last year in women’s government representation on the International Parliamentary Union’s list of 190 countries, down from 17th in 1997.

For Trudeau, 43, a self-declared feminist who won a majority government last month in part by saying he’d bring new voices to Ottawa, selecting a 50-50 cabinet wasn’t so simple. He chose from among 134 men and 50 women Liberals MPs, and some long-standing male legislators were left out, including retired Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie and former Toronto police chief Bill Blair. The new gender division comes on top of existing cabinet-making criteria for regional, linguistic and ethnic representation, including the practice of selecting at least one minister from each of the country’s 10 provinces.

The other women in cabinet include Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, an Ottawa human-rights lawyer; Carla Qualtrough, a para-Olympic swimmer from Vancouver in the sports ministry; and Maryam Monsef, a native of Afghanistan, as minister of democratic institutions.

In some areas - Alberta, Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island, the North - the Liberals elected only men. In others, like Manitoba, just one woman, MaryAnn Mihychuk, won a Liberal seat and she was named minister of employment, workforce development and labour. Trudeau’s cabinet is also smaller than that of ousted Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who finished nearly a decade in charge with 39 ministers, 12 of them women.

“It’s a challenge, no doubt,” says Charest, a former national leader of the Progressive Conservative party who took over the Quebec Liberals in the late 1990s and led the province from 2003-2012. “There are lot of people who legitimately feel they could sit around that table and they won’t be there.”

Still, deliberate action to promote women in power is critical to “hurry history’’ and equalise female political participation, said Laura Liswood, who co-founded the Council of Women World Leaders, a network of female presidents and prime ministers, and is an adviser to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. on global leadership and diversity.

Trudeau’s action sets a benchmark for his English-speaking Group of Seven colleagues. US President Barack Obama’s 16- member cabinet is currently 25 per cent female; David Cameron’s UK cabinet is 33 per cent female.

“We’ll see what happens,” Liswood said. “Number One that the sky doesn’t fall.”