Imagine a nation where the minority rules virtually without interruption over the majority. This majority holds about one-fifth of the seats in the national legislature and the cabinet, and is rarely represented in top posts. The same situation prevails at the next level of government. Majority members are derided due to real or imagined identifying characteristics and are encouraged to become more like the minority if they want to get anywhere in politics.

Unconscionable. Were these ethnic or religious divisions, world leaders would be lining up at the UN to condemn the nation’s systematic discrimination. But since we’re talking about women in politics, there is no discernible outrage.

Sexist comments directed at women politicians continue to pass easily. Last week, Liberal MP Robert Thibault earned only a mild rebuke for encouraging the government’s leader in the Senate, Marjory LeBreton, to go back to “making tea for Brian Mulroney.” Similarly, Tory Minister Peter MacKay suffered little for calling ex-girlfriend Belinda Stronach a dog in the House of Commons, or for telling former NDP leader Alexa McDonough to “stick to her knitting.” We really don’t appear to have progressed much since John Turner went around patting women colleagues on the backside.

In terms of representation, we’re actually moving backward. In 2006, we elected fewer women than the previous election, the first drop since 1968. Even worse, women are disappearing from the federal cabinet, the real centre of political power. Only seven of 32 ministers are women, and most of them hold junior positions. The top woman in cabinet is Senator LeBreton, who comes sixth in the cabinet’s order of precedence.

The highest-ranking woman who actually represents voters is Edmonton MP Rona Ambrose, in 14th place. The only other woman who holds a high-profile portfolio is Citizenship and Immigration Minister Diane Finley. The health, foreign affairs, defence, justice, public safety, and environment portfolios, among other prominent ministries, are all in the hands of men.

A large part of the problem is that we elected a Conservative government with, by far, the smallest female representation of any of the federal parties. Only 11 per cent of their MPs are women, in contrast with the NDP’s 40 per cent, for example. And within that government, women’s voices are clearly not valued. Two of the women who did make it into cabinet, Ambrose and Bev Oda, have since been demoted. None has been promoted.

Does it matter? Well, yes. And you can bet if the House and the cabinet were, say, 80 per cent francophone, we’d never hear the end of it. And would anyone even ask that question if we were discussing any other identifiable group? This marginalization of a majority to the point of almost complete absence from the centre of power is an affront to basic political rights and challenges the very legitimacy of our government.

There is no sign of improvement anytime soon. If all four federal parties in the current House lost their leaders tomorrow, not a single woman would be poised to replace any of them. And the last woman to give it a serious try, Belinda Stronach, was chased out of the Tory party by Stephen Harper, who bluntly told her she had no future there.

But the problem runs deeper than one regressive, socially arrested party. A woman has never won an election in Canada as prime minister. And although women have led provincial official oppositions from coast to coast, only one has ever been elected premier. Women party leaders have, on the other hand, been notable in several spectacular electoral crashes, from Kim Campbell and Audrey McLaughlin at the national level to Nancy Macbeth, Rita Johnston and Lyn McLeod in Alberta, B.C., and Ontario respectively.

An NDP MP told me shortly after his party elected Jack Layton that the party had tried two consecutive women leaders and the public was clearly having none of it. The only woman to run against Layton finished dead last, with one per cent of the party’s vote. The only woman to run for the Liberal leadership last time also finished last, with 2.7 per cent.

It is sometimes argued that these were simply the “wrong” women, or that their character or political skills were lacking. But is this likely true of more than a dozen different people in a range of parties over close to two decades, whose only common feature was their gender?  It seems that Canadians—both men and women—are for some reason still unwilling to trust women with the top job, either in Ottawa or in the provinces.

So what’s going on here? Have women bounced off the glass ceiling?

We will soon see whether the last federal election represented a pause or a plateau in correcting the gender imbalance in Canadian politics. Parties are busy nominating candidates across the country in anticipation of a fall campaign. You can tell a lot about whether they’re looking to the future or the past by counting how many women they choose to represent them.

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