A woman has never led the Liberals. Why?
With a potential Trud-exit looming on their horizon, Liberal partisans should be introspective about the challenges facing women seeking the top job within their own tent.
On Sunday, Mexico's President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum became the first woman to lead a political party to a general federal election victory in her country. She did so as the successor to outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's leftist MORENA party.
Surrounded by speculation that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau might not reoffer in the next election, his Liberal Party's intelligentsia is starting to consider who their next leader will be. But despite self-lauding their feminist bonafides for decades, the Liberals are now the only major national federal political party in Canada to have never been led by a woman. So it’s worth asking, will the Canadian Liberal Party be able to accomplish the same feat as MORENA and produce a female successor to Mr. Trudeau for Canada's political left from within its senior ranks?
Judging by the opinion columns written about Mr. Trudeau's potential successors, the jury is firmly out on that question. Should Mr. Trudeau decide to exit before the next federal election, the front runners for that scenario most discussed in public over the last few months have been men. And behind closed doors, Liberal insiders express doubt that the top female contenders are likely to win if Mr. Trudeau proactively chooses not to reoffer. These women are often described as either being too similar to Mr. Trudeau to be viewed as an electable agent of change, as not having built the organization to make a viable bid happen, as likely to lose their seat in the next election, or some combination thereof. But those criticisms could just as easily be leveled against the men who are likely to run upon Mr. Trudeau's departure, but for the most part, they're not. So why the difference?
Blame for this state of affairs should be squarely placed on perception problems created by Mr. Trudeau's need to attribute the appointment of women to his cabinet to quotas, the subsequent uber-centralization of power within his Prime Minister's Office (PMO) and away from his ministers, and the Liberal Party's meek acceptance of the additional barriers the results of these policies have placed in the way of women seeking the party's top job.
In November 2015, before naming his first cabinet, Mr. Trudeau preannounced a quota for half of his cabinet to be women. I remember feeling mixed emotions about this proclamation. On one hand, seeing women appointed to positions of power is a powerful positive signal to send to other women—it says, "You belong here too." However, weighing much more heavily against Mr. Trudeau’s preannouncement of an officially quota-built cabinet being a good thing was that it only had one clear political beneficiary - himself. Despite many of these women having significant resumes, the official pre-attribution of their appointments to his quota system meant he could take credit for their appointments ahead of time. There was no benefit to them from this announcement; they would have had more space to shine had Mr. Trudeau ceded the space to allow credit to be attributed to them alone.
Mr. Trudeau could have been forgiven for this failing or made a real case for the power of quotas if he had gone on to give his cabinet any modicum of real power. After all, quotas may provide access to senior rooms of power in an organization, but they rarely guarantee that actual operational power will come with it. But even in the early days of his government, it was evident that Mr. Trudeau's management style was centralized micromanagement. Lobbyists and media learned early on in his government that PMO staff - and today, senior bureaucrats - were arguably more empowered to make decisions than his cabinet ministers.
Mr. Trudeau has certainly made it hard for anyone to credibly argue this hasn't been the case. An early example in Mr. Trudeau’s tenure came when reports emerged about former Minister of Justice Jody Wilson-Raybould's response to the SNC Lavalin scandal. Instead of allowing her to lean into the power her position should have afforded her - and letting her manage any fallout - he removed her from her office. Putting it mildly, this was not the action of a ride or die feminist seeking to create space for powerful women in the executive branch of Canada’s government. There were other examples, too. Mr. Trudeau's summary dismissal of former Health Minister Jane Philpott for the crime of questioning the appropriateness of Ms. Wilson-Raybould's dismissal was one. His odd demotion of former Minister of Defence Anita Anand during a critical moment in fixing a culture of tolerance for harassment within the military was another.
It would be difficult for anyone to build an organization capable of successfully gaining and wielding enough political power to become Prime Minister under those circumstances, but the quota attribution arguably made the task more difficult. That's because when quotas are described as a primary mechanism to bring diversity into an organization, they tend to become a primary explanation for why someone got the job.
So if the stature of any woman holding one of Mr. Trudeau's quota-attributed appointments is even partially attributed to quota in a future leadership race - particularly in a whisper campaign - they automatically have an extra hurdle to overcome that their male competitors do not. And when the chips are down in the fickle world of politics, the impact of a gendered perception as simple as that can be the difference between winning and losing. Additionally, having one's spot in cabinet officially pre-attributed to the decision of the man who vacated the job is a potential energy-sucking campaign issue that men seeking the Liberal leadership post-Trudeau won't have the pleasure of experiencing.
At a minimum, as it stands today, I suspect outside of the most rabid Liberal partisans, few people would voluntarily or passionately argue that Mr. Trudeau has made it easier for his party to finally be led by a woman.
On the bright side, it should be easy for the Liberal Party to see the starting point to overcome these challenges: progressive organizations calling out Potemkin village feminism committed by members of their own community (in this case, Mr. Trudeau). While it may be easy for progressives to point fingers at their political opponents, the failure to elect a female leader is unique to the federal Liberals. Every other major political party in Canada has been led by a woman at some point. This includes the Liberal Party’s primary opposition - the federal Conservative Party - which has had three female leaders over its various iterations. Mr. Trudeau's reign will not last forever, and to prepare for that day, if the Liberals are serious about being open to having a woman fill their top job, they need to correct the problems within their own ideological house.
For my part, as a former female Conservative cabinet minister and current Member of Parliament, I've publicly and privately had to manage bumps (some admittedly self-inflicted) that I've encountered along my journey as an elected official. But in all my experience in public office I can't say that I've ever experienced a man in a position of power publicly announcing that he gave me an appointment due to a quota.
I suspect they would have anticipated my response if they had tried.
If Mr. Trudeau truly desired to pave the way for a female successor, the women who had walked down the path to Rideau Hall in November 2015 should have been able to say the same thing.