How Party Matters: A Comparative Assessment of the Openness of Left- and Right- Wing Governments to Women's Issues in Ontario and British Columbia 1980-2002 Cheryl N. Collier Department of Political Science Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario
[email protected] Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, May 30-June 1, 2007 Draft Paper - Comments welcome. Please do not cite or quote without permission. 1 How Party Matters: A Comparative Assessment of the Openness of Left- and Right- Wing Governments to Women's Issues in Ontario and British Columbia 1980-20021 By Cheryl N. Collier Carleton University In November 1991, almost immediately after being elected to office, the left-wing BC NDP government of Michael Harcourt created the Ministry of Women's Equality (MWE). Even though BC already had a junior ministry to deal with women's issues, the MWE was the first and only full, free-standing ministry for women to be created in Canada with a mandate to advance women's equality (Erickson 1996; Teghtsoonian 2005). This was a significant achievement for women's groups and feminists within the BC NDP who had been trying to get the party to establish the ministry ever since it first formed a government between 1972 and 1975 (Erickson 1996). The MWE was a "central agency" within the BC government of the day. Its minister was given a seat on the two most important cabinet committees and the ministry as a whole was given a wide policy advisory role to "ensure that 'issues relating to women's equality [were] reflected in policy, legislation, services and programs throughout [the] government'" (quoted in Erickson 1996:199).