Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as you are well aware, some distinguished women have served in this Legislative Assembly, including Nellie Cournoyea, the first and only woman Premier of the NWT, the second woman Premier in Canada, and the first Indigenous leader at this level. Jeanie Marie-Jewell of Fort Smith, Sandy Lee from Yellowknife, and Jane Groenewegen of Hay River all served in Cabinet, as my colleague Caroline Cochrane does today.
All told, there have never been more than three women in any single Assembly, representing 15 per cent of the total Members. Not to put too fine a point on it, Mr. Speaker, the NWT has the worst record for electing women in the country. Legislatures in British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, and Nova Scotia all have representation of at least 30 per cent women, as well as the Yukon. What do they have that we don't?
One factor is a lack of party politics where parties can choose candidates and mandate a specific proportion of women. For example, there is a bipartisan initiative in New Brunswick to have women as 50 per cent of all candidates in the provincial election coming this fall.
What we do know is that the more women who run, the more will get elected. Last year, there were 20 candidates running for the 10 councillor positions on the Behchoko community government. More than half of the candidates were women, and eight got elected.
The challenge is to get women to run at the Territorial government level. They have always been reluctant to do so, averaging no more than 15 per cent of candidates since 1951. While we are at it, hats off to the 110 women who have run in the last 66 years. Mr. Speaker, last election, only 17 per cent of candidates were women, and no women ran in 10 out of 19 ridings.
Let me turn to the question: what prevents women from running? A 2013 American study about the gender gap in political ambition among girls found that, first, boys are more likely than girls to have been socialized by their parents to think about a career in politics; second, young women tend to be exposed to less political information and discussion than are young men; third, young women generally get less encouragement to run for office than young men do; and fourth, young women, consequently, are less likely to think they will be qualified to run for office, even in the not-so-near future.
From my own experience, I would also add two more reasons: women give more consideration to the toll politics will take on their families, especially their children, when they will work long hours and may be away from home for weeks at a time; secondly, women worry about the cost of paying for a campaign out of their own or their family's financial resources.
In short, women have to be talked into running, and it usually is a hard decision for them to make. The Status of Women and now the Women's Advisory section of the Executive and Indigenous Affairs have been helping to equip women to run by offering campaign schools free of charge to any woman who is interested in running for office at any governmental level. The school offers practical advice about creating a message, budgeting, fundraising, and honing networking skills, among other things.
There were campaign schools in Inuvik and Hay River last winter, in Fort Simpson last weekend, and in Yellowknife this coming Saturday and Sunday. The Minister responsible for the Status of Women and I have been at all of them. We are on a mission to get women into this building.
Why do we need more women? Women are voters and taxpayers. We hold important roles in the courts, public service, and business. We want to share the power. We want to present our own perspectives on the issues of the day. These are different than hearing a man talk about a woman's perspective. The two of us here bring our unique gender perspective to the work we do, including budget review, creation of policy, and legislation.
Women tend to highlight areas of work that men may not emphasize, such as promoting the need for available and affordable childcare and advocating for action on violence against women. That doesn't mean that women don't care about economic or environmental issues. Of course, we do. It doesn't mean that the men here are doing a bad job. They aren't. We are allies working together for the good of the whole of the NWT.
Research has shown that having women at the table provides for faster decisions, more effective actions, and better financial outcomes. Mr. Speaker, we need a Legislative Assembly that is truly representative. Gender equality is a human right. Women are half of the population, but have only 10 per cent of the seats. Imagine if this was the other way around, and men had only 10 per cent of the seats. They wouldn't feel adequately represented here. What we want is equality.
This isn't a perfect comparison, because it deals with diversity rather than equality, but what if this House had two Indigenous Members and 17 non-Indigenous Members? Indigenous people, naturally, would not feel adequately represented. They are half of the population. Women, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, are underrepresented in this House.
In an ideal world, women would have half of the seats here. The reality is that there are only a couple of countries in the world today that have true equality. The UN has set a goal for women's representation at 30 per cent. That is the threshold at which there are enough women to produce public policy representing women's concerns. It is time for all of us to share responsibility to achieve gender equality.
To bring this idea home, 30 per cent of representation by women would be six Members in this House. That is where we want to be by the 2027 election, if not sooner. Twenty per cent representation by women is four Members. That is double where we are now, and that is our goal by the election in 2023. Mr. Speaker, these are modest goals, but we have to start somewhere.
As the 18th Assembly, we committed in our mandate to supporting initiatives designed to increase the number of women running for elected office in the NWT. That support can take a number of forms; promoting women's leadership, encouraging women to take part in public debate, responding to requests for mentoring from women who want to become candidates in any level of government, to appreciate and work to remove all of the barriers women face in becoming candidates.
As I said in my statement today, equality won't happen by itself. Our starting point for making it happen is to support the goals set out in today's motion. Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.