Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Discussing Guaranteed Seats
Guaranteed or reserved seats are an electoral mechanism that has become a popular tool in modern democracies. The purpose of guaranteed seats is to ensure that representation in legislative assemblies is more reflective of the population being governed.
Countries use guaranteed seats as a mechanism to include populations on the basis of ethnicity, language, religion, geography and/or gender. Legislatures reserving seats on the basis of ethnicity, not based on language, include New Zealand, India, and Rwanda. Countries recognizing language or national identity are predominantly European countries, such as Slovenia and Kosovo. Religious identity is the basis for guaranteed seats in countries in the Middle East and South Asia and geographical representation is used where islands are detached from the nation state's mainland (Fiji, Isle of Man in the United Kingdom).
Many countries have developed gender quota systems in conjunction with other measures imbedded in the countries' socioeconomic realities. In this mix of measures, guaranteed seats may be chosen to address one factor of representation, and in countries with political party systems, electoral lists may be the tool used to establish gender quotas.
Belgium, for example, established guaranteed seats for each of the three language communities of the nation to ensure that each of its communities is represented in the Belgian parliament. Belgium's electoral system is a party-based system with proportional representation. Political parties have to comply with a gender quota and each candidate list must have as many women as men candidates listed. In this way, Belgium applied a gender quota of 50 percent to all electoral lists. This does not guarantee that all women will be elected, however, voters chose from an equal number of women and men when voting.
Rwanda, to ensure long-lasting peace after war and genocide, developed an elaborate system of reserved seats, quotas and other mechanisms to ensure gender and minority representation. Rwanda is also the only country with sanctions for non-compliance of its reserved seat quota.
New Zealand, the first country to make women eligible to vote (in 1893), and to stand for election to parliament (in 1919), has today 49 woman Members of Parliament and surpasses the 40-percent mark in gender representation in its legislature. New Zealand's early path toward gender equity is seen as a combination of political will among parliamentarians, and a desire for equal rights by the Pakeha settler feminists in convergence with Maori women petitioning on land rights and women's rights. Both women's groups continued throughout the country's history to organize advocacy for representation.
New Zealand's voting system includes a number of guaranteed seats for Maori, the Indigenous peoples of New Zealand. Maori representation was guaranteed through the establishment of separate Maori electorates as early as 1867. In 1973, the government introduced the "Maori Electoral Option" allowing electors of Maori descent to choose whether they enrolled in General or in Maori seats. Electoral reforms in 1993 created a Mixed-Member Proportional voting system in New Zealand while maintaining the guaranteed Maori seats.
Today, out of the 120 seats in parliament, 29 belong to members of Maori descent including the seven seats guaranteed for Maori determined by the size of the population who self-identify as having Maori ethnicity. This distribution raised discussions of whether the guaranteed seats are needed.
Many Maori have argued for the retention of guaranteed seats not only as providing guaranteed representation but also as a symbolic recognition and practical manifestation of the Treaty of Waitangi in the New Zealand Parliament. Abolitionists argue it is a flawed model that may sideline Maori concerns.
It is generally believed that the existence of guaranteed seats plays a large part in explaining the larger representation of Maori in Parliament, in particular when comparing to the low representation in Australia of Aboriginal people in political office, where no such measures exist.
Pros and Cons of Guaranteed Seats
Committee heard various views on the proposed solutions to increase women representation in the Legislative Assembly by applying temporary measures. Some found that temporary guaranteed seats are a good measure but had concerns on what the impact would be in the long-term; other rejected the idea of guaranteed seats in principle.
In committee's public hearings, those who spoke against the idea of guaranteed seats had concerns of principle with the idea of reserving seats. Committee heard that guaranteed seats may be seen as a form of tokenism with the negative implication that the seats are held by women lacking merit. In this way, guaranteed seats present 'freebees' or 'pity seats' and were said to possibly hurt women on their path to equality.
We heard concerns that while well-meaning, guaranteed seats for women may be a disservice to women by increasing their vulnerability to harassment and provoking comments disregarding the merit of those women who gained guaranteed seats. Guaranteed seats were described as exposing women to possible stigmatized treatment and gendered comments.
Concern was also raised that women legislators in reserved seats may be more likely to be marginalized from power or cabinet positions. This concern, however, is not limited to guaranteed seats but could apply to all women legislators, under the current system used in the Northwest Territories for the selection of Cabinet Ministers.
The opposite view was also mentioned, that bringing more women into the legislature would ease the stress on the few women who hold seats and who may feel like tokens. In this context, the conflicts that may arise through guaranteed seats were considered temporary.
"If you want to achieve equality in numbers of men and women at the Legislative Assembly, there exists a reasonably easy way of achieving this. It is not my idea but I like it: give each constituency two MLAs, one man and one woman." (Dave Nickerson, Public Hearing Yellowknife, 8 May 2019)
Mr. Speaker, I would like to pass the reading of this report on to the honourable Member for Deh Cho.