A candidate running to lead British Columbia's NDP is standing up for "older, white males."
Former cabinet minister Harry Lali officially entered the race Thursday and immediately waded into the sensitive area of gender politics, denouncing gender quotas as discriminatory and calling on white men to join his campaign.
Lali's controversial campaign launch followed a debate about the NDP's gender quota rules, which could force out one of two party executives. That debate also prompted a Simon Fraser University professor to release an early draft of a study that suggests women are still at a disadvantage within the province's Opposition New Democrats, and the party's gender quotas are working.
"We need to empower women and equity groups through an incentive-based and target-based approach, but NOT through equity quotas," Lali said in a written copy of his speech.
"Equity quotas are anti-democratic and discriminate, specifically against older, white males. As leader, I would welcome back older, white males into our NDP family. I say to older, white males, don't stand outside the tent and complain. Come and join my campaign team."
Lali is in his mid-50s, and he was born and raised in India. He couldn't be reached for an interview to elaborate on his comments.
The debate over quotas began earlier this month when a long-time New Democrat pointed out a rule in the party's constitution that requires representation of both genders in the three top positions: leader, president and treasurer.
The current president and treasurer are both men, so the constitution could require one of them be replaced by a woman if the new leader is a man. The current leader, Carole James, is a woman.
So far, only three candidates have stepped forward, and all are men. Of the caucus members and federal MPs who've publicly expressed interest, all of them are men, too.
The NDP's gender provisions also apply to vice-presidents, the party's oversight committee and a number of regional positions.
Ahead of the provincial election in 2009, the party introduced a gender-equity system to select candidates in vacant constituencies, setting a goal of 30 per cent women.
Lali went out of his way to comment on the gender quotas, including it in his prepared remarks rather than in a response to a reporter's question, suggesting he intends to make it a significant issue in his campaign.
British Columbia is currently above the national average when it comes to the representation of women in politics, but they still make up far less than half of the provincial legislature.
About 30 per cent of the seats in the legislature are held by women. In the House of Commons, they account for about 22 per cent of MPs.
Women fare better within the NDP, where they account for 35 per cent of the party's caucus, compared to 28 per cent for the governing Liberals.
The province has only ever had one female premier, Rita Johnston, who took over after the resignation of Bill Vander Zalm in 1991 and held the position for just seven months. The only visible minority to sit in the premier's office was Ujjal Dosanjh, who was an NDP premier for about a year until the current Liberal government took power in 2001.
Kennedy Stewart, who teaches public policy at Simon Fraser University, has been working on a study for the past five years into why women are still underrepresented in politics, using B.C. as a case study.
The media coverage of the quota debate prompted him to release the draft of a paper, which will soon be published in Party Politics, the journal of the American Political Science Association.
Stewart was looking specifically at the representation of women in constituency nomination contests, and he said the results in the NDP ridings suggest discrimination still exists within the party.
He said in the 2005 election, men running for an NDP nomination were five times more likely to win that nomination than women, even after he controlled for factors such as the number of women who entered the race and how much money they spent on their campaigns. In the end, about 30 per cent of the party's candidates were women.
On the other hand, he said the NDP's introduction of quotas in the 2009 saw the number of female NDP candidates increase to about half.
"The only way you can overcome this is through quotas," said Stewart. "The idea of incentive-based rather than quota-based (as Lali suggests) doesn't work. We found the amount of money you spend doesn't matter."
Stewart said if the NDP removed its quotas for candidates, the number of women the party sends to the legislature would likely decrease.
"If you don't care about equity, if you think it's fine that the legislature is all male, then you haven't got anything to worry about," said Stewart.
"And Harry Lali, that's what he obviously thinks, that it's OK if the legislature doesn't mirror the population. If equality is something he's not interested in, then that's very brave of him to state that."
Janni Aragon, a political science professor at the University of Victoria who focuses on gender in politics, said the persistent under representation of women in the province's political system clearly show the "older, while males" Lali is talking about aren't at a disadvantage.
"His complaints about the duress of white males are laughable," said Aragon.
"We're not in a post-feminist era. We're in an era in which people are still discriminated against based on their gender, their race, their sexuality."
