Monday, November 23, 2015

For the last seven years we have had at least on women premier in office in Canada

We currently have three women as premiers in Canada - Christy Clark in BC, Kathleen Wynne in Ontario and Rachel Notley in Alberta.  Since the selection of Eva Aariak to be premier of Nunavut on November 14th 2008 we have always had at least one woman premier in Canada.   This is 2566 consecutive days.   Of the 12 women that have been first ministers,  seven of them have served in office since 2008

Here is how they all stack up by time in office - underlined means currently in office, bold means won at least one election.

  1. Eva Aariak         Nunavut 1827 days
  2. Christy Clark      BC      1715 days
  3. Nellie Cournoyea   NWT     1469 days
  4. Catherine Callbeck PEI     1353 days
  5. Kathy Dunderdale   NF      1148 days
  6. Kathleen Wynne     Ontario 1016 days
  7. Alison Redford     Alberta  898 days
  8. Pat Duncan         Yukon    884 days
  9. Pauline Marois     Quebec   581 days
  10. Rita Johnson       BC       217 days
  11. Rachel Notley      Alberta  183 days
  12. Kim Campbell       Federal  132 days

Next March Christy Clark will become the longest serving female first minister in Canadian history.

Each time I have looked at this I have considered how many person days each first minister has governed for - this is time in office multiplied by population governed.    I think that in many ways it is a better measure of the relative impact of women in politics.    As you can see Kathleen Wynne tops the list when you calculated it this way.

The number is person days governed

  1. Kathleen Wynne     Ont 13,057,000,000 Lib
  2. Christy Clark      BC   7,546,000,000 Lib
  3. Pauline Marois     Que  4,582,000,000 PQ
  4. Kim Campbell       Fed  3,786,000,000 PC
  5. Alison Redford     Ab   3,273,000,000 PC
  6. Rita Johnson       BC     715,500,000 Socred
  7. Rachel Notley      Ab     667,000,000 NDP
  8. Kathy Dunderdale   NL     590,700,000 PC
  9. Catherine Callbeck PEI    149,000,000 Lib
  10. Nellie Cournoyea   NWT     92,000,000 na
  11. Eva Aariak         Nu      58,300,000 na
  12. Pat Duncan         Yk      24,800,000 Lib

What is also interesting is that four of the women did significantly better than expected in their elections - that being Alison Redford, Christy Clark, Kathleen Wynne and Rachel Notley.

On the other hand two women were forced out of the office of premier in an atypical manner early on in their first term as elected premier.  

I also looked at this on:
January 22nd 2015
October 1st 2013
February 25th 2013
 January 2nd 2013
June 14th 2011

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