Well, Copy Paste in AF seems to be broken. Is this just me?
Anyway, the story is that he is appointing women to 50% of cabinet posts. There are about three times as many male parliament members as female ones. His gender based appointment policy will be prioritize over other rules that would have ensured more uniform representation across ethnic or geographic groups.
I’m certainly not against women holding cabinet positions. But isn’t this taking some campaign slogan a bit too far? What are you guys doing up there?
does it matter? creating policy is done by a large team that is far bigger than just the cabinet ministers. cabinet ministers just implement policy and look good, sort of like the PM. as women generally look better than men and are generally more collaborative, this may be a good thing. Americans have to remember that our PM doesn’t have veto power or anything like that (it’s the Governor General who has all the true power - military decision-making, quasi-veto power for many things) and cabinet ministers have no true additional power other than more newspaper and tv time, a fancier desk and a lower queue time when trying to contact the PM.
the media is being sensationalist about this because it seems like merit should matter but it really shouldn’t.
Ministers still have a lot of discretion in setting the agenda and scheduling discussion and prioritizing how things are done. It’s true that a lot of the policy work and writing and analysis gets done further down the chain and that ministers are in more of a mangement-type role than true legislators or executives, but they still have a fair amount of power over things that affect the outcome.
I’m not sure that whether they are women or men matter that much, other than the optics. However, if this government fails miserably, women will be handicapped by people saying “remember what happened when we tried to make the cabinet 50/50 just because the population is 50/50.” I suspect if things go spectacularly well, women won’t benefit to the same degree as they will lose if it goes badly. So while upping the portion makes sense, doing the 50/50 thing could easily backfire.
Ok, so point taken that the specific selection of party muppets to fill the cabinet seat might have only small effects on government. But this does not mean that the positions are not important. Obama or Hillary Clinton would probably be indistinguishable in policy. However, imagine if we said “let’s give a 10% vote subsidy to the candidate who is male/female”, which is what Canada is doing.
bchad has a good point that the overall party success, which might not be related to the minister selection process, will still be projected onto this policy. Of course, the “success” or “failure” of government tends to be twisted and defined based on point of view…
let me be clear. i don’t support hiring people based on quotas. it’s a stupid policy. but in this case, it doesn’t really matter. since the jobs aren’t usually given to this based on merit anyway as they are usually give to those who have a pull in the party as a key hobnobber or public face i don’t see it making much difference. i mean, you’re still hiring from a small number of MPs for the job. if the best candidate were to be chosen based strictly on merit, and not based on electability or personality, 99.9999999% of the time it would be someone who is not an MP and would be managerial or academic person from outside of government.
so to cry because its not based on merit is stupid. it was never based on merit. it was always a beauty pageant involving those who were pretty enough or personable enough or lucky enough to get elected. and the bottom line is that if you suck at your cabinet minister job, you’ll be quickly replaced. no harm no foul.
one last thing. i feel much better about this experiment taking place in government than in corporate boardrooms. government is supposed to represent the people so a government that is representative of its electorate is not too far off base. the movement to add more women to boardrooms is outright stupid. that is where meritocracy should rule. adding inept women to boards in the name of equality will result in lower corporate efficiency and lower economic growth. i don’t know why we have to force the envelope when in 30+ years, perfectly qualified women will dominate the c-suite anyway, based on recent divergences in academic acheivement by gender.
@ bchad. good analysis on the consequences to gender image. you’re onto something there.
Democracy isn’t about the most qualified. It’s about representation. I don’t necessarily agree with a quota system, but I understand what Trudeau is trying to do here. Unfortunately, quotas undermine the success of women that earn their positions through merit alone. My wife actually found this quota offensive.
He actually has power. Ichan has some business weight, Trump might if he wins (he wont) and has sparked some national debate, but is still generally a complete joke to most people.
