LONDON – A majority of NDP candidates in the June 7 election are women — the highest rate for any political party in the province’s history.With 56 per cent female candidates — or 69 of the total 124 — NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said “we’ve worked very hard over the years to encourage women to get engaged in the political process.“It takes some time to encourage people to seek office, and then have the process of having contested nominations. We prefer to have a process that invites people to get involved in our party, and as a result ... 56 per cent of our candidates are women because we made the effort to make that happen,” she said during a campaign stop Tuesday in London.The Green Party reports that 52 per cent of its candidates are women; the Liberals, almost 46 per cent and the Progressive Conservatives 33 per cent.Most of the female PC candidates were recruited under previous leader Patrick Brown.Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne, the first female premier in Ontario`s history, said “there are more and more women who do want to get involved and the numbers are going up, the percentages are going up.”However, Wynne also expressed concern about the “toxicity of debate” in the social-media era, which may discourage women from seeking office.“We all have a responsibility to say, ‘look, if we want people to be involved in a decent political discussion then we’re going to have to deal with some of the language, some of the rhetoric that is used on social media,’” she said at a campaign stop in London.“I think social media has given license to a level of debate that’s very, very disturbing.”Both Wynne and Horwath have been the target of misogynistic attacks online — called offensive names or threatened with violence — and their staff filter out comments on social media because the vulgar slurs are so frequent.On Tuesday, Wynne and H ...
|
