OTTAWA—Most everyone knows who their premier is, but it wasn’t until this week, when they were all lined up together at the Council of the Federation in Saskatoon, that it really sunk in. They’re all men. You may have seen the photographs that put this in stark relief: the lot of them, an exclusive boys club for the first time since 2008, smiling like the alumni of a hockey team that no one cares to remember. As many have pointed out, the vision of this band of men represents a very different class of premiers from just a few years ago. Here is the story of that change — you might say regression — told in a series of all-premiers’ photographs. 2013If the number of women at the first ministers’ table is a sign of approaching gender equality, then 2013 was a high water mark. Ontario’s Kathleen Wynne became the sixth female premier in the federation, after clinching the Liberal leadership and first minister’s chair after Dalton McGuinty resigned amidst a series of controversies. Capturing the flavour of the time, Wynne’s chief rival for the job, Sandra Pupatello, quipped about the contest: “We had the guys on the run.” Remarking on the historic female presence at the head of governments across the country, the Star’s editorial board wrote that “it’s a remarkable and long overdue makeover in national politics.” 2014It wouldn’t last. By April of 2014, Alberta’s Alison Redford and Newfoundland’s Kathy Dunderdale had resigned, and Quebec’s separatist Parti Québécois premier Pauline Marois had fallen in an election. That left Wynne and B.C. premier Christy Clark as the lone women at the first ministers’ table. “I worry it’s going to fuel the perception that women can’t hack it,” Janet Ecker, a cabinet minister in premier Mike Harris’s Ontario government, told the Star’s Linda Diebel at the time. ̶ ...
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