Honourable senators, I rise to speak as the sponsor of Bill S-213, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act (demographic information). Bill S-213 is identical to Bill S-283 from the last Parliament, which I spoke to on March 19, 2024.

Bill S-213 has a simple principle: It is time that Canadians have ready access to more and better demographic information on who is running for federal office and on what federal political parties are doing to achieve a House of Commons that better reflects this country’s diversity.

Bill S-213 addresses Canada’s long-standing and continuing failure to elect more women and citizens from other under-represented groups. The measures proposed are based on recommendations made by established entities that report directly to Parliament. They are research based and draw upon Canada’s Constitution and upon rights-based laws and policies put in place to increase diversity in other federal institutions.

As Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer has observed:

Many groups are under-represented in the House of Commons and the reasons for this are complex. There can be little doubt about the value of working toward a Parliament that reflects the true diversity of Canadian society; but that work must start with high-quality information . . . .

This is exactly the basis of this bill.

Bill S-213 amends the Canada Elections Act by adding two measures. First, the Chief Electoral Officer will collect and report to the House of Commons demographic information about electoral participants who are nomination contestants, candidates and leadership contestants. The Chief Electoral Officer has asked for this mandate.

Second, major political parties will report on what they are doing to increase diversity in the selection of candidates, including targets and timetables with respect to women, but going beyond women to other diverse communities.

Let me explain why I am undertaking this bill.

Colleagues, getting more women elected to public office has been a vital personal goal for me for over three decades. I have been an activist in this area for a very long time, and since I was appointed to the Senate, I have been motivated to find a way for Parliament to address the poor representation of women and other under-represented groups.

I am also motivated to improve our democratic institutions in these troubling times, when the world is facing threats not seen since the Second World War. Building a Parliament that better reflects the voices of all Canadians will improve our decision making and outcomes and build trust in our democratic institutions.

Time is of the essence. Our progress in addressing historic representation gaps has been slow, to say the least, and the recent federal election shows that progress is vulnerable.

The subject matter here is entirely appropriate for a Senate public bill. I have said before and will say again firmly that I believe that the Senate not only has the right but also the responsibility to deliberate and to show leadership on all aspects of our democracy and our democratic institutions. We cannot leave this work to others.

This bill will strengthen our democracy by increasing the transparency of our Parliament and political parties for the benefit of all Canadians.

Let me start with the results of the April 2025 election. When it comes to diversity, the results were disappointing, to say the least. In this past election, 104 women were elected, filling 30.3% of the seats in the House of Commons, compared to 30.5% in 2021. Yes, this is a drop, though you might conclude that this drop in representation is not that serious.

But consider this: In the 18 federal elections held since 1968, the percentage of women increased in every one except those of 2006 and now 2025. In only 2 out of 18 elections has the percentage of women gone down, and this most recent election is one of them. This is hardly a distinction for us to be proud of. Definitely not.

Still, even the progress we’ve had has been slow. In the 10 federal elections held from 1997 to 2025, women have moved from 20.6% to 30.3% of Parliament. That is about one percentage point every election. That progress is very slow.

The Inter-Parliamentary Union ranks the percentage of women in national parliaments around the world since 1997 and is the most reliable source for this data. In 1997, at the inception of those rankings, Canada was twenty-first in the world. We are now seventieth in the world in terms of percentage of women in our Parliament. This is another unfortunate distinction for this country.

Also regarding the 2025 election, Canada’s two largest political parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, currently fill 90% of the seats in the House of Commons. Both parties nominated significantly fewer women as candidates in 2025, despite the clear and long runway leading to the election. Library of Parliament data indicates that 35.6% of the candidates for the Liberal Party were women, down from 43.6% in the 2021 federal election. In 2025, 22.9% of candidates for the Conservative Party were women, down from 33.8% in the 2021 election. Overall, there were 627 women candidates, down from 763 in 2021.

Jerome H. Black and Andrew Griffith undertook an analysis of candidate diversity in this past election in their piece entitled “The diversity of candidates and MPs stalled for some groups in this election,” published in Policy Options in May of this year. They found that the number of candidates from visible minorities increased slightly in 2025 over 2021. The majority of these candidates were men, who constituted 65%, while women constituted 35% of all visible minorities elected. The number of Indigenous candidates declined in 2025 over 2021. There was a significant decline in LGBTQ candidates and MPs elected.

Unfortunately, the authors were not able to comment on candidates with disabilities due to a lack of data.

A comparison of the percentage of candidates from this study to census data shows that representation still falls well short for Indigenous, racial minority and LGBTQ Canadians.

I draw your attention to a welcome new resource, entitled Black on the Ballot: Black Canadians in Electoral Politics, published in January 2025, which includes a dataset on the 74 Black Canadians who have run for the House of Commons between 1968 — when Lincoln Alexander was first elected — and 2021. Of the 74, 32 were men and 42 were women. Out of the 20 elected, 12 were men and 8 were women — 60% and 40% respectively.

Colleagues, we have had decades of effort and earnest, though only somewhat effective, voluntary measures undertaken by political parties and civil society to move the dial on improving representation in the House of Commons. But we cannot deny the evidence that we are stalled compared to the legitimate expectations of Canadians and compared to much of the rest of the world.

We are also stalled compared to what we have achieved in other parts of our society and democratic system. Think of the progress in the last 50 years regarding the Constitution, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Crown in Canada. Think of the representation here in the Senate, the judiciary, the executive, public administration and public services and federally regulated industries. The progress made there has been greater.

The results we have for Parliament do not reflect our aspirations, our values, our approach to equality and anti-discrimination or the view of ourselves that we present on the world stage. These results are, in my opinion — and I hope yours as well — indefensible.

Now, let me turn to the provisions of Bill S-213. To be clear, the bill does not prescribe structural changes to Canada’s electoral system. It does not tell parties or electoral participants what to do, nor does it place any restriction on the freedom of a party to choose candidate selection procedures or candidates who, it thinks, will best represent its interests. The bill does not say, “Do this.” The bill actually says, “Tell Canadians what you are choosing to do.”

The bill is based on four sources: first, recommendations from Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer calling for Elections Canada to collect high-quality demographic data about electoral participants; second, recommendations from the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women in its April 2019 report — which I will call “the committee” or “the committee report” — also calling for improved demographic data and improving the representation of diverse women in electoral politics; third, extensive federal experience in employment equity based on the reporting of action plans to promote diversity in the workplace and for corporate boards and management; and fourth, decades of domestic and international research on women in politics.

Unfortunately, there has not been a lot of research conducted with respect to other aspects of diversity.

Section 1 of the bill creates a floor for the two reporting requirements on diversity. At minimum, reporting must be done for the designated groups defined in section 3 of the Employment Equity Act. These groups are women, Aboriginal Peoples, persons with disabilities and members of visible minorities. That’s what that act defines.

Further, the bill gives scope to both the Chief Electoral Officer and political parties to add other grounds as they see fit. Data collection does not have to be limited to these groups.

As you may recall, the federal minister of Employment and Social Development Canada confirmed in December 2023 that the federal government intended to amend the Employment Equity Act to add two groups: Black people and 2SLGBTQI+ people.

Further, it would update three of the other groups: Indigenous Peoples, racialized people and would align persons with disabilities with the Accessible Canada Act. This commitment on the part of the government was reaffirmed in Canada’s last federal budget of April 2024, and I urge the federal government to honour this commitment that they have made at least twice.

I’ve been assured by legislative counsel that any amendments made to the definition of “designated groups” will flow through to the provisions of this bill when those become law.

Sections 4 and 5 of this bill authorize data collection and reporting by the Chief Electoral Officer of demographic information about electoral participants. As I have mentioned, both the Chief Electoral Officer and the committee have recommended this. The Chief Electoral Officer is required to provide a self-identification, which is a voluntary and confidential questionnaire, to all electoral participants currently covered by the Canada Elections Act, and this includes candidates in section 67, nomination contestants in section 476 and leadership contestants in section 478.

This demographic information must include — as I mentioned — at minimum, the designated groups under the Employment Equity Act, and the data formats must support disaggregation and intersectional analysis.

The Chief Electoral Officer must publish a report setting out the anonymized data within 90 days after the return of the writ following a general election, and the Speaker must submit such reports to the House of Commons.

I also note that the report Black on the Ballot calls for the collection of racially disaggregated data on candidacies and office holding in Canadian politics.

Section 3 of the bill requires disclosure by major federal political parties of their action plans on diversity. The bill implements significant portions of recommendations 8 and 9 from the committee report, but it expands the scope of these recommendations beyond diverse female candidates to cover all employment equity groups.

It is important to note what this House of Commons committee called for in 2019. It called for public reporting by registered parties on their efforts to recruit more female candidates from diverse backgrounds. It called for registered parties to “. . . set goals and publicly report on their efforts to nominate more female candidates . . . .” It also called for search committees for candidates in federal general elections and by-elections.

In the bill, diversity action plans must be reported by those registered political parties whose candidates for the most recent general election received at least 2% of the number of valid votes cast or at least 5% of the valid votes cast in the electoral district in which the registered party endorsed a candidate. This threshold for reporting comes directly from the Canada Elections Act, section 444.

Currently, out of 16 registered political parties, the 5 parties represented in the Forty-fifth Parliament meet this threshold.

According to the bill, the Chief Electoral Officer is given power to ensure that the parties meet their reporting obligations.

Bill S-213 requires that these parties who meet the threshold must make public on their internet websites:

. . . any rules in use by the registered party or any of its electoral district associations relating to the selection of candidates . . . .

To a greater or lesser degree, the five parties in the House of Commons already do this.

By the way, the current Chief Electoral Officer made this same recommendation in 2024 to the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference, which that inquiry adopted.

The bill’s measures on diversity reporting for parties are modelled on comparable federal initiatives which apply to public sector employment, federal contractors and federally regulated private sector corporations. Specifically, reporting requirements for political parties are modelled on the Disclosure Relating to Diversity regulations under section 172.1 of the Canada Business Corporations Act.

Since 2020, “distributing corporations”— generally, companies incorporated under that act which offer their shares to the public — must annually report on what they are doing to increase diversity on their boards and senior management teams with respect to the groups under the Employment Equity Act as well as any other groups the companies choose to include.

These federal rules draw on provincial securities rules, which require reporting on women by TSX-listed companies, and these rules have been in place since December 2014.

You may have heard these federal and provincial regimes described as “comply or explain.” Companies have the option to state how they are complying with the required disclosure or to explain why they are choosing not to comply. Companies design the policies, plans and timetables that suit them best, and shareholders hold them accountable as they see fit.

Colleagues, I have drawn upon this corporate disclosure regime because it is an excellent template for reporting on diversity, and I draw upon it because it is working. The January 22, 2024, editorial in The Globe and Mail said of this “comply or explain” approach:

It’s a basic first step: Quantifying where you’re at is key. Disclosure rules have helped propel progress.

The representation of women on boards of TSX-listed companies passed the 30% mark for the first time this year, and 2025 has also seen some improvements in the representation of visible minorities, persons with disabilities and Indigenous Peoples.

Corporate diversity disclosure is working in another important way as well. “Comply or explain” has changed the conversation. It has moved the dial. It has turned up the heat on the lack of diversity in boardrooms and C-suites. It has raised the bar for what is considered acceptable performance so that there is no going back; there is only going forward. That is precisely what we need to happen with diversity in candidate selection.

This public report card is becoming even more important. Early indications from 2025 filings are that President Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the public and private sectors may be having a chilling effect on diversity disclosure in Canada, by public companies here and on actual results here. Access to quality information will help us in this country to meet this challenge, just as we are meeting other challenges coming from the United States and globally.

Based on the particular model that is now well established in Canada, under Bill S-213, political parties that meet the threshold will have to publish information on their internet sites about any programs they have in place designed to achieve greater diversity in the selection of candidates, including but not limited to the designated groups and including the use of formal search committees and written policies on the identification and nomination of persons in each designated group as candidates.

These provisions recognize that there is unlikely to be a “one-size-fits-all” measure for under-represented groups. What will work for one group will not necessarily work for another. Bill S-213 respects the need for flexibility.

Parties may decide not to undertake any of these initiatives, and if so, they must state their reasons for opting out — that’s where we get the term “comply or explain” — and indicate whether they have a timeline for complying.

Colleagues, I would like to turn to the final provisions in section 3 of the bill, also based on this model, which speak directly to the situation of women in federal electoral politics as revealed in the research. The bill requires reporting on three mechanisms: any rules for filling vacant seats where the party is the incumbent; any rules for access to “winnable” ridings; any voluntary targets they have for women to be nominated by a specific date; and the cumulative progress that has been achieved.

The use of targets is not new for federal political parties. What is new is making sure that Canadians have access to the information about any targets that are in place.

I will now ask that you step back with me for a few minutes from the detail of the bill, to understand the “big picture” on the undeniable and persistent gender gap in our House of Commons. Let’s be guided by fact and by research, not by myths and not by deflections from responsibility.

First point, voters are not responsible for the gender gap. Research shows that there is no voter bias of any consequence against women. Canadians vote for parties. If a party you favour is running a female candidate, you will vote for that party, whether that candidate be a man or a woman. A controlled study of more than 21,000 candidates who have run for the House of Commons since 1921 shows that female election candidates receive just as many votes as their male counterparts when you control for the conditions. That’s the first point.

As my second point, women are not responsible for the gender gap. Abacus Data undertook a national survey in January 2022 on behalf of Equal Voice. I will quote from two key findings.

An equal number of women and men, 5% in each case, say, “I am definitely interested in running for public office at some point in the future.” So this is the potential pool of candidates among Canadians, and this potential pool is the same among women as it is among men.

However, when it comes to public office candidacy, men are twice as likely as women to have been asked to run, and 14% of Canadian men say they have been approached or asked to run as a political candidate. Only 7% of women say they have been approached. That’s double the number of men than women who have been approached to run. This is the nub of the issue.

Further, Canadian research also establishes that parties tend to favour men for seats where the parties think that they have an electoral advantage, seats where the party is the incumbent and seats they consider to be “winnable.” Parties are more likely to place women in seats where they are less competitive. The Black on the Ballot report also suggests that Black candidates are placed in seats where the parties they represent are less competitive.

The point is that the candidate selection processes of political parties are the main factor responsible for the gender gap.

The road to the House of Commons is overwhelmingly through political parties that are the gatekeepers to the other place. The Samara Centre for Democracy concluded in a 2019 study that:

More than 99% of the Members of Parliament . . . elected to Canada’s Parliament over the last 30 years were elected as representatives of a political party. . . .

They are the gatekeepers to Parliament.

This same study highlights that candidate selection has shifted from contested nominations at the electoral district level to management by the national campaigns. That study found that 83% of nominations have just a single candidate or are the direct result of appointment without any competitive process at all.

Extensive international research shows that diverse representation can only be improved by implementing focused intentional measures. Data collected by UN Women tells us that 93 countries have chosen to implement legislated gender quotas. Most of those countries are doing better than this one.

Bill S-213 does not impose quotas, not even voluntary quotas. Instead, this bill draws on expert evidence heard by the standing committee when they heard testimony that improving transparency in the candidate processes used by the major parties is the minimum next step to improve representation results. This step that I’m taking is, according to experts, the minimum that we would undertake.

We must not lose sight of the fact that Canada’s major political parties receive significant public benefits, including reimbursement of election expenses by taxpayers, the ability to issue tax receipts to donors, to access to voter lists and others. They are getting benefits from taxpayers.

With benefits come responsibilities, to which I would add the more focused and deliberate approach to diversity that Bill S-213 lays out.

Annual reporting via the internet of diversity policies and practices will not be onerous. Our major political parties are modern. They are sophisticated organizations with expert staffs. They have accessible websites.

Clause 6 of the bill provides that the bill comes into force two years after Royal Assent, which is a generous implementation period.

Colleagues, to conclude, Bill S-213 is a reasonable next step in addressing Canada’s long-standing failure to elect more women and individuals from historically under-represented groups in the House of Commons. It places reasonable reporting responsibilities on political parties, ones we are already placing on other institutions in this country. We have a great deal of experience with these arrangements.

Through this bill, we will gain access to important demographic data we are now lacking, especially with regard to Indigenous Peoples, those with disabilities, members of visible minorities and other under-represented groups. We are going to have the data we don’t have now.

We can also expect to move the dial, to help create a Parliament that better reflects Canadian society in the best interests of our democracy.

I hope you agree this bill is deserving of committee study and input from Canadians as a next step in the process.

Colleagues, I welcome your questions and support for this bill at second reading. Thank you.

Yes, I will take questions.

I can’t say for sure whether it covers the Green Party at this point. I have to go back and look at the data.

This provision is already in the Canada Elections Act. It serves as a threshold for parties to claim election expenses and other benefits. It exists in the act and will apply to those parties. I’m not sure if the Green Party passes that threshold. I’d have to check on that.

I think the bill is clear. The information that’s to be included are measures in the questionnaire of the designated groups. That is what needs to be included. There can be other information included in a questionnaire, but this is the basis of the information that must be included.

Those are the four designated groups; there would be questions relating to each of those. That would be the basis of the questionnaire, maybe other measures as well. I hope, if this comes to pass, that it will be possible to add other information to the questionnaire, in addition to what’s required.

It’s pretty clear when you have a requirement to include this kind of information in a questionnaire.

“Variables” refers to data points. That’s what the bill is requiring. Variables are different measures.

Education could be a variable. There could be other variables that might be added. The point is to make it clear we have a basis for the questionnaire, but there might be other variables added. That would be up to the discretion of the Chief Electoral Officer when putting together this questionnaire. That’s what a variable is. It could be these and other measures.

The bill makes clear there are questions which are the basis of the questionnaire. It also provides the ability to add other questions that measure demographic variables. This is up to the discretion of the Chief Electoral Officer when he’s putting this questionnaire together. He may get representations from groups, for example the LGBT community, to have that question on the survey. It creates a minimum of questions but provides for the opportunity to add other questions.

Certainly, questions about education level, in addition to the four groups, could be added. You mentioned age. Age is actually automatically collected because candidates have to verify that they are of voting age to be a candidate. That’s already part of the basics. Other measures can be added. This is specifically what was intended.

As I said in my comments, there are going to be changes. There are expected to be changes to the Employment Equity Act that would include more groups in the basic designation. If those changes by the government come into effect, they will automatically flow through to this bill.

Thank you for the question. We thought it was a reasonable time period, and I think it’s quite doable to submit a report in that time frame.

Thank you for the question.

I most certainly agree with you that running elections these days is a more difficult and complicated process. With foreign interference and other issues of that nature, it is very challenging to run our elections, along with the pressures that come from the media, the public and citizens.

I think we should absolutely ensure, as parliamentarians, that Elections Canada has the resources it needs to deal with these new and very challenging issues. I agree with you; these are absolutely new issues, and we need to make sure that the agency can deal with them in a way that builds confidence among Canadians in our electoral system.

Would Senator Dasko take another question?

Yes.

Thank you, senator. Over the last decade, the Trudeau government’s experiment of an independent Senate was one thing, but seeing someone who has embraced the independent Senate with such enthusiasm now table a bill of this nature is really perplexing. Many of the appointments that were made by the Liberal government over the last decade were fantastic women who were quite partisan at some point in their lives — they were former candidates, donors and Liberal Party organizers, or they were involved in the recruitment process and some of them ran for office and served in office.

Doesn’t what we’re doing here in the Senate defeat the purpose of your bill, where one of the conditions to accept the nomination to sit here is to extract yourself from the partisan political process? As you appropriately pointed out in your speech, it is the party process where you make sure you get more of this, less of that and all the rest of it.

Thank you for the question, senator. If I understand your question, as I said in my remarks, I would say that I think the Senate has a very important role to play in ensuring that our democracy is strong and that it maintains the trust of Canadians.

The House of Commons is a partisan chamber, and we can’t ignore that chamber when we’re talking about our democracy because it is the gatekeeper to Parliament, and Parliament is the heart of our democracy.

We, in this chamber, have to participate. I believe it’s our responsibility to be active when it comes to maintaining, building and strengthening our democracy. I see this bill as a really important way to do that. We have a significant role to play, whether we’re partisan or not. I agree with you that there are many wonderful partisan people, and I know them as well as you do, but we’re talking about strengthening our democracy and our House of Commons.

I have identified a deficit that I think is very important, and I’ve proposed a way that I think we can deal with it — a way that is practical and reasonable and a way that other federal institutions have dealt with it, according to legislation and regulation. I think we can look at these models. They are very good models for us to adopt and embrace when it comes to the House of Commons, but I think we need to do more. I think being seventieth in the world for representation of women is not good enough.

All of the parties have to do better. That is what this bill is hopefully prompting with respect to the experience that we’ve had and the evidence from experts. Quotas work, but I wasn’t prepared to come forward with that initiative. I think what I’ve put forward is a very reasonable approach, and we can look forward to positive changes.

Senator Dasko, your time for debate has expired. Are you asking for more time? There are a couple of other senators who would like to ask questions.

If senators would like more time, I would be happy to ask for more. Thank you.

Is leave granted, honourable senators?

If I heard correctly — and I don’t want to put words in your mouth — I think you recognize we need to do more. By actually asking parliamentarians to disengage from the partisan political process, we’re not achieving what you’re trying to achieve with this bill, but I guess that is a debate we can explore at another time.

Do you agree that Elections Canada has one mandate: to make sure we have free and fair elections? That’s their mandate. Their mandate is not to design outcome. The moment you have legislation in a democracy that dictates outcome to Elections Canada, you’re going down a very slippery slope. You will agree that the only chamber in the Westminster model where outcome is in the hands of someone far more powerful than the electorate is this chamber. That’s why it is a chamber that is probably the most diverse in the Westminster system, which is good. One of the good outcomes of a non-elected, appointed body like we have is it’s super diverse. If anything, people will tell you it’s disproportionately diverse based on the population, and that is part of the balance that we serve here.

Surely, you would agree that when you start engaging in trying to define factors such as colour, religion or language in the other place, all of a sudden the purity of a fair and open electoral process is being dictated by somebody, and I think that is a very slippery slope.

Thank you for the question, senator. There are no outcomes specified in this bill. This bill involves a process where parties are reporting. It’s a reporting mechanism, and that is what they are doing. There’s no outcome and no percentage. No action is required except to report on what they’re doing. That should be clear, and I’m sorry if it wasn’t absolutely clear in my comments.

Second, the Chief Electoral Officer has asked for this mandate. He asked for it in reports following the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. He has said to me that he is receiving a lot of requests for information about exactly this phenomenon: the diversity of candidates. People are calling Elections Canada and saying, “We want to know more. Why can’t you provide this information?”

He has said very specifically that he does not currently have a mandate to collect this data. He cannot collect it without a legislative basis for it, and that is what this bill does. It provides him with what he has been asking for. You can see it in the recommendations of his reports after the 2019 and 2021 elections. It’s an activity and a process that he would undertake, and it would be part of the mandate that, again, he has asked for. Thank you.

Senator Dasko, will you take a question?

Yes.

There is a term I keep hearing, “visible minorities.” What does that mean?

Honestly senator, I’m not sure exactly how to answer that. The government has said that they will redefine these terminologies. They are not going to use “visible minorities” anymore. They are going to use “racialized groups” and “Blacks.” So that is their proposal to amend the Employment Equity Act to include more groups.

One might conclude from that the term “visible minorities” is not precise enough. They have been getting representations from communities to change the terminology. So maybe that is where it’s coming from.

I have a point of order. When additional time was granted to Senator Dasko, which is normal procedure, normally it’s defined: five minutes, exhaustion of the list, three more questions or something like that. That wasn’t given; it was an open-ended granting when you asked the chamber. That is a privilege granted to leaders on unlimited time debates but typically not a bill sponsor upon their second reading speech.

Thank you for the question. If time has not been defined, we usually give five minutes. Those five minutes are almost over, so if you’re asking for either an extra question or more time, it would be another five minutes.

I am recognized as the next in line, so I think the time would include me.

I have called upon Senator Ataullahjan for a supplementary question. As I mentioned, I think there are 16 seconds left.

Senator Dasko, are you asking for more time to answer more questions?

I will take one more question.

That would be a supplementary question from Senator Ataullahjan. Are you asking for five more minutes, Senator Dasko?

Yes.

Is leave granted, honourable senators?

Senator Dasko, with respect to “visible minorities,” I stopped using that term a very long time ago because on some level I find it a bit offensive. I think to describe, I guess, some of your colleagues also as “racialized people” would be using a kinder term. Would you agree?

Yes, I do agree with you. I’ve just gone back to the changes that are proposed by the government. The term will be “racialized people.” That is the term proposed in the changes to the Employment Equity Act. That would mean the first terminology would not be used.

Thank you, Senator Dasko. Would you take a question from me? Maybe we have established that. Thank you.

It is an interesting bill you have put forward, which I support very much. The timing is interesting, because if you think of it, before 1929, women could not be appointed to this place, and that only changed in 1929; in 1930, the first woman was appointed. A century later, we are in a place where the majority of senators are women.

I want to ask about the tenor of the times and how you anticipate this decision will go. I see — and you alluded to this — considerable opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, in the United States. Some of that is certainly spilling over the border.

Do you anticipate that kind of opposition — to anything to do with diversity, equity and inclusion — to be part of this debate you are launching?

Thank you for the question. I do think that we are going to see the influence of those developments in the U.S. in this country. I think we may even be starting to see it now.

But I also feel that we are resilient and that as Canadians, we will have the strength to continue to value diversity and the progress we’ve made.

I think we will be able to find our way through this to the other side. I’m trying to be optimistic about the outcome in terms of how these issues are unfolding.

Let’s put it this way: I’m trying to remain optimistic, and I think we have a good basis for continuing along the lines that we have. This bill is one effort to do so, so I’m trying to remain optimistic about it.

Senator Dasko, would you take another question?

Yes.

From our point of view, when we go to the national caucus, the results from the most recent election resulted in quite a diverse group of candidates from across Canada. I know that as a party, we definitely uphold the merit system; may the best candidates put themselves forward. Then the electorate makes that decision.

When we start dictating certain variables you talk about and having these systems where we’re making concessions or trying to force outcomes, I’m worried that there’s also the danger of tokenism where people are not accredited for the work they have done based on merit. I worry about moving away from a merit-based system. I see the change in diversity on the Hill from the last election, whether it’s staffers or bureaucrats or parliamentarians.

So I’m trying to understand the need for your bill, which seems to move away from a truly merit-based system and an election system that is fair and democratic.

Senator Dasko, there is very little time left. Are you asking for more time to answer that question?

I probably shouldn’t ask for more time.

Are you asking for more time to answer that question?

Yes.

Is leave granted, honourable senators?

Thank you for the question. First, I cited numbers that show there was a significant decrease in the number of women nominated for your party as well as the Liberal Party. That is not, in my view, a positive development.

This bill speaks to what has been very slow progress in achieving diversity in our House of Commons. The reporting measures in place that apply to many other federal institutions are reasonable ones.

If you feel that you’ve made great progress with respect to diversity, then you should be happy to do the reporting that’s required as part of the bill. I think you would appreciate that. You can tell the Chief Electoral Officer. You can tell Canadians because this is a report to Canadians. You can tell Canadians about what you have put in place to achieve results. That would be part of your reporting process, and you would want to tout what you’ve done. So I think you would want to view this with some optimism and consider this to be a positive development. Thank you.