Feminist Trudeau Names Women To Half of Posts in New Cabinet

 Justin Trudeau promised in June that half his cabinet would be female if he was elected Canada’s prime minister. Today he got the job, the women -- and the bruised egos of a few experienced men who didn’t get the nod.

Canadian Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau poses for photos with tourists as he walks from the parliament to give a press conference in Ottawa on Oct. 20, 2015 after winning the general elections. 

Photographer: Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images

Trudeau named 15 women to a cabinet of 30, including Jody Wilson-Raybould, an aboriginal lawyer from British Columbia as minister of justice and attorney general; Chrystia Freeland, a former journalist as trade minister; Jane Philpott, a first-time member of parliament and family doctor, at health. 

Asked after his swearing-in ceremony why an equal cabinet was important to him, Trudeau said, “Because it’s 2015.”

“It’s a message to Canadian women -- and young women in particular -- that this world is about you,” said Jean Charest, the former premier of Quebec who put women in half his provincial ministries in 2007. “You have to move beyond the old boy’s network.”

Trudeau’s ‘parity cabinet’ is a first in a country where women started voting in 1916, four years before similar rights in the U.S. It ends a centuries-old habit by leaders of large English-speaking countries, including the U.K. and U.S., to name men to a large majority of government posts. France, Italy and the Nordic countries already have had parity cabinets. Canada has been slower than others to elect women, ranking No. 50 last year in women’s government representation on the International Parliamentary Union’s list of 190 countries, down from 17th in 1997.

Justin Trudeau Photographer: Justin Tang/The Canadian Press via AP Photo

For Trudeau, 43, a self-declared feminist who won a majority government last month in part by saying he’d bring new voices to Ottawa, selecting a 50-50 cabinet wasn’t so simple. He chose from among 134 men and 50 women Liberals MPs, and some long-standing male legislators were left out, including retired Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie and former Toronto police chief Bill Blair. 

The new gender division comes on top of existing cabinet-making criteria for regional, linguistic and ethnic representation, including the practice of selecting at least one minister from each of the country’s 10 provinces.

The other women in cabinet include Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, an Ottawa human-rights lawyer; Carla Qualtrough, a para-Olympic swimmer from Vancouver in the sports ministry; and Maryam Monsef, a native of Afghanistan, as minister of democratic institutions.

Culled from bloomberg.com

Wow a 50-50 cabinet with the right portfolios!

I liked the part where he said ''This is 2015!''