April 21, 2006

I remember sitting in a newspaper editorial ideas meeting and watching as a woman spoke in her normal tone of voice, which admittedly was soft, and was interrupted by a younger male colleague. He didn't apologize or allow her to continue later.

The woman's idea was excellent. But the man's voice was loud and male, a built-in advantage. It was like turning on a tractor. That big ol' farm implement drowned out all other voices and churned up everything in its path. Unfortunately, it accompanied the intellect of a tractor. His simple field of an idea had been ploughed many times before. The effect? The value of the product dropped collectively.

Something very much like this has happened in the candidates' race for federal Liberal leader. There were 16 potential contenders at a debate in Edmonton in early April. Some have since dropped out; others have joined the race. Several highly qualified women are either running – businesswoman Martha Hall Findlay – or considering it – members of Parliament Dr. Carolyn Bennett and Ruby Dhalla.

• INDEPTH: Liberal leadership: Possible candidates

But when I look at the media coverage of these women, I assume they have taken a vow of silence or their voices must be scarcely above the ridiculous whisper that Jackie Kennedy affected in her White House years. There is almost no coverage of them. This, in a world where Chile, the United Kingdom, India and Germany have elected female leaders.

I do appreciate the Toronto Star's Carol Goar (who's met a lot of tractors, I imagine) and the Globe and Mail's Roy McGregor, who each devoted a column to Hall Findlay. But they're rare. Another male columnist specifically dismissed the women candidates entirely while lauding the brain power of the men. Seriously.

I've followed Hall Findlay's career with great interest – partly because she came within 689 votes of defeating Belinda Stronach in 2004. It's also that Hall Findlay is possessed of such intellect (and that essential ingredient for a politician, energy) that she fills the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds' worth of distance run.

It's like skiing up a mountain

She is a bilingual lawyer, businesswoman and entrepreneur with a husband and three children and, not only that, was a silver medallist in the 1976 National Ski Championships. She has lived in both rural and urban Canada, and that is truly rare.

We are all different. Bennett is a doctor. Dhalla has a degree in biochemistry. I would no more take a job where blood regularly sprays than I would attach planks to my feet and leap off a mountain.

The fact that these women already do things that most of us would fear and then go into an arena where women are despised leaves me in awe.

Try being a woman and facing political rejection that starts with getting scarcely a mention in the media. You'll see that Hall Findlay has strapped laths to her feet to do the equivalent of climbing UP the mountain, even as others sail down.

I met her last week. She is enormously impressive in person. For one thing, she has a sense of humour and an ease with people. Despite the fact that I am not a Liberal, she was convincing on a number of issues close to my heart, one of them being cleaning up the planet even as we are undone by global warming. She also decries the absence of foreign policy as an issue in the last election. It seems absurd, we agree. And she mourns, as I do, the Liberal neglect of Alberta (we both love Alberta).

Hall Findlay didn't brush me off when I started giving her daft instructions on how to make herself more palatable to voters who dislike ambitious women. Get a family photo on your website, I said. But my daughter's in Australia, she wailed. Oh, PhotoShop the kid in, I said. There's something about motherhood that reassures the right wing of the party.

I have no idea why this should be so. Why should a woman have to do much better than the often-plodding male candidates simply in order to be ignored?

Canadians aren't as fair-minded as they think. I would ask them to pay attention to the women candidates, even if the media make it hard to do so. The women will attract voters with their wide-ranging intelligence, experience and courage. Give them some thought, please.