Both contenders vying to be Alberta's premier are women. Nobody's making a big deal of it

As voters head to the polls, no one seems to be batting an eye about the fact that both front-runners for Alberta's top job are women. 

Either Danielle Smith, leader of the United Conservative Party, or Rachel Notley, leader of the Alberta New Democrats, will be elected premier on May 29.

"I think it's pretty exciting that regardless of what happens, a woman's going to win," said Kristin Raworth, chair of Parity YEG, a non-profit group aiming for gender equality in politics.

"And it's nice that that's actually just not even a discussion point."

Having two women contending for the premier's job isn't common in Canadian politics, but it has happened before in Alberta. The current campaign marks the second time two women have gone head to head in a general election.

3 female premiers

The 2012 provincial election pitted Alison Redford against Danielle Smith, then leader of the Wildrose party. Months earlier, Redford had become Alberta's first female premier when she won the leadership of the Progressive Conservative party. 

Alberta's second female premier? That was Notley, in 2015, when her New Democrats formed government.

Smith became the province's third female premier last October when she won the leadership of the UCP, which was created in 2017 with the merger of the Wildrose and PCs.

In the current election campaign, gender isn't playing as big a role as it did in 2012. 

Deborah Grey remembers herself sticking out when she went to Ottawa in 1989 as the first Reform Party member of Parliament. She was 36 when she won a byelection in the northeastern Alberta riding of Beaver River.

"That was pretty avant-garde, because all the folks in Ottawa thought that this new Reform Party was just a bunch of old, white, white-haired guys," Grey said.

Grey said the fact that they're women has nothing to do with why Notley and Smith are leading their respective parties.

"Rachel's been around forever ... Danielle Smith has been around forever, too," Grey said.

"[Smith is] a very capable, bright woman. And then she had her radio show. So neither of these women is a surprise or 'Oh my goodness, look, we have two women leaders.' I think we've left that behind."

People shouldn't focus too much on the gender of their political candidates, Grey said.

"We get battered and bashed around verbally by being women in politics," she said. "I find that so wearisome and I just think I should go out and just prove them all wrong if they think it's ridiculous for women to be there."

Long way to go

Clare Beckton, founder of Own Your Own Success, an Ottawa-based organization that helps develop women leaders, said politics still has a long way to go in terms of gender equality. 

"Women have been criticized for their looks, for their hair, how they behave, are they likable," Beckton said.

Social media has only increased the unfair treatment of women in politics, she said.

It doesn't help that gender parity is still lacking in Alberta politics or in Canadian politics as a whole, Beckton said.

"Simply because we have two women running as leaders does not give us that equality," she said of Notley and Smith.

"We need to have 50 per cent of the women in all the legislatures and the federal government to be women."

The Alberta NDP has achieved gender balance this campaign. Roughly half of the party's 87 candidates are women. About one-fifth of candidates on the UCP slate are women.

Bev Esslinger, who was the lone woman on Edmonton city council from 2013 to 2017, called the UCP's gender breakdown disappointing.

"Because they do have a woman leader, you would think there'd be more opportunity for women to come in and have a voice," Esslinger said. "And I'm not sure why that didn't happen."

Rajan Sawhney, the UCP candidate for Calgary-North West, said her party has no intention to dictate gender quotas.

"You have to bring people in on an organic basis and make sure that they feel welcomed and that they're able to contribute and that everything is also based on merit," Sawhney said in an interview.

Lizette Tejada, the NDP candidate in Calgary-Klein, said the party's intentional gender parity helped her decide to run.

"I'm Latina and of mixed origins ... I think even 20 years ago that's not what we expected to see at the legislative level," Tejada said.

"We still deal with some misogyny. In my case, sometimes we still see racism as well. But I think the idea that we would participate is not a foreign concept anymore."

Back in 2012, when Redford and Smith were campaigning for the premier's job, gender identity played a much bigger role in Alberta politics, Raworth said.

Critics zeroed in on the candidates' personal lives. Redford's identity as a mother, and as a daughter to her elderly parents, was played up.

"And she really rejected that in a lot of ways," Raworth said. "She didn't want to be framed that way. 

"And I think that that speaks to the way that we saw women in politics," she said. "You could be in politics, but you still have to be the caretaker — this, you know, feminine person. So we still had to keep women in a box in 2012."

Turning point

When Redford won the election, it changed the dynamic in Alberta politics "completely," Raworth said.

She said that by contrast, Notley's children, and her role as a mother, hardly get mentioned.

"And I think that speaks to the fact that it's so normalized here now that the gender issue is not even being addressed," she said.

"I have not seen one pundit, one media outlet, not the UCP, NDP — nobody has brought it up.

"We've moved into 'I'm just a politician and these are my opinions' as opposed to, 'I'm a woman, I'm a mother, I'm a this, I'm a that, and I'm a politician fifth or sixth."