Rookie Green party leader Elizabeth May is poised for success in the next federal election simply because she's a woman, according to one political consultant. Jonathan Ross of TDH Strategies told the Georgia Straight that in the past, female federal leaders have had dismal election results. However, he said, women are accessible in ways that men are not, and that's a recipe for 21st-century political power.

“We're in a new stage in politics,” he predicted in a phone interview. “The most important thing is to be tangible to people, to be human. People are tired of political rhetoric. Women bring something new to the table.”

Since May announced her candidacy on May 9, Green party membership has doubled countrywide to 10,000. With the Liberal party choosing a new leader at a convention in Montreal between November 29 and December 3, for the first time since 1993, there's a possibility of two female leaders heading major parties.

Ross, however, doesn't think so. It's not that Liberal leadership candidates Hedy Fry, Carolyn Bennett, and Martha Hall Findlay are going to be discriminated against on the basis of their gender, he said. “It's just that the strongest organizations are attached to male campaigns. It has nothing to do with capability, just [that] the front-runners tend to be men.” Since Confederation in 1867, however, the federal Liberal party has never chosen a female leader.

Historically, male-only leadership could be considered a shrewd move. So far, at least, federal female leadership coincides with abysmal election results. In 1993, the only federal election with women as major-party leaders, both the NDP's Audrey McLaughlin and the Progressive Conservatives' Kim Campbell led their parties to the lowest historical showing since those parties were formed.

Campbell took her party from 169 seats in the 34th Parliament to just two in the 35th Parliament. The NDP fell from 43 seats under Ed Broadbent to nine with McLaughlin at the top. The NDP continued to flounder with leader Alexa McDonough, winning just 21 seats in 1997 and 13 in 2000. It wasn't until Jack Layton took over that the party rebounded, first with 19 seats in 2004, and then with 29 in the last election.

Even among parties that have never won a seat, the pattern holds true.

In 2000, for example, the Canadian Action Party won 27,103 votes with leader Paul Hellyer. Connie Fogal took over, and the votes plummeted to 8,930 in 2004, then 6,102 in 2006””one quarter of what the party earned under Hellyer. Of the five female-led parties in the 2006 election, not one earned more than 15,000 votes.

Gender has doomed female leaders, according to Canadian Political Science Association researcher Shannon Sampert. It's not that voters refuse to elect women, she said, but that women take on leadership only when no one else wants it.

“The only time a woman is considered good enough to run a party is when a party is in ruins,” Sampert told the Straight, referring to Campbell's 1993 disaster when her predecessor, Brian Mulroney, left an 18-percent approval rating as a legacy. Plus, there was McLaughlin's struggle with unpopular provincial NDP governments in B.C. and Ontario during the 1993 election.

The legacy of kamikaze-style female leadership isn't news to May, but it doesn't scare her either. As a feminist and someone who lobbies for women's issues, she told the Straight, she's keenly aware that gender is political.

“Like any organization, there's an aspect of old-boys' club to parties, even the Green party,” May said during a phone interview. “I think there's a comfort level some members have with a male leader that's not there for a female, but that's a very, very small number.”

May noted that, unlike with some other high-profile political women, the media has been fair with her so far. She joked that she has no fabulous wardrobe to comment on and is too busy to have a paparazzi-worthy personal life.

As likely the only female leader in the next federal election, she hopes to leverage her gender to ensure the Greens secure, for the first time, a seat in the national televised debates.

“It's an additional reason to include the Green party, to break up that visual of the old boys and represent more of the face of Canada,” May said. “I'm also scrappy and a good debater””it'll make for good TV.”

UBC political-science professor Cara Camcastle told the Straight that women are considered to be credible leaders when they have specific expertise. May's 13-year term as executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, her education and practice as a lawyer, her status as a prominent environmental and human-rights activist, and her published books distinguish her from female leaders of the past.

“A woman as the leader of the Greens could be a real asset to the party, because she could more easily co-opt the women's vote, and half the population is women,” Camcastle said.

She pointed out that Jeanette Fitzsimons coleads the Aotearoa–New Zealand Green party, in the only country to elect Green MPs under the first-past-the-post system””the same political system as Canada. In total, six Green MPs sit in New Zealand's 69-seat House of Commons.

May, however, said female voters shouldn't elect any candidate on the basis of gender. Ministers of the environment have been female since Mulroney's time, she said, and there have been good ones and bad ones. It's policy, not body parts, she stressed, that should dominate Canada's House of Commons.