Disability in parliamentary politics.

• Author: Fletcher, Steven
• Position: Roundtable

Although parliamentarians and public figures with disabilities have attained a heightened profile in Canada over the past decade, new research suggests that people who identify as having a disability are not seeking public office in numbers representative of their place in the general population. In this roundtable the Canadian Parliamentary Review gathered scholars, parliamentarians and public officer holders who have an interest in disability and politics to discuss the state of parliamentary politics for persons with disabilities and strategies for making political life more accessible to Canadians.

CPR: Prof. Levesque, your recent research suggests persons with disabilities are not seeking elected office in numbers representative of their place in the general population. Why is participation in elected politics among persons with disabilities so low?

ML: I first became interested in this topic by wondering if we elect people with disabilities, or women, or Aboriginals or other identifiable groups to political office in numbers equivalent to their place in the overall population; and, once elected to office, if members of these groups make a difference in policy relating to the particular issues they face.

To begin, I tried to get a sense of the numbers by distributing a survey to all the presidents of the provincial political parties. My focus is the provincial level because there's little existing material on it. I asked them: 1) if they sought out candidates with disabilities, 2) whether there were specific mechanisms they used to attract people such as funding, and 3) to list the candidates with disabilities who had run in the past three elections. I also asked for their ridings because there's a body of literature that suggests political parties tend to run marginal or minority candidates in ridings they have little chance of winning just to achieve a quota faster.

I received about 21 responses and they suggested that only about one per cent of the candidates who ran provincially in the last three general elections were persons with disabilities. This is really, really low when anywhere from 15 to 21 per cent of the population identifies as having a disability. Also, none of the parties that responded stated that they have any particular recruitment strategies to identify and encourage these potential candidates to run. Instead they look for the best candidate for the riding in order to win the riding. In one case a party approached a person with a disability to run, not because they were actively seeking to be representative of the population, but because they already knew the person from their work within the party and they considered them a strong candidate.

DO: What's your definition of disability, by the way?

ML: It was broad. It could be a physical disability; it could be a learning disability; it could be an intellectual disability. I tried to be as inclusive as possible on that front.

DO: What's interesting is there is an a priori assumption that the best candidate would not be someone within that 15 per cent of the population, therefore they didn't look there.

ML: It did puzzle me though. I looked at this data and I wondered if persons with disabilities who may consider running didn't identify with the political parties. So, I dug up all the party constitutions I could find across Canada and I found there were no specific provisions in the constitutions. There was only one party constitution which had any sort of language dealing with disability and that was the Ontario New Democratic Party. They have a disability rights committee as a part of their party. And that's interesting because a number of other parties have committees for particular groups, like the Saskatchewan NDP's Rainbow Pride Committee or its Aboriginal Committee. The Ontario NDP also has a policy to get three-quarters of their non-incumbent targeted seats to have candidates from affirmative action target groups, including people with disabilities.

CPR: Perhaps we can ask the politicians if they can speak to the mechanisms, or lack of mechanisms, to encourage candidates with disabilities to run. And are their roadblocks which dissuade these people from running?

KM: We held an event concerning disability, policy and political party recruiters here in Nova Scotia called Forum 29 with the hope of getting people with disabilities involved with democracy. As the first Speaker of a legislature in Canada with a disability, I related my own personal story about how I was introduced and groomed and got to the point where I actually put my name on the ballot. Our end goal was to inspire people to put their name on a ballot at some point in time, and although we had a good turnout I found there was a lot of misinformation out there, at least among the people who attended. There was not a great understanding of the political system and how it works in Canada and there was not a great understanding of the difference between parties.

To be frank, although we're slowly growing out of it, I think there's a history of people with disabilities not being encouraged to become involved with these sorts of things. And it's for a host of reasons traditional unemployment levels are higher, there are socio-economic barriers, the day-to-day reality of living with a disability and worrying about your own personal circumstances. Getting involved in politics is so far off most persons with disabilities' radars, that I think it's contributed to the small numbers that were alluded to earlier.

CPR: On the other side of that equation, there are philosophical differences among parties about recruiting candidates based on a group identity.

SF: I am absolutely opposed to affirmative action, particularly for me. I think if you're going to go into politics it can be pretty rough. Federally I had to go through two contested nominations, one for the Canadian Alliance and when the...