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After an eventful campaign period, Filomena Tassi was elected as the Member of Parliament representing the area around and including McMaster University.
With a turnout of over 60,000 voters in the newly created Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas riding, Tassi is part of a returning wave of support for the Liberal Party, a party that has been conspicuously absent in representing Hamilton at the federal level for the past nine years.
The Liberal Party achieved a historic victory this October, reaching a parliamentary majority with 184 out of 338 seats, ousting the previous Conservative majority government. The Liberals now represent two of the five Hamilton ridings, with Tassi in the HWAD riding and Bob Bratina, former mayor of Hamilton, representing the Hamilton East-Stoney Creek riding.
Since 2006, Conservative MP David Sweet had represented McMaster University in the now defunct Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Westdale district. With Sweet running for and winning the new Flamborough-Glanbrook district, the battle amongst candidates in the HWAD riding was expected to be far more open without an incumbent involved in the race.
Despite this, Tassi won with 29,698 votes, a comfortable margin of nearly 10,000 votes over her closest competition, Conservative candidate Vincent Samuel.
In an election defined by voters desperate for change, it seemed apparent that strategic voting helped shape the outcome of the riding. However, it’s arguable that Tassi’s large margin of victory was also in part due to the criticism that NDP candidate Alex Johnstone faced over comments she made regarding the Auschwitz concentration camp. Although candidates declined to comment on the issue during the race, Johnstone’s absence from her campaign to visit the camp, as well as an absence from the All-Candidates debate hosted in McMaster’s student atrium, contributed to a fairly straightforward result that was expected to be much closer between all three parties.
With some of the Liberal Party’s key promises directed towards student tuition and the transition to the workforce, students can expect to see some direct benefits from Trudeau’s government. This includes a grace period for loan repayments until a graduate is earning a minimum income of $25,000, and the investment of $1.3 billion over three years in the creation of new co-op placements for students in science, technology, and business, as well as over 40,000 youth jobs.
Although it’s unclear how much students will be able to save by simply delaying their loan payments to the government, or what exactly Trudeau’s “youth jobs” will entail, Tassi emphasized the importance of students to the Liberal party’s plans in a previous conversation with The Silhouette.
“We’re just trying to bridge the gap from education to work,” said Tassi. “They’re saying the average student debt is $26,000; this is why we want to work with students to try and ensure that the cost of going to school is lowered, and that when they graduate they won’t have to repay [right away].”
Unfortunately, Tassi did not respond to The Silhouette’s request for an interview in time for the print issue.
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By: Celine Ferreira
After one of the longest election campaigns in Canada's history, the Liberal Party's victory is not the only surprising change to come out of this election.
Professor Karen Bird, whose research involves comparative politics, gender and politics, and indigenous and minority groups, spoke on a panel organized by the Department of Political Science on Oct. 21 concerning the 2015 Canadian Federal Election.
"The share of women among the newly elected Parliament is little better than before. Women now hold 26 percent of the seats, compared to 25 percent. The glass, for women, is still only half full," she said. “The evidence overall suggests we’ve been stuck at about 25 percent for a long time and it doesn’t seem to fix itself on its own.”
The addition of new ridings and the insurgence of new candidates suggested that more women would be elected. However, the one percent increase does not truly reflect this hypothesis. Prof. Bird said that is due to the lack of seats won by the New Democratic Party which had the largest proportion of women in their caucus.
The NDP has implemented various practices that have increased their number of female MPs, including reaching out to women and offering the support they need to run. A great effort is put into recruitment and a mandate has been established requiring justification for why a female candidate was not found if that’s the case. Bird later stated that such efforts should be adopted by all parties if there is going to be a translation to a more gender balanced parliament.
Due to the higher proportion of women with a post-secondary education, women are increasingly doing well economically, therefore resources such as those provided by the NDP are not of prime interest. Bird went on to say that something must be done at an institutional level to address the lack of women represented in parliament.
Female representation is also topical at McMaster. Last year’s “MSU Wants You” campaign urged more female candidates to seek high-ranking positions within the MSU, and while this initiative is a step towards better female representation at McMaster, it also signifies the work that remains to be done. The federal election can be examined to see how our student government can become more representative of the undergraduate student body at McMaster.
Out of the top nine research universities in Canada, McMaster has the second lowest representation of women in its council especially in executive positions. When asked about her opinion regarding this, Bird said that this is not due to the fact that the women are less qualified for the position or that voters are voting against women; it is a result of structural hindrances.
“I think that if there was some information about what the office involves – what the work is on a day-to-day level, what kinds of tasks are involved – a lot of women would say, ‘I have exactly those skills,’” she said.
Bird further stated that explicitly publicizing what the job involves would attract more women as they would recognize that student government is something they would like to be involved in and that they do have many skills and accomplishments that would make them strong candidates for that position.
Bird hopes that in future elections, whether on the federal scale or at the university level, women will recognize that they possess the skills, experiences and ideas needed to hold key positions that shape public policy.
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