LONDON – A majority of NDP candidates in the June 7 election are women — the highest rate for any political party in the province’s history.

With 56 per cent female candidates — or 69 of the total 124 — NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said “we’ve worked very hard over the years to encourage women to get engaged in the political process.

“It takes some time to encourage people to seek office, and then have the process of having contested nominations. We prefer to have a process that invites people to get involved in our party, and as a result ... 56 per cent of our candidates are women because we made the effort to make that happen,” she said during a campaign stop Tuesday in London.

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The Green Party reports that 52 per cent of its candidates are women; the Liberals, almost 46 per cent and the Progressive Conservatives 33 per cent.

Most of the female PC candidates were recruited under previous leader Patrick Brown.

Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne, the first female premier in Ontario's history, said “there are more and more women who do want to get involved and the numbers are going up, the percentages are going up.”

However, Wynne also expressed concern about the “toxicity of debate” in the social-media era, which may discourage women from seeking office.

“We all have a responsibility to say, ‘look, if we want people to be involved in a decent political discussion then we’re going to have to deal with some of the language, some of the rhetoric that is used on social media,’” she said at a campaign stop in London.

“I think social media has given license to a level of debate that’s very, very disturbing.”

Both Wynne and Horwath have been the target of misogynistic attacks online — called offensive names or threatened with violence — and their staff filter out comments on social media because the vulgar slurs are so frequent.

On Tuesday, Wynne and Horwath also criticized PC Leader Doug Ford for not properly dealing with an attendee at his Monday rally who twice yelled “lock her up.”

The NDP’s success in recruiting so many women is the result of decades affirmative action, said University of Toronto political science professor Sylvia Bashevkin.

Its outreach efforts began in the early 1980s and “this history helps to explain why local constituency associations have been pressed to think seriously about nominating women candidates for decades,” said Bashevkin, an author and expert in women and politics.

“The NDP, like left-of-centre parties in other political systems, is more open toward intervention in the marketplace than centrist and conservative parties — and this includes the marketplace called political candidacy.”

Professor and author Erin Tolley said the parties “hold the cards” on this issue.

“Nearly everything we know about representation in politics tells us that on election day, voters are not biased against women politicians,” said Tolley of the University of Toronto’s political science department.

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“If you want to get more women into politics, the key is to nominate them. The nomination stage is the number one stumbling block for all candidates.”

Horwath said every riding must actively search for women candidates and for those “that are from what we would call equity-seeking groups — people who are living with disabilities, young people, women, people who are from various ethno-cultural and racial backgrounds — and as a result ... we also have a slate of candidates that truly reflects the diversity of the people that make up the province of Ontario and we are very proud of it.”

Wynne noted during a Mother’s Day campaign stop that her cabinet was 46 per cent women, as well as half of the chiefs of staff in her government.

“So that means that every single policy we talk about, every discussion we have, there is a balance between what is the best for the whole population and what’s the best for moms, for women, who are struggling,” she said.

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