Former Prime Minister Kim Campbell addresses the audience at the Equal Voice event, Ottawa University. Photo Cynthia Munster for Equal Voice

Kim Campbell says there’s no doubt that, in the 20 years since she served, very briefly, as Canada’s first female prime minister, we’ve come a long way toward making Ottawa a more woman-friendly place. But as so many female members of Parliament can probably attest, there’s still quite a long way to go.

Campbell was in Ottawa this week, invited by the Parliamentary Internship Programme and Equal Voice to celebrate the 20-year mark of her 132 days as prime minister in 1993. The timing was good – or interesting, at least. The night she sat on stage at the University of Ottawa for an Equal Voice event, accompanied by NDP MP Laurin Liu and the Liberal party’s Penny Collenette, was the same night #askjustin took off on Twitter, with some MPs, including Michelle Rempel, raising concerns about the Liberal fundraiser and duking it out with critics – “What’s the big deal? Calm down, ladies” – online. And earlier this week Rempel had to remind everyone, in response to a Tumblr poking fun at her appearance during question period, that “the day people pay less attention to the appearance of women and more to their competency is the day more women will run for office.”

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Politics is a different playing field for women today than it was 20 years ago. There are some really good things – a lot more women in the politician role, many MPs under the age of thirty, like Liu, and the majority of Canadians governed by female premiers. There are plenty of not-so-good things, too, such as sexism playing out online, via Twitter, showing that a lot of us are still pretty uncomfortable with women participating in the political process.

Change is happening, but it’s been slow. “There are things that need to be changed,” Campbell says, sitting in her hotel room the morning after the Equal Voice event, “but one of the ways that you change things is by changing the landscape from which people learn, or develop their ideas about how the world works.”

“If you never see a woman as a leader on Wall Street, as a prime minister, as a president, as a minister of finance, as a corporate leader, as a scientist, as someone in a leadership position, then you just don’t think of them doing that,” Campbell says. “And it makes it harder when a woman does want to do it, there’s a visceral disconnect. There’s a whole, ‘this is not quite right’.”

So more women in politics – although they might be facing barriers and a barrage of insults on Twitter, is a good thing.

Canada’s 19th prime minister, and the country’s only leader born and raised in British Columbia, says that after the crushing defeat of the 1993 election, and after retirement was “thrust” upon her, she had a chance to return to her academic roots and look into why her experience was the way it was. She studied the literature and sorted some things out.

There was a lot about her time in politics that perplexed her. She never received the benefit of the doubt, she says, and faced an Ottawa press corps that couldn’t recognize a woman leading the country – it was a kind of cognitive dissonance. Women don’t get the benefit of the doubt, and have to work twice as hard to get half as much recognition. And after she was sent packing from the nation’s capital, Campbell says she noticed that – even though she won the party leadership with a high margin, that her approval rating in the summer of 1993 was the highest in 30 years for a prime minister, and that she made significant strides restructuring cabinet – nothing she did as PM was ever mentioned, just the fact that she lost so badly; a focus only on the things that went wrong.

“What bothers me about it,” Campbell says, perched on a chair in the sitting room of the Chateau Laurier’s presidential suite, “and I suppose personally it’s offensive, but it’s also cheating people, particularly young people who need to know that I wasn’t an accident, I wasn’t an anomaly.” It’s just that “the timing was terrible.”

At the outset of the 1993 campaign, Campbell had just been elected as PC leader at the heels of Brian Mulroney’s – a most unpopular character, she says – departure, which didn’t give her enough time to gather her own campaign team or put a solid foot on the ground as a leader. Factor in a new Reform party and the rise of the Bloc, some horrible hiccups and bad decisions along the campaign trail, and the rest is history.

Kim Campbell, leader of the Conservative party and prime minister-designate is given a standing ovation in the House of Commons by outgoing prime minister Brian Mulroney and other members of the government on June 16, 1993. CP/Tom Hanson

Campbell says she isn’t on a mission to correct the public record. But she’ll readily point out she didn’t waste her time in office, before the election, and used the powers she had to make some sort of difference. She created the heritage and public safety ministries. She held a first minister’s conference with premiers and territorial leaders ahead of a G-7 meeting, to get their input, which had never been done before. She reduced the federal cabinet from 35 ministers to 23. And the fact that she was a woman and a prime minister is nothing to sneeze at.

“It’s a record that belongs to Canadians. And it belongs to Canadian women to be able to say, even though she wasn’t there for a long time, Kim Campbell showed that a woman can be an effective prime minister.” Not enough time to be a great prime minister, she says, but “relative to the time, I think it’s very respectable.”

Campbell adds that when she was first asked to come to Ottawa to mark the anniversary, she was hesitant about the idea.

“And then I thought, well, maybe it’s time,” she says. “It’s 20 years, and the interns really wanted to do it, and Equal Voice said they’d like to be part of it. So I thought, well, it’s an opportunity to tell people what I’ve been doing in the last 20 years and to reflect at some distance.”

Is Canada ready for another woman at the helm? To Campbell, even though Canada’s premiers have some pretty interesting women in charge, a female prime minister isn’t in the very near future, but there’s space for some hope.

“I’m discouraged that there hasn’t been a woman as a leader of a national party that had a chance to govern,” she says, but “this sudden appearance of all these women premiers may help to encourage some women at the federal level to push for consideration as leaders.”

Eventually, whenever any of the parties hold their next leadership race, someone could rise amid the discomfort and online unease to put up a credible campaign to become Canada’s second female prime minister.

“There are maybe a couple of boxes of stationary that say ‘la premiere ministre'” in the Langevin building where the Prime Minster’s Office is located. “I hope that before it gets too yellowed and old and crumbles, somebody will be in there and take it out and use it.”

Campbell said these words, garnering strong applause from an attentive crowd at the Equal Voice event, as the letterhead made for her time in office gathers dust in a closet somewhere in Langevin.