OTTAWA — Justin Trudeau promised in June that half his Cabinet would be female if he was elected Canada’s prime minister. As he was sworn in Wednesday, he named 15 women to a Cabinet of 30, including Jody Wilson-Raybould, an aboriginal lawyer from British Columbia as minister of justice and attorney general; Chrystia Freeland, a former journalist, as trade minister; and Jane Philpott, a first-time member of Parliament and family doctor, as health minister.
“It’s a message to Canadian women — and young women in particular — that this world is about you,” said Jean Charest, the former premier of Quebec who put women in half his provincial ministries in 2007. “You have to move beyond the old boy’s network.”
Trudeau’s ‘parity Cabinet’ is a first in a country where women started voting in 1916, four years before similar rights in the United States. France, Italy and the Nordic countries already have had parity Cabinets.
