Y es, I am a woman, but I must admit that I have never experienced discrimination in my political career.

To be clear, I’ve definitely had to deal with attitudes of mistrust, and I’ve often felt people observing me and thinking, “Let’s see how this one copes.” In addition to being a woman, I was young and had decided to embrace the Right. So, according to an odious and false radical chic bias, if we’re not deemed “unpresentable,” then we must be subpar. Yet, looking back now, overcoming the expectations of those before me proved less challenging than I had expected.

In time, I half-seriously, half-jokingly adopted the words of Charlotte Whitton, Mayor of Ottawa in the 1950s: “Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.

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