Conservative women launch movement to flip female vote
The Canadian Conservative Women’s Association launched this month to encourage more women to get involved in politics and support the Conservative Party.
A new conservative women’s group launched this month, with founder Alicia Vianga hoping it will encourage more women to get involved in politics and support Conservatives at the ballot box.
After seeing the low number of women who voted Conservative in the last election, Vianga said she wanted to inspire and educate women who align with conservative values ahead of the next federal campaign.
“The idea is basically to get more women involved in politics, and to ensure that the conservative form of government in the next election,” Vianga, the founder of Canada Conservative Women’s Association, told Juno News. “It’s grassroots. We do a lot of events, we educate women about politics with grassroots workshops and host events in a community.”
In the last federal election, Vianga was also the candidate of record for the Conservative Party of Canada in the federal riding of Pickering—Brooklin and the founder of the cancer support group “After Breast Cancer.”
She said that at the beginning of May, the Canadian Conservative Women’s Association hosted 17 “unstoppable” events on the same night across Canada, bringing Canadian women together, regardless of their political leanings, for community events.
“I’ve seen in the last election approximately 33 per cent of women voted Conservative, and if we’re going to form a conservative government, we need to get more women involved,” she said. “A lot of times, women want to get involved, they just don’t know how.”
Vianga said a common experience when knocking on doors during the last election was having women defer the politics of the house to their husbands.
“You’ll hear women say, ‘Well, you have to talk to my husband about it. I don’t know what I should do. I don’t know too much about what the policies are,’ and so on, so we just want to make it easy for women to feel that they have a place where they could actually belong.”
She said the “unstoppable” events varied across the country with different speakers, including female speakers from both provincial and federal Conservative politics. Events ranged from charity events, tea parties and the event in Toronto, for example, which had Caroline Mulroney, the recently resigned president of Ontario’s treasury board.
“It is about allowing women to feel like they could have their voices heard, feel comfortable educating them softly, because we are able to make decisions for our everyday lives,” she said. “What goes on in our family, what goes on in our community, what goes on in our children’s lives as well, too. And in Canada, we have those opinions as well. We are just making it easy for them to come together and have a really awesome conversation.”
She said the Canadian Conservative Women’s Association will be “doing many grassroots events, with the next events scheduled for July.
“There’ll be lots of events to bring women together to do small and large events in the community, on a grassroots level, and hopefully in the next three years or so, we will have a big part to play in the Conservative party forming government and seeing the women’s movement growing and growing and growing.
She aspires to have the percentage of Canadian women voting Conservative move from 33 per cent to “maybe 43 per cent of women voting Conservative.”
“I think at the end of the day, the direction that Canada is going, we all feel like something gotta change, and the Conservative Party is in a position where I think our policy, who we are, with Pierre Poilievre as our leader, is the right movement, and the right person to form government right now.”