minority when three Liberal MLAs resigned from the caucus – and in the resulting 2002 election, her party was nearly wiped out. Some have attributed this to the belief that the voting public widely ascribes leadership qualities more to men than to women. Sheila Copps, for example, once noted in a newspaper interview that "if you're a woman and you're aggressive, you're a ball-buster", Ruby Dhalla told an interviewer from Inter Press Service that women in politics have to be tougher, stronger and harder-working than men to reach the same level of achievement, and Charlotte Whitton, one of Canada's first prominent women mayors, once famously quipped that "Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult." Andrea Horwath, a former leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party who was elected mayor of Hamilton in 2022, has noted that she faced not just indifference, but active discouragement, from both men and women – based around the notion that at age 35, she was too young and hadn't earned the right to get into politics – when she first ran for Hamilton, Ontario City Council in 1997: Conversely, however, MP Martha Hall Findlay has asserted that one of the biggest barriers to women's greater participation in politics is their own fear of stepping into the public spotlight: Maureen MacDonald, a New Democratic MLA in Nova Scotia, has offered a similar assessment: Danielle Smith, the former leader of the Wildrose Alliance in Alberta, has also suggested that new opportunities have been opened for women due to recent changes in Canadian political culture. According to Smith, the fact that most governments in Canada have now instituted fixed election dates helps women, who still generally hold more responsibility for the care of children and aging or ailing parents than most men do, to plan more easily toward a goal of running for political office; and the fact that most political parties have now moved to a one member one vote system, instead of the more traditional leadership convention method of selecting leaders, has helped women because the grassroots are typically more willing to vote for women leaders than the "old boys network" inside a political party's establishment are. Conversely, commentators have also claimed that political parties in Canada have tended to turn to female leaders as an almost cynical ploy in times