Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion has promised that for the next election, the Liberal Party will field a slate of candidates where 33% will be women.

He's got to get cracking.

The Liberals will need 307 candidates (the Liberals have vacated Central Nova in favour of Green Party leader Elizabeth May). They have nominees selected in 202 ridings. Of these, 136 are men and 66 are women. Actually, that's not bad. Of the selected candidates, 32.6% are women, so the Liberals are right on track.

But the problem is that 36 of the remaining 105 candidates have to be women. In of itself, that number isn't scary, since clearly the Liberals are on track. But the problem is that neither the distribution of women candidates nor the distribution of available seats is even.

Right now, here is the completion rate by province. It represents the number of rdings in which there is a selected candidate:

PEI: 100%
YK: 100%
NB: 90%
ON: 84%
NS: 82%
BC: 78%
AB: 71%
MB: 64%
NL: 57%
SK: 36%
QC: 32%
NU: 0%
NWT: 0%

Nunavut and the Northwest Territories are each exactly one seat in size. The real space to grow is in Quebec, were fully 51 ridings have yet to select a candidate. Even Ontario, for all its seats, only has 17 ridings that have not already selected candidates. In all the rest of the country combined, there are only 35 ridings left where female candidates could be selected. Remember that 36 women candidates need to be put on the slate to meet the goal.

If you distribute the ridings where women need to be nominated according to the ratio of available ridings remaining in the province versus the total number of available ridings, 49% of the remaining ridings in Quebec have to be reserved for women.

In other words, Quebec Liberals are far behind provinces like Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. In Ontario, 33% of the nominees selected so far are women. In Alberta, the number is 50%. In British Columbia, the number is 55%. In Quebec, the number is a paltry 25%.

That lacklustre gender-selection performance coupled with the number of ridings in Quebec that are still open for candidates means that, all things being equal, 49% of the ridings remaining in Quebec have to field women candidates.

It is very unlikely that, left to their own devices, ridings associations are going to nominate women in 50% of the ridings. That means a lot of unilateral top-down nominations by Stephane Dion, which is never good. Every such imposed nomination that bypasses a local riding nomination process open Stephane Dion to accusations of not respecting the democratic will of local riding Liberals.

But criticisms like that just come and go.

The real problem for Stephane Dion is that all indications are that the Liberals are going to take a beating in Quebec. That means a fair number, perhaps even a majority, of his hand-picked women candidates are going to lose, and lose badly.

Each loss by a hand-picked candidate will be another blow to Stephane Dion. Not that his leadership is likely to survive a loss in a general election. But there is also hs legacy and place in history to consider. A large number of locally nominated Liberals losing in Quebec is bad enough. But Stephane Dion might be remembered as the Liberal leader who personally selected the most number of losing candidates of an leader in Liberal Party history, forced to do so by his promise to field 33% women candidates. And if it turns out, as these numbers suggest, that a majority of these losing candidates are women candidates, forced by Stephane Dion to take the brunt of the punishment meted out by the Quebec electorate, many women who might have considered running in future races might decide the time is not right, and that there are more productive ways for women to participate politically without trying to win an election in a riding.

Some might wonder, perhaps publicly, if Stephane Dion was using women as cannon fodder in Quebec.

If allegations like that arise, Stephane Dion will also be remembered as the federal leader who did the most to hurt the level of participation of women in elected office.