Parliament’s harassment high noon?

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/11/2014 (3721 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There is a whole lot of “he said, she said” going on Parliament Hill these days, and it has little to do with a discussion about sexual harassment. In fact, it only confirms what women have been saying for years, the House of Commons can be a nasty, old-boys club.

Appallingly, there is no process in place that allows a member of Parliament to make a complaint about sexual harassment about another MP unless that person is willing to raise it publicly as a point of order in the House of Commons. There are processes in place for Hill staffers and employees, but the House has no authority in respect to complaints between members because MPs are not employees, but elected officials.

Even more startling, the standing committee on procedure and House affairs now tasked with putting some process in place has only one woman on it, among 10 committee members. That has to change if anyone can take seriously declarations parliamentarians want to improve working conditions for female politicians.

Of course, this all came about after a female NDP MP complained to Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau about inappropriate behaviour by Liberal MPs Masimo Pacetti and MP Scott Andrews. Mr. Trudeau asked Liberal caucus whip Judy Foote to investigate the allegation and, after a meeting with Ms. Foote and NDP whip Nycole Turmel, decided to suspend the two MPs.

Here’s where the politics take over as various political players seem to fall over themselves trying to score brownie points.

First, the NDP turned around and accused Mr. Trudeau of re-victimizing the victims because of the public way in which he dealt with the issue. The logic of that is mystifying. Mr. Trudeau did not name the victims or even identify the party to which they belonged in his public statement. Instead, according to the Hill Times, two journalists working on the story stated this information was provided by the NDP themselves. So, exactly who did the re-victimizing here?

Moreover, another NDP MP — justice critic Françoise Boivin — has gone so far as to suggest the two MPs should have only been issued a verbal warning because there was no formal complaint.

Talk about being put between a rock and a hard place. It seems like Mr. Trudeau is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. If he had dealt with it in private, or if he had only issued a verbal warning, he ran the risk of being seen as trying to cover the incident up. Instead, he took action and took the allegations at face value, giving primacy to the victim’s side of the story at some risk to his own party’s reputation.

More recently, a senator has piled on, complaining this is a smear campaign against the Liberal MPs. Sen. Larry Campbell — booted out of the Liberal Senate caucus by Mr. Trudeau in 2014 — has called on the NDP MPs to make public their allegations, in the interest of fairness. In an interview with the CBC, Mr. Campbell calls the allegations nothing but a smear and says if the women don’t come forward, “This opens the whole system up to… whatever.”

Perhaps the “whatever” is a demand that, for once, the House of Commons finally comes up with a process to be seen as effectively dealing with sexual-harassment complaints. Because it’s not exactly a new story.

In 1991, Progressive Conservative MP Barbara Green spoke about sex harassment to the House of Commons. In 1997, a survey of female parliamentarians suggested 31 per cent of female MPs had experienced unwanted sexual advances or propositions. Allegations of sexual harassment are nothing new. What is new is there may be enough women on the Hill and enough sympathetic men to finally create a critical mass to have the issue taken seriously.

Maybe.