Clothing the debate The rules are simple for men at the legislature: jacket, tie, no helmets or — usually — snowmobile suits; cracking the dress code is more complicated for women and gender-neutral MLAs By: Carol Sanders Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Friday, May. 7, 2021

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/05/2021 (1332 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Nahanni Fontaine remembers the day she was accused of a dress-code violation in 2016, soon after she was elected to the Manitoba Legislative Assembly.

She was wearing a stylish, indigo, one-piece pantsuit/jumper that she bought at a shop in London, England.

“It’s a gorgeous piece,” says the self-proclaimed fashion lover and NDP MLA for St. Johns.

After speaking at a midwives’ rally on the legislature steps, then attending question period, the NDP house leader called her over.

“He took me outside and said, ‘A complaint has been made to the Speaker’s office about what you’re wearing.'”

Fontaine was taken aback.

“A man complained to Speaker’s office about what I was wearing?” she says. “As a woman, I took offence to that. That was a man in the chamber policing what I wore.”

Her alleged dress-code crime?

“The back opens a little,” she says.

That complaint follows a litany of chamber dress-code violations over the years involving men in somewhat less-than-appropriate attire, including a military helmet, jeans, a snowmobile suit and a turtleneck.

In the 21st century, men in the Manitoba legislature are expected to wear a necktie and a jacket but there’s no specific dress code for women or members who don’t identify as male or female, says house Speaker Myrna Driedger. To change the standard practices, there needs to be a consensus from the house leaders, she said.

“Not all of the standard practices of the assembly are set out in the rules of the house,” Driedger wrote in an email. Some of the customs “have become accepted practice.”

“The dress code for the Assembly requires that the male MLAs wear a tie and jacket and that female MLAs wear a corresponding type of attire.”

The practice has also been to discourage blue jeans, T-shirts and runners from being worn in either the house or the committee room, she wrote. There’s no mention of women showing a bit of their bare back.

“The Speaker doesn’t make these rules or practices — only upholds them,” Driedger wrote.

Uphold them the Speaker does.

On April 29, MLA Adrien Sala was in his office, about to speak in the house virtually, when the deputy Speaker filling in for Driedger cut him off. The NDP member for St. James was wearing a suit jacket and dress shirt but no necktie, a no-no according to the rules of the chamber, even for members working outside of it.

On March 8, when Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont rose to speak in the house, the Speaker immediately cut him off.

“I’m going to have to point out to the honourable member for St. Boniface that he is not dressed according to the code of the legislature,” she said. “I’m going to have to tell the member that he needs to have a tie to be in the chamber and to be acknowledged.”

Lamont apologized and left the chamber to put on a tie.

“I was bringing forward a motion of contempt of the legislature for the fact that the government had brought in 19 blank bills that I thought was a violation of democracy,” he says.

“When I came back wearing a tie, I was not allowed to compete my speech. It was more frustrating to me to have my motion ruled out of order.

In 2018, he wore jeans in the legislature and was required to change after Fontaine complained that his informal attire violated the chamber’s dress code.

Hold on… the same Fontaine who, two years earlier, took offence when someone complained about her outfit?

She says when she saw the newly elected Lamont wearing jeans, she rose in her role as the NDP house leader and asked the Speaker if the rules had changed.

“We all know we’re not allowed to wear jeans,” she says.

And it’s an apples-and-oranges argument, she says; the expensive designer outfit that another MLA complained about her back — behind her back — didn’t violate any stated rules.

“In the context of the chamber, so often men can do what they want,” she says. “I’m always going to make sure men are challenged on the stuff they’re doing.”

Lamont, for his part, is more concerned about what’s said in the chamber than what the people saying it are wearing.

“The clothes aren’t the problem,” he says, adding he loathes heckling in the chamber and the “colossal lack of respect, in general.”

“We work in an environment where people are talking about really important issues and it can get very hot, very fast and people get personal,” he says. “All these rules are really in place to keep fist fights from breaking out.”

He’s not kidding.

In one memorable 1996 violation, Kevin Lamoureux donned an army helmet when the chamber felt like “a war zone.”

“There were threats of violence,” says Lamoureux, then the Liberal MLA for Inkster, recalling debate on privatizing Manitoba Telephone System under Gary Filmon’s Progressive Conservative government.

“Gord Mackintosh walked across the floor and some of us thought he was going to hit the premier.”

Not so, says the former NDP cabinet minister and MLA for St. Johns.

“I would never do such a thing,” Mackintosh says. “That’s so far-fetched.”

Filmon “held his composure and didn’t react; he stared into space,” says Lamoureux, now the Member of Parliament for Winnipeg North.

He also opposed privatization and was prepared for battle — and publicity — donning the helmet he’d brought into the house for such a moment, and put his hands up in surrender.

“I was trying to emphasize that it was turning into a war zone… and somehow, in a humorous way, get people to calm down.”

Mackintosh says it was a serious matter; then-Speaker Louise Dacquay wasn’t recognizing Opposition members or letting them speak, so he got up and crossed the floor to get her attention, not to shake his fist in the premier’s face.

He cites a Nov. 28, 1996 Free Press report of the previous day’s events describing how he “waved his finger just inches from Filmon’s face…”

“I waved at the speaker,” recalls Mackintosh, who says Lamoureux “looked like a buffoon” wearing the helmet, and “it was silly and inappropriate.”

Lamoureux doesn’t argue the point.

“It wasn’t a shining moment in the Manitoba chamber,” he says.

Another member’s attire was in the spotlight a few months later when the city was buried by April 1997’s paralyzing blizzard. Work at the legislature continued, sort of.

Having been subjected to some previous heat in the press for spotty attendance, Liberal MLA Gary Kowalski said he wasn’t going to let the weather keep him away from the house.

He donned a snowmobile suit and cross-country skis and made his way from his home in The Maples to McPhillips Street, where he hitched a ride to the legislature with a stranger plowing through the snow-blocked streets in a four-wheel-drive truck.

“He made it to the assembly when so many other members couldn’t get in,” recalls Mackintosh, a history buff who’s written about Manitoba’s legislature and its customs and traditions.

Kowalski, a police officer before being elected in the Maples, says he detested taking part in question period, preferring to work with constituents.

“I was ticked off we were having a sitting, that they hadn’t cancelled,” he says.

Inside the chamber, still in his snowmobile suit and without the requisite necktie, Kowalski rose and asked for leave (unanimous consent) to waive the dress code. It was granted, and he was allowed to remain, wearing his snowsuit unzipped and pulled down to the waist.

“It’s the only time the dress code was waived, that I know of,” says Mackintosh, who was deputy clerk of the legislature before being elected.

The dress code, he says, was reviewed in 1969 when an MLA was called out for wearing a turtleneck in the house. The member made a motion to get rid of the dress code but it was ruled out of order.

The rules committee then decided men were required to wear a suit jacket and a necktie in the house. It didn’t bother with a rule for women.

Fontaine, who serves as NDP justice critic in addition to Opposition house leader, has never again worn her fashionable, though objectionable — at least to one member — outfit to work.

“There has to be a measure of professional attire, but there has to be flexibility,” she says. “When people are supposed to look a certain way when they’re doing their job, you’ll inevitably leave someone out,” she says.

In the middle of the largest health and economic crisis in a century, in a country struggling for reconciliation with its Indigenous people, discussing rules of dress for legislative assemblies may not be a priority but it is important, she reckons.

“I think legislatures have to be more reflective of all the people they’re representing in the house,” she says, adding the rules were set by generations of white men for white men.

“They were never meant for women or Indigenous people.” she says.

 

 

 

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca