Change happens, but some patience is often required
These are anxious times. But these are hopeful times, also. The combination of a pandemic, mass protests about racism and a growing awareness change is needed has finally hit home.
We’ve been here before. Many times over many years and the palpable frustration is seen in today’s protests. When change is demanded it is often difficult to do the one thing that truly works — wait. Work at it and wait for it. Appreciate the time lag.
Will Canada’s treatment of its First Nations change for the better? Inevitably.
Will racism vanish? Maybe, if we work at it. How about the so-called white privilege? That, too, will change when we provide more equitable education for all children.
Diversity and change takes time, concerted effort and willingness. I can write that in complete confidence because I have lived through so many changes and it’s only by looking back that I can see the radical and profound differences between the world into which I was born and the one I live in now.
I’m hopeful for change, because I’ve experienced so much of it.
My first job after university was in the middle 1960s. I walked into the Calgary Herald newsroom dominated by white men, their thinking and opinions. It was a year after Betty Friedan’s feminist cry for change — The Feminine Mystique — had been published. Young women who, inspired by the book, wanted more than husband, children and home devoured it. Men scorned the message and the messengers. “Women’s libber” became the curse thrown at any woman who voiced an opinion about change. It was an era of “girlie” shows at the Calgary Stampede, prompting the city editor to assign me to put on an embarrassingly skimpy costume and strut around for a first-person story.
My second job at the London Free Press, I was the only female news reporter.
By the third or fourth job, back at the Herald in the late 1970s, I was working as a desk editor. We were the editors who took the wire service copy — Canadian Press or Reuters, for example — wrote the headlines and “paginated” the results, filing each story and its accompanying photo and headline onto a paper mock-up of the page. The lack of technology at the time isn’t the point, but the lack of diversity was.
Few of us were female, and one Sunday night, the only two editors working were I and another woman. We decided, as a lark, to focus on women. Any story about a woman went to the top of the page; any story about a man would feature an illustration containing a visible woman.
We were gleeful in our feminist “anarchy.” We waited for the questions from management about our “rebellion.” None came; nobody noticed. Our “push against the patriarchy” came after the newspaper had featured a lengthy story about childbirth and illustrated it with a large picture of a male obstetrician.
The whole point of this is to look back and see the genuine changes that have occurred. The Calgary Petroleum Club faced a conundrum when Pat Carney was appointed energy minister in Brian Mulroney’s government. She came to Calgary in 1985 and discovered she could not have lunch at the club, automatic for a male energy minister.
Deborah Yedlin, now chancellor of the University of Calgary, wrote in 2003: “Ms. Carney was in Calgary meeting with oilpatch executives, only to be denied access to the august club because she was the wrong gender. This of course was a huge embarrassment because Calgary’s 1950s mentality was exposed for all to see. But it still took until 1989 for the rules to change.”
By 2007, Enbridge executive Bonnie Dupont would serve as president of the Petroleum Club.
Diversity in the workplace and on boards of directors takes more than protests and placards. It takes men and women in positions of authority to be made aware of the need for different voices, cultures, upbringing and colours.
Young people marching in the streets make the public aware of the problem and make people incapable of turning a blind eye. But riots and vandalism, tearing down public monuments, merely allow the privileged to dismiss all of this as nothing more than mob rule.
Perhaps Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, one of the leading books on leadership, said it best: “When young people develop basic leadership and collaborative learning skills, they can be a formidable force for change.”