Signs ‘we still have progress to make’
Sexist graffiti targets female candidates
MONTREAL — As campaign posters go up, vandalism often follows. Most graffiti is benign: NDP Leader Tom Mulcair sporting Sharpie sunglasses on a poster, or a photoshopped Liberal poster for a Klingon candidate in the fictitious riding of Qo’no S-Praxis-Verdun. But some vandalism on posters for a female Conservative candidate in Pierrefonds-Dollard in Quebec is simply vile.
Some of Valérie Assouline’s campaign signs have been marred by unprintable phrases referring to sexual habits. Others had condoms filled with hand cream attached near Assouline’s face. A large, dark dildo was glued over her mouth on another.
A picture of the destroyed signs was posted on Twitter last Monday by Frank Dumas, a volunteer for Assouline’s campaign. Dumas said about seven were damaged.
Would this ever happen to a male candidate? “Of course not,” Assouline said. “This is an attack on me, because I am a woman, because I look like a woman. It’s unacceptable.”
Vandalism has long been a fact of life in election campaigns, but the sexist nature of graffiti targeting female candidates illustrates the special challenges facing women in politics.
“I’ve seen a lot of vandalism on my own placards,” said Hélène Laverdière, the NDP incumbent in Laurier-Sainte-Marie, another Quebec riding, although none was as extreme as that on Assouline’s. People have drawn moustaches as well as tears of oil on Laverdière’s face and all her posters along one Montreal street were recently cut down.
Laverdière said graffiti is an issue faced by all candidates, regardless of their gender, but she and her NDP colleagues believe it is worse for women.
“It is more easily sexist against women, if not misogynistic,” she said. “It’s a lack of respect — not only for the candidates, but for the whole process and for citizens in general.”
“As society, we have made huge progress, but we see with this vandalism ... we still have progress to make,” she added.
Elections Canada spokeswoman Diane Benson said vandalism on campaign signs is an issue handled by local police forces. Candidates who have to spend additional money to replace destroyed signs are not penalized by campaign spending caps imposed by Elections Canada, she said.
Several incidents of sexism and sexual harassment on the Hill have come to light in recent years. Two Liberal MPs were expelled from their caucus in November after two other, unnamed MPs complained about sexual harassment, and NDP MP Megan Leslie wrote an article in Blacklock’s Reporter in 2013 detailing suggestive comments other parliamentarians made about her physical appearance and clothing.
“There is a disparity between how female and male candidates are treated, which continues after they’ve been elected,” said Dominic Vallières, spokesman for the Bloc Québécois.
More women than ever before sat in the 41st Parliament. Seventy-six women were elected — almost 25 per cent of all MPs. The overall proportion of female candidates in the current election is about the same as the last one — 31 per cent, according to Equal Voices. The proportion of female candidates ranges from 43 per cent of NDP candidates to 19 per cent of Conservative candidates.
With eight weeks to go in the 2015 campaign, some candidates, like Melissa Kate Wheeler, the Green party candidate for Notre-Damede-Grâce-Westmount on the Island of Montreal, haven’t even put up their signs yet.
She faces Liberal incumbent Marc Garneau, James Hughes for the NDP and Conservative Richard Sagala.
Wheeler said the defacement against Assouline was “not surprising,” but she hasn’t seen a lot of sexist or vulgar graffiti during the campaign.
“Some people use defacing posters as a method of protest,” Wheeler said. “It doesn’t make it acceptable. It reinforces patriarchal standards and using a penis to put down or belittle a female candidate is obviously problematic.”
A vandal also defaced a poster for Conservative candidate Daniela Chivu, one of three women running in Dorval-Lachine-LaSalle, another Montreal-area riding. The others are NDP incumbent Isabelle Morin and Liberal Anju Dhillon.
Chivu sent The Gazette photos of the poster on Tuesday, where a vandal had scrawled a penis and a word colloquially used to describe female genitalia.
“Not only is (the graffiti) an insult to us and it’s sexist, but children don’t deserve to see that,” Chivu said.