Tackle sexual harassment on Parliament Hill

It is 2018. The prime minister is a self-described feminist. The governor-general is a female former astronaut. The government in Ottawa has a gender-balanced cabinet. And still - still! - the most famous workplace in Canada apparently remains unsafe for women members of Parliament.

Thanks to a survey of female MPs about their experience with inappropriate sexual behaviour on the job, Canadians have been reminded as the new year starts of the long road left to travel in ensuring safe workplaces, and will likely be appalled at the sorry example set by those who should be leaders. Almost half of the 89 current female MPs responded to the survey by The Canadian Press. Three MPs said they had been the victim of sexual assault. Four said they were the target of sexual harassment. Nearly 60 per cent of respondents said they had personally been the target of sexual misconduct while in office, including inappropriate or unwanted remarks, gestures or text messages of a sexual nature.

If that’s the level of workplace torment aimed at MPs, the story is almost certainly worse for women working on Parliament Hill and environs in lesspowerful staff jobs.

Women have come a long way in politics and government. But progress has been slow and grudging. It’s a half-century since Judy LaMarsh lamented that, in being the only woman appointed to Lester Pearson’s cabinet, ``my weight, my age, my home, my cooking, my hobbies, my friends, my tastes, my likes and dislikes all became public property to a degree suffered by none of my colleagues, including the prime minister.’’

It’s been 35 years since former prime minister John Turner seemed nonplused by the uproar that followed his public patting of Liberal party president Iona Campagnolo’s bottom. He famously wrote it off to being ``a tactile politician.’’

Sheila Copps, a former deputy prime minister, has said she was sexually assaulted in the early 1980s when a member of the Ontario legislature by a male MPP while travelling with a committee - a committee studying violence against women.

In 1985, former speaker Lloyd Francis said, in a conversation he thought bound for the vault, that ``the House was a den of sin in the 1970s,’’ with sexual harassment and procurement popular extracurricular pursuits.

When running for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada in 2004, MP Belinda Stronach was asked during an interview: ``Is your being beautiful an asset or a liability?’’

When she fended that one off, the questioner concluded with: ``A final question on behalf of all the hot-blooded males around here. Are you dating anyone?’’ It’s past time for all men - especially those elected to high office - to face up to the ready lessons of history and clear requirements of the modern workplace. It’s past time for Parliament Hill - a workplace of extreme partisanship and large power imbalances - to establish a mechanism to deal with complaints of sexual harassment.

For if not you, as leaders, who?

And if not now, in the welcome season of #metoo, when?