Firing flap hasn’t damaged Alberta’s UCP

COMMENT Negative campaign tacks have their limits

It’s fair to say that Jason Nixon failed to cover himself in glory when he fired a single mom a few days before Christmas back in 2005 shortly after she complained about being sexually harassed on a construction site.

Nixon — now the United Conservative Party’s house leader in the Alberta legislature — didn’t harass the woman, Kori Harrison, himself. Rather his company, Nixon Safety Consulting, was providing services to a company called Navigator, which was building a condo in Kelowna, B.C.

Harrison was working on that site as an occupational health and safety worker when she was repeatedly sexually harassed by Greg Ford, an independent contractor who was also her superior on site.

Harrison would later testify to the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal that Ford made explicit sexual comments, asked her to watch pornography with him at work, slapped her on the buttocks, and offered to give her tire trucks, pot and lingerie in exchange for sex.

Harrison, then 27, would often end the day crying.

Harrison c omplained about the situation to Nixon and, under pressure from Navigator, fired her shortly afterward — although Nixon did try to find another job for Harrison within his company, which she, understandably, refused. She was eventually awarded $32,000 in damages and lost wages.

There is no dispute that Nixon, then a 25- year- old small businessman who clearly feared the loss of Navigator’s business, did the wrong thing. Last week, Nixon told reporters that he should have handled the situation differently.

“Now, with the benefit of hindsight and experience … I believe I should have pushed back very hard on my client at that point,” he said. “And I probably should have terminated my relationship with that client at that point.”

Well, yeah. It doesn’t take a moral giant to not fire the person who is being told to dress sexy to work. That said, moral righteousness is a much easier thing to afford when the accounts in the company ledger aren’t being drawn in red: People make mistakes.

No doubt, Nixon was in a precarious position to be arguing against sections of Bill 30, which mandates tougher measures for antibullying and harassment on work sites, although he insists nothing in that bill would have prevented the situation that befell Harrison; nor has the UCP argued against the harassment provisions.

The Nixon story broke in the Edmonton Journal last week with no word about where the tidbit may have originated. There is also no doubt that the Alberta NDP took full advantage of this unflattering 1 2- year- old revelation — as all political parties are wont to do — appearing only days before voters in Calgary- Lougheed were set to go to the polls to elect UCP party leader Jason Kenney in a byelection.

“Mr. Nixon was his handpicked selection to be his political lieutenant, his political spokesperson. So did he know and not care? Or now that he does know, what’s he going to do about it?” Premier Rachel Notley asked. The answer: nothing. And regardless of how the court documents found their way into the public sphere, that may have been the right answer. If voters were outraged by Kenney’s decision to maintain Nixon in his role, they showed no sign of it on Dec. 14, handing Kenney a victory with 72 per cent of the vote. That with a turnout of about 35 per cent — typical for a byelection, and healthy considering the vote was held just a few weeks before Christmas.

It’s generally not wise to read too much into byelection results; these kinds of margins are typical for Kenney, who has a demonstrated ability to move voters to the polls on election day, especially in suburban Calgary.

If there is a warning to be derived from this at all, it’s that there are limits to a campaign strategy that relies primarily on presenting the conservative caucus and its leader as backward and extreme.