CALLING OUT MISCONDUCT IS TRICKY
Near the end of the 2011 federal election campaign, news broke that then-NDP leader Jack Layton had been found naked by police in a massage parlour some years earlier, when he was a city councillor. The parlour in question, police believed, was also a bawdy house. Layton, shaken by the news report, said he had been there only because he had sore muscles and, well, needed a massage. He said he did not know other activities were suspected on the premises.
How much damage these 11th-hour allegations did to a leader then riding a wave of voter momentum is hard to gauge (the NDP still became the Official Opposition). But it was an unmistakable blow, and NDP supporters struggled with it.
Seven years later, in the context of the #metoo movement and the growing number of women willing to call out inappropriate sexual behaviour, it is interesting to speculate how such revelations would be received. For this week’s misconduct allegations, denial and abrupt resignation of Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown unfolded in mere hours. Meanwhile, federal MP Kent Hehr found himself out of Justin Trudeau’s cabinet late Thursday as the government investigated harassment allegations against the former sports minister. The breathtaking swiftness of these sagas shows how razor-thin our tolerance for alleged male misbehaviour has become.
It was not always so. While the seamy sexual advances of Bill Clinton, including his dalliance with an intern in the Oval Office, drove scandalous headlines and consumed huge volumes of political oxygen, he did not resign. Today, his political reputation remains solid. The sexual peccadillos of JFK decades earlier weren’t even mentioned publicly in his day; yet his place in history also is secure.
Fast-forward to allegations of sexual impropriety on Parliament Hill in 2015 against two Liberal MPs; both were quickly bounced out of town. Sen. Don Meredith stepped down last spring for misconduct. British Defence Minister Michael Fallon resigned in November. A finding of workplace misbehaviour forced Nova Scotia’s Conservative opposition leader to quit, this very week. And now, allegations of sexual misconduct by two unnamed women, reported by CTV, have pushed out PC leader Brown. Like showbiz, politics will never be the same.
This is both heartening and horrifying. Heartening — in that the social media age has often helped victims find each other, and boosted their willingness to speak about events that, in the past, would have stayed buried. It is tremendously difficult for women — or any vulnerable person — to admit they have been abused. The stories in so many cases ring true. This is surely a unique moment in history.
Yet horrifying, too — both for the sheer breadth of stories surfacing, but also for the ease with which they can be exploited. Brown vigorously denied the accusations against him. Less than five months from an election, that did not stop Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne or NDP rival Andrea Horwath from quickly holding news conferences to denounce sexual misconduct in general while pretending not to be piling on a political opponent, which was exactly what they were doing. In current times, any public figure’s reputation can be shattered even before a full, rigorous exposition of all relevant facts.
Times are changing — mostly, we think, for the better. Women are showing enormous courage. Still, we must ask: How can we continue to encourage women to speak up, while trying also to ensure due process to those accused (in this case, usually men) of sexual misbehaviour?
That challenge, no one has yet solved.