Brown’s swift fall hopeful, horrifying
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 years earlier when he was a city councillor. 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, but it was an unmistakable blow.
Seven years later, with the growing number of women willing to call out inappropriate sexual behaviour, it is interesting to speculate how such revelations would be received.
This week’s misconduct allegations, denial and resignation of Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown unfolded in hours. The swiftness shows how thin our tolerance for alleged male misbehaviour has become.
It was not always so. While the seamy sexual advances of Bill Clinton drove scandalous headlines and consumed huge volumes of political oxygen, he did not resign.
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. A finding of workplace misbehaviour forced Nova Scotia’s Conservative opposition leader to quit this week. And now, allegations of sexual misconduct by two unnamed women have pushed out PC leader Brown. Like show biz, 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.
Yet horrifying, for both the breadth of stories surfacing, and the ease with which they can be exploited. Brown 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 press conferences to denounce sexual misconduct in general while pretending not to be piling on a political opponent.
Times are changing — mostly, we think, for the better. Still, we must ask: How can we continue to encourage women to speak up, while trying also to ensure due process to those accused of sexual misbehaviour?