Harassment not just about gender, it’s about power

You could see it as a milepost on the road to true gender equality in Canadian politics.

In two stories in the political headlines this week, female members of Parliament were cast as alleged perpetrators of harassment — not victims of it.

Is this a reason to celebrate? Obviously not. But it’s interesting.

One of the harassment sagas is still unfolding against New Democratic Party MP Christine Moore, accused this week of sexually stalking a disabled Canadian war veteran, Glen Kirkland. The harassment accusations, which come from Kirkland himself, date back to 2013, when he was a witness at a Commons committee and Moore was one of the MPs hearing his testimony.

Moore has been suspended from her MP duties pending further investigation by the NDP.

The other story revolved around Green party Leader Elizabeth May and it came to a close this week when she was exonerated of accusations about workplace harassment from three former party employees.

The Green party hired an independent investigator, Toronto lawyer Sheila Block, after the allegations first surfaced in the Star earlier this year. On Thursday, Block issued her report and the Greens announced the good news for May in a news release.

“The investigators concluded that the allegations do not constitute workplace harassment,” the release said. “The investigation is now closed.”

As mentioned already, it’s clearly not that much of a success to see women in the role of accused harassers. That’s not the kind of equality we’ve been seeking in the workplace.

But it does break the harassment conversation out of the usual frame of a gender-imbalance discussion and get us talking about power — a vital ingredient in all this discussion of who does the harassing and who gets harassed in the political workplace.

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that the House of Commons came up with an official policy and a reporting regime on harassment.

This new policy, while a result of a 2014 controversy about Liberal MPs allegedly harassing New Democrat MPs, only covers MPs in their roles as employers of staff — in positions of clear power, in other words.

So far, two annual reports have been issued since 2015, documenting not even three dozen complaints — 10 in the first report, 19 in the most recent one, covering the period from 2016-17.

Here again, we see that not all stories of harassment are about men as the perpetrators and women as victims. In 2015-16, three of the harassment complaints were against women bosses; in 2016-17, there were five women who were subjects of complaints. So far, the stats show that five men came forward in the first two years of this reporting system to complain that they’ve been victims of harassment.

While these are still small numbers, it’s noteworthy that the number of complaints against women is roughly consistent with their numbers in the Commons.

Just under one-third of the seats in the Commons are occupied by women and one-third of the harassment cases in the Commons’ new reporting regime revolve around women as the accused harassers.

Here’s a tough question for all those who believe that harassment can be solved with gender equity: as women increase their numbers in political power, are we going to see an increase in harassment complaints against them, too?

In an ideal world, we’d be measuring progress by an upward climb in women’s representation in politics and a stark decrease in harassment of any kind — by men or women, against any gender.

But the fact that we are seeing women now in the role of accused harassers in the headlines in 2018 tells us that we may be ready to move the discussion beyond gender and into the real issue — power, and its corrosive potential in any workplace.