The feminist PM falls flat in response to groping incident
Beware the male political leader who dares to call himself a feminist. For he shall be brought down hard.
The above is an ancient #MeToo proverb.
I mean ancient in the sense that we seem to have aged years since allegations of gross sexual misconduct against producer Harvey Weinstein last October kicked off a passionate worldwide movement that has encompassed everything from women finally pushing back against decades of sexual harassment and abuse by male colleagues and employers, to powerful men losing reputations and careers over their behaviour, to women in many industries deservedly getting a better shot at equal pay and senior jobs.
Harvey Weinstein has recently been criminally charged with multiple incidents involving rape and sexual assault and will have his day in court, although rape is not remotely all that happened to the many women whose careers he allegedly undermined by abusively focusing on them sexually.
For that outcome alone, I support the #MeToo movement, however unwieldy and unpredictable it has become.
Despite its imperfections — including in some cases lack of due process and overreaching on the part of activists who are genuinely trying to right wrongs and change a toxic culture — #MeToo has given rise to real stories told by real women about how they’ve been sexually mistreated, especially on the job. These stories have cut across ideological lines and opened up a difficult and necessary conversation between men and women that is far from finished.
Now this difficult conversation includes Justin Trudeau, our selfavowed feminist prime minister and a leader who has in the past exhibited zero tolerance for sexual impropriety among his MPs.
It must rankle him beyond measure that we currently have a “Justin Trudeau groping incident,” as it is now called.
The facts have been exhumed as far as they can be:
Eighteen years ago, at a music festival in Creston, B.C., when Justin Trudeau was 28 and a school teacher, well before he entered politics, he had a brief encounter with a female reporter that she found inappropriate.
Catherine Cullen, a CBC political reporter, recently said on air that the woman’s publisher confirmed the reporter had said Trudeau had touched her briefly on “her rear end.”
At the time, this encounter resulted in a published editorial in the Creston Valley Advance taking Trudeau to task for “groping” and “handling” its reporter, who also reported for larger publications. It stated that Trudeau had apologized, saying “I’m sorry. If I had known you were reporting for a national paper, I would never have been so forward.” (Huh?)
That old editorial surfaced recently, fuelling a #MeToo episode involving a leader who until now has been a worldwide poster boy for feminist values. The woman, now a former reporter, has remained adamant that she does not wish to be further involved and has asked the media to stop pursuing her. I think we should honour that request.
Trudeau himself, like a figure skater really trying to nail that triple axel has fallen or flailed in at least three attempts to publicly explain himself.
First he astonishingly said in a tone deaf statement that he did not remember “any negative interactions” that day. This of course is problematic not only because he had already apologized to the woman, but that response is precisely the problem: women years later remember every unwanted touch from men who blithely say nothing untoward happened.
Then, in a more thoughtful try after a fraught meeting at Queen’s Park with newly elected Premier Doug Ford, Trudeau talked about “reflecting very carefully” on the incident and said that while he was “confident” he had not acted inappropriately, he conceded the woman might well have experienced it differently.
In this and other subsequent attempts to curtail the damage, Trudeau has philosophized about the #MeToo moment and these conversations that are, as he said, “part of this awakening that we’re having as a society, a long-awaited realization, is that it’s not just one side of the story that matters.”
You bet. And one of the key realizations that every man — whether he’s a teacher or a prime minister — needs to have is that in a professional or personal setting, he should not touch a woman without her consent.
In a statement reluctantly issued by the former reporter, she said she would “not be providing any further details or information. The debate, if it continues, will continue without my involvement.”
So if she’s not going to talk further, what is there left to investigate? The media — and of course Trudeau’s political opponents — have already taken this incident very seriously.
There’s little doubt that had Trudeau not proudly declared himself a feminist and thrown out two Liberal MPs after allegations of sexual impropriety, the coverage would not have been so extensive. (Or gleeful.) I hate it that any woman doing her job feels she has been disrespected or touched inappropriately.
I wish Trudeau, when that damning editorial resurfaced, had owned up right away to an awkward encounter he had already apologized for, one in which he had described himself, back in 2000, as having been “forward,” a term that now sounds disturbingly quaint.
It would have resulted in a healthier and more transparent discussion. Many, if not most, men will have had a “forward” incident in their past.
But barring any more claims about his behaviour, this incident is not where #MeToo or our national political conversation needs to go.
Justin Trudeau will no doubt hear about it again from his political opponents during a federal campaign.
He should sit down now and “very carefully reflect” on how much better his response should have been — as a man, as a prime minister, and yes, as a feminist.