The political age of women is upon us
Political scandals morph rapidly and always have unintended consequences. This one continues to be no exception
It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character.
What a delicious sentence the above is, from British playwright and author Deborah Levy’s acclaimed recent memoir The Cost of Living. It takes a minute to absorb it. For it’s not just about women claiming the obvious right to be major char- acters in their own stories, even ones that involve men, it’s about men not quite realizing this is indeed happening.
While Levy was writing about a specific relationship between a man and a woman, her words capture many women’s life experiences. They also sum up this new volatile, impressive, exhilarating coming of political age of women we are currently living through.
The him could be any entitled male politician, even one who proudly
considers himself woke, or at least not obliviously asleep on his comfy feather bed of privilege and history.
The her offers so many current examples I don’t know where to begin.
In the U.S., there’s Nancy Pelosi, newly re-elected Speaker of the House, who has probably never seen herself as a minor character, to the record fresh batch of relatable young congresswomen, to the also unprecedented five seasoned Democratic women who are so far running for the 2020 presidential nomination.
In Canada, we have been embroiled these past two weeks — or is it an eternity — in a seesaw political scandal involving our prime minister — a man — trying to deal with a rogue resigned cabinet minister — a woman — who clearly doesn’t see herself as a minor character in his story at all.
And why should she? She is, of course, Jody Wilson-Raybould, former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada, briefly minister of veterans affairs, the first Indig- enous female lawyer to hold these posts.
She often uses her Indigenous given name, Puglaas, in public, meaning “born to noble people.”
Last week, amidst a deepening political furor, WilsonRaybould resigned her briefly held veterans affairs post after being shuffled out of justice, in which she was rumoured to have been pressured by the PMO to let the giant engineering firm SNC-Lavalin off the hook for a criminal prosecution on charges of bribery and fraud.
In supposedly demoting her last month, Trudeau, it was said, had punished her for not toeing the party line.
He has now publicly disputed that.
After more than a week of explosive daily headlines, it was not yet clear what exactly happened, let alone who was throwing whom under the bus.
It will be left to further developments to determine whether Wilson-Raybould’s resignation had as much to do with her evident frustration over the Trudeau government’s handling of Indigenous mat- ters as it did with a corporate criminal case or losing one of the most significant portfolios in the government.
Or whether any of it all had anything to do with her being a woman.
In the meantime, the desire to jump on the feminist bandwagon and roll this out as a powerful paradigm of male — female political warfare in the #MeToo era is irresistible. Even if it may turn out to be wrong.
From the headlines pleading “Let Jody Wilson-Raybould speak!” to Wilson-Raybould’s own father, Bill Wilson, a Kwakwaka’wakw hereditary chief, who told CBC As It Happens host Carol Off that the PM was “full of baloney” and Canadians would not stand for him treating a woman “shabbily,” we are also seeing this through a lens of male/ female dynamics.
Still, as a feminist who heartily approves of women refusing to be minor characters in public life, I don’t quite understand why Wilson-Raybould, a former regional chief herself, has allowed Wilson to speak publicly on her behalf.
“Thank you to my pappa for your unwavering support,” she tweeted in the midst of the storm.
The whole point of being a major and not a minor character is having your own voice, even if, as Wilson-Raybould has done, she needs to hire her own lawyer, a former Supreme Court justice, to examine what she is legally allowed to say, given the restraints of privileged cabinet conversations and an ongoing corporate criminal case.
It takes real courage to want to be in the public eye as a politician. Men have done so for years, allowing themselves and all other men to fail as spectacularly and as often as they succeeded.
Political scandals morph rapidly and always have unintended consequences. This one continues to be no exception.
Justin Trudeau, the first self-avowed “feminist PM,” has proudly proclaimed his gender equal cabinet, but also has discovered that a man waving a feminist flag can be pulled over for major or minor misdemeanours.
(He dismissively called her “Jody” after she resigned, until he realized the forced familiarity was costing him.) The #MeToo movement has propelled a different and valid kind of conversation to the forefront. But nothing, of course, is ever that simple.
When Wilson-Raybould speaks, I will be listening for her to clear up not only what happened in a legal and political sense, but whether and how her being a woman — and an Indigenous one at that — had anything to do with her clashes with the Trudeau government.
There is no doubt WilsonRaybould earned her remarkable place in history when she was appointed to the justice portfolio.
No one should now expect her to play a minor character whatever political path she now takes.