Young & female on Parliament Hill
A POLITICAL JOURNALIST GIVES AN HONEST PORTRAYAL OF WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A WOMAN WORKING ON THE HILL
My mother worked as a staffer on Parliament Hill in the 1980s and ’90s. Today, she remembers everyone she worked for fondly. She says the work environment was respectful.
But one time while she was working, a senator looked toward her from an open doorway and compared her figure to a “race car.”
Sexist comments weren’t unusual, and it didn’t stop there. It wasn’t unheard of for women to receive a request to sit on someone’s lap. My mom remembers one fellow patting his lap in invitation, during the ’80s, when they were alone inside his office. She laughed it off.
“I was surprised, and then slightly uncomfortable, but sort of quickly brushed it off and didn’t think too much of it,” she said.
A few decades later, it was her daughter on Parliament Hill interviewing a senator. While alone in his office, he asked me to move across the room from the chair I had chosen and sit right next to him on a couch. “You don’t mind, do you?” he said, and made a joke about how he “wouldn’t bite.”
I was only halfway through the interview, so I laughed it off and kept going.
These are scenes from the professional lives of generations of young women on Parliament Hill. They have been familiar to me since the beginning.
A couple of years ago, I attended a political party’s convention. After a full day of listening to policy discussions, I visited a hotel room set up as a “hospitality suite,” where politicians shmooz with partisans, journalists and lobbyists over drinks.
Beer in my hand, and still wearing a media pass, I stood between crowds of people, next to a former member of Parliament about 40 years my senior, whom I was meeting for the first time. Beer in his hand, he decided to regale me, unprompted, with a detailed story about sitting in a hot tub with several naked women.
It was … weird. I listened politely and, at the first opportunity, went to talk to other people.
The next morning, another journalist and I were hanging out in the hallway, trying to chat with politicians headed in and out of the main event room. My male colleague asked the former member of Parliament how he was doing, after a night of drinking. “As good as she looks!” he said, grinning at me for a beat too long. He walked away, and my colleague and I moved on to chat with other people.
Last summer, at the Parliamentary Press Gallery dinner, a member of Parliament came up behind me on the dance floor to put his hands on my waist. I felt the hands before I saw the face. I figured he was drunk. I pulled away, not looking back, and went to dance with other people.
These weird moments, temporary discomforts you just shrug off, were common when my mother worked here. I heard about them when I first came here as a page, when I was a teenager. And they persist today, about three years since I started establishing my career on Parliament Hill as a political journalist.
Politics is a pressurecooker, where the powerful are often isolated from their families, and stressed-out humans hang out together after long days in rooms with free-flowing alcohol.
Even today, as more women take powerful positions in government and elected office than ever before, a power imbalance between older men and younger women can create conditions for unease, discomfort and much worse.
When you are trying to build a career on Parliament Hill as a reporter, you try to avoid starting rumours about yourself. People love to gossip.
Some people who talk a good game, publicly, about mutual respect and zero tolerance turn around to openly wonder, on the basis of whispers, whether certain female journalists are sleeping with certain politicians, or which MPs and staffers are paying each other latenight visits.
I have heard people openly assume that a female journalist must be having an affair with a male politician because she wrote favourably about him.
You try to pre-emptively extricate yourself from situations that will create gossip or, who knows, become legend. As one political staffer explained, she repeatedly says no when married male MPs invite her for drinks in their office after receptions. It is self-preservation. It protects them, and their party, too.
Let me add an uncomfortable truth: Consensual sex, affairs and relationships between people at different levels of power have always been a part of the Parliament Hill culture. People still “f--on boardroom tables” in the Parliament buildings all the time, one staffer told me.
It may muddy the waters in the #MeToo debate to say so, but the close quarters, high stakes and power can breed attraction — and for some people who work on the Hill today, the jury is still out on what kinds of relationships are inappropriate.
We make light of this, sometimes. A former staffer offers private tours of Parliament Hill to those who request them, which detail raunchy stories gathered over the years.
Some co-workers and I attended one last year. We heard tales of 20th-century cabinet-level threesomes and an unfortunate incident where an MP was locked out of his office, naked, after a liaison with his assistant. It was funny. We laughed.
“When there’s alcohol involved and people away from spouses and family, I feel like it’s unfortunately bound to happen,” one staffer told me. “But I feel like the way it happens is not OK.”
There are plenty of ambiguous situations that feel problematic, or potentially not OK.
As a page in the House of Commons almost a decade ago, I heard stories about MPs inviting 18-year-old coworkers to Hill receptions, offering free drinks, or even asking for dates. I remember being in the basement of a bar on Sparks Street and finding it a little strange — though admittedly a little delightful, too — that a cohort of first-year university students would be out fraternizing, unsupervised, with elected officials.
The rumour mill is real. So is the whisper network. Staffers warn each other about problematic MPs, not to be alone with certain people, not to leave teenagers alone with people.
One staffer told me that in an after-hours social situation, an MP once pulled her aside and instructed her to pose on the edge of a pool table so as to distract his opponent. She said she had never felt so cheap, and immediately walked out. She said she has heard far worse stories from colleagues.
A different staffer talks about the comments that, while she wonders if they were just meant to be nice, made her cringe: “I’m surprised you’re single,” said a man about 40 years older. And, “If I was single, I’d go certain after you.”
A journalist friend says she has caught male MPs openly staring at her bum or breasts at receptions.
Sometimes you turn it into a joke. I spoke once to a male MP who didn’t maintain eye contact, his gaze darting comically from my face, to my chest, to my shoulder, where I have a tattoo. It was uncomfortable. Later I made fun of what I called “the triangle.”
When you’ve worked here for a while, and heard enough stories, the tendency is to believe that because these little moments pale in comparison to criminal incidences of sexual assault, even talking about them might distract from the necessary conversation society is now having about our legal system, power relationships and the reasons why people don’t feel comfortable speaking up about incidents.
Who cares if somebody put their hand on my knee at a party? Does it really matter if that one guy keeps greeting me with kisses on the cheeks, when he shakes hands with everybody else? Is it a big deal to be on the awkward end of a dirty joke? Should I be laughing along? These are questions we ask ourselves, even when we have a gut feeling that says, “This is weird.”
If you are a party staffer, you can’t be sure that the party whip, supposed to investigate when you complain about a manager, isn’t your manager’s best friend — they sit in caucus together.
And if you are a journalist, to whom would you turn to complain about an interaction with a politician? You judge whether exposing an unfortunate interaction is worth burning a source, losing a scoop, or the cardinal sin of putting yourself in the story (guilty!). Often it’s not.
Things are changing. The bombshells this week that led to three politicians losing their roles over allegations of sexual misconduct have gotten people talking about the full range of experiences we encounter on Parliament Hill and in halls of power across the country.
It’s a range that includes these smaller moments, the ones that make you feel weird — the ones that, in the past, would have been brushed off and buried.
But the thing is, you never really brush them off all the way, because they stick to you.
I asked my friend this week if he remembered the weird comment from the exMP, many moons ago, and he did. For God’s sake, my mother recalls a race car analogy after 30 years.
Those little moments, as minor as they can seem, are peeks behind the curtain of a culture that has for a long time protected a minority of offenders from suffering consequences for putting others in a complicated, awkward, weird, bad or even nightmarish position. And I think it’s time we started to talk about them.
WE HEARD TALES OF CABINET-LEVEL THREESOMES.