A tale only half-told
It’s vital that Jody Wilson-Raybould be allowed to tell her side of the story, sooner rather than later
The story of Jody Wilson-Raybould’s departure from cabinet, incomplete as it now stands, is not a #MeToo moment in Canadian politics.
The allegations at hand are, of course, not sexual in nature, and the sort of “undue pressure” to which Wilson-Raybould is said to have been subjected is by no means equivalent to the stories of harassment that have rocked Parliament Hill and politics more broadly in recent years.
But in Justin Trudeau’s ultracautious approach in the midst of what’s arguably the biggest storm his government has faced, he seems to have missed some instructive parallels.
The same prime minister who has summarily put Liberal MPs into exile for harassment allegations and spoken out repeatedly for the need to presume in favour of the complainant, we may recall, is being much more careful when it comes to the allegations circulating in the WilsonRaybould case.
No heads are rolling and no one is talking about a zero-tolerance policy for pressure in politics. (Impossible as that would be to pull off in a business that’s high pressure by definition.)
Trudeau’s response to date is that no one in his office “directed” Wilson-Raybould to make a decision on SNC-Lavalin’s bid for a plea deal in corruption charges it is facing. Moreover, the prime minister and his officials have also said that Wilson-Raybould did not lodge any formal complaints about undue pressure, as was her legal obligation.
Think about it, though: if the former attorney-general had been complaining about harassment, would Trudeau have been able to say the onus to report misdeeds was solely on the recipient of them? As Trudeau himself knows, a failure to report harassment doesn’t mean the harassment didn’t exist. That was the number-one message of the #MeToo movement.
There’s another lesson of the #MeToo moment that would seem to apply. The Wilson-Raybould case is likely to turn on what defines “undue pressure” on a minister. As is the case in many harassment allegations, the question of what’s inappropriate, even illegal, requires a serious look — not just at messages sent, but how they’re received.
Trudeau knows this. In fact, the prime minister has talked about it, most notably in the dust-up over some ancient allegations of harassment or “groping,” as it was called, which were swirling around him last year.
The nearly two-decades-old story, dating back to Trudeau’s life before politics or his marriage, involved allegations of inappropriate touching during an encounter with a young reporter at a festival in B.C. in August 2000.
The incident was mentioned at the time in an unsigned editorial in the paper where the woman worked, which also noted that Trudeau had apologized. By 2018, however, the anonymous woman herself, now out of journalism, was reluctant to dredge up the allegations anew and rebuffed reporters’ attempts to get confirmation or elaboration on what happened.
When initially asked about it last year, Trudeau first issued a terse written statement, saying he didn’t recall any “negative interactions” at that event. But after the story refused to go away, Trudeau clearly decided he had to say more. Here is what he said to reporters last summer:
“I’ve been reflecting very carefully on what I remember from that incident almost 20 years ago. I do not feel that I acted inappropriately in any way. But I respect the fact that someone else might have experienced that differently.”
The prime minister then said: “This lesson that we are learning, and I’ll be blunt about it, often a man experiences an interaction as being benign or not inappropriate and a woman, particularly in a professional context, can experience it differently and we have to respect that and reflect on that.”
It needs to be said again: there is so far no indication that Wilson-Raybould’s alleged unease over the SNCLavalin case approached anything like harassment or even gender conflict.
But “undue pressure,” like harassment, needs two sides of the story: how the pressure was administered (or not) and how it was received.
That’s the incomplete part of this explosive saga, and why we need to hear from Wilson-Raybould, preferably sooner rather than later. It’s not just an incomplete report at present, it’s a half-told tale.
‘Undue pressure,’ like harassment, needs two sides of the story: how the pressure was administered (or not) and how it was received.