MPs, press gallery wrestle with harassment

Opinion

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This article was published 13/06/2015 (3769 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Just in case the Senate wasn’t beleaguered enough last week with the public release of a damning auditor’s report, there was some more bad news coming its way.

This time, it’s that sitting Conservative Sen. Don Meredith is under investigation for workplace harassment involving four employees.

The Senate started the review last winter because there was incredibly high turnover among Meredith’s staff. The allegations include the senator making sexually suggestive comments and bullying his staff to the point where security guards in the Senate were keeping an eye on the staff for their safety.

Meredith, a pentecostal minister from Toronto, has denied there is an investigation going on, but Senate Speaker Leo Housakas confirmed it.

But Meredith, unlike two Liberal MPs who were accused of harassment by two female NDP MPs last fall, hasn’t been suspended from his caucus. Instead, an outside investigator was hired to look into the allegations, and a report is expected within a few weeks. A Senate committee will determine what to do next.

In large part that may be because the Senate has had a policy for dealing with harassment in the workplace for six years.

The House of Commons, we discovered last fall, had nothing.

So the alleged victims had nowhere clear to go to make a complaint, leaving one of them to raise it with Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau when she happened to be sitting near him one day.

That set in motion a process that was amateurish and damaging to all involved. The MPs were suspended pending investigation, but as politicians, their reputations are their livelihood. As soon as they were named publicly, the process lost any appearance of fairness.

For the victims, who have never been publicly identified but whose names are one of the worst-kept secrets within the Ottawa bubble, the lack of a policy made things even worse.

“We never wanted to hurt anybody,” one of them told the Huffington Post last fall. “Except that we were in this situation where you don’t know what to do, because there is no solution that makes any sense.”

Speaking up brings with it the fear of political reprisal, she said.

Thankfully, that may not be the case the next time this happens. And let’s be real, it will happen again.

But last Monday, as the Senate audit overshadowed almost everything else going on in Ottawa, a House of Commons committee quietly tabled a proposed new policy to address harassment between MPs.

When the harassment allegations took shape last fall it was surprising to many the House of Commons had no procedures to address such problems.

These are the people who make the laws of the land — surely they would have seen fit to get their own house in order on this. But no, they never had. There wasn’t even a policy to oversee complaints for disputes between MPs and political staffers, alarming considering the power dynamic in those arrangements.

Journalists could not be smug on this, however, because it was not long after these cases came out that it became glaringly apparent the Parliamentary Press Gallery Association also lacked a harassment code. That’s because a dispute between two of its members has been going on for nearly a year without any way to resolve it.

All of this is being addressed.

The House of Commons introduced a policy to handle complaints about MPs by staff in December. The proposed policy for complaints between MPs will take effect after the next election.

The press gallery met Friday and passed a misconduct policy, despite objections by several members.

Those objections, and the process to get this policy through, highlight how delicate the issue is, how many considerations there have to be.

But just because the policies aren’t easy to create, and can’t likely address all aspects of the problem, doesn’t mean they can’t end up being helpful.

In the absence of a policy, many complaints may simply never get told. It’s hard enough to come forward, risk your reputation and offend the people you work with. It’s nearly impossible if you don’t know who to go to, or what will happen if you do.

And these policies protect alleged harassers as much as they help alleged victims. The House of Commons policy, for example stresses confidentiality during an investigation, something that was not afforded to the Liberal MPs involved in the recent cases.

 

Mia Rabson is the Free Press parliamentary bureau chief.

mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @mrabson