Dialogue

This past week the leaders of Ontario's and Nova Scotia's Progressive Conservative parties resigned due to allegations of inappropriate behaviours. The federal Minister of sport and persons with disabilities has also resigned for near similar behaviours. For all three of the men, their political careers are over.  In the short term I would guess that no company that has any sort of public profile will hire them. In spite of there being very few if any facts available, it is now the norm that groups, political parties or organizations quite rightly quickly dispose of toxic members/leaders. Certainly in Canada, no ruling political party (or one that wanted to be) could ever hope to withstand the firestorm of criticism if they did not force a resignation.

It was not always this way. In fact, for virtually all of Canada's existence as a political entity, our politicians have been give immense grace to do what they wanted to do. For example, our first Prime Minister -Sit John A. was more than occasionally drunk. Our tenth Prime Minister, Mackenzie King was in regular communications with his deceased mother and other equally as dead relatives. The first Trudeau made an obscene comment in Parliament and got away with it, Mulroney, I expect, hung out at rich people's homes during the holidays and Diefenbaker may have had a relationship with his secretary- the list could go on and on. Historically it has been the policy of the Canadian press to not to focus, to in fact ignore what was happening in the private lives of our politicians. Civil servants while they may at their peril leak details of government plans, would never have discussed what went on behind closed doors.

No one talked about all of the above things partially because it just was not done but also there were no the mechanisms to quickly disseminate the information. The only way of sharing information about anyone or anything was initially the newspapers, later the radio and still later television. All of those types of news media, while they may have been incredibly biased, needed to ensure that their fact were correct. That is no longer true. Individuals who have information can now bi-pass all of the news gatekeepers and go directly to the people.

For example this week an individual who use to work with Mr Hehr (the above mentioned federal minister) while he was in the Alberta legislature, on Twitter discussed his inappropriate comments to her. While I am in no way suggesting that either his comments were anywhere near acceptable or that the individual is not telling the absolute truth - it strikes me that Twitter is a particularly inappropriate platform to make a statement about something that happened a decade ago. It allows no dialogue, no context of the events and because there is no defence against something that is posted on Twitter or any other social media page.

The issues that are being raised are long over-due. I suspect that there are thousands of women who could tell similar stories. I also suspect and hope that there are thousands of men who cringe at what they said or how they acted 20, 30 or 40 years ago. We need to find a platform so that women and men can have these conversations. But somehow we need stop it from being just about those who are rich, famous, powerful or have just got jobs within the public view. Surely the conversation cannot just be about getting famous men fired.

It would seem to me that at least part of what we need to talk about is how men and women are raising their daughters and their sons. The errors of the past can be apologized for, the worst perpetrators can be publically shamed and humiliated - but I need to know that my three grandson will never do or say anything that offends, humiliates or threatens a women and I need to know that my granddaughter will always be both safe and live in a society where she can easily say when she is not.