Thank you.
I commend the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women for its interest in barriers facing women in politics, and I appreciate the opportunity to appear today.
Thanks to the support of the SSHRC, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, I have been able to study for an extended period many of the questions that face the committee. Given the open, public availability of my findings, I will not repeat here what I have stated in print.
What concerns me today is our neglect of very powerful brakes on the supply of women candidates. These obstacles come into play long before the formal recruitment and nomination processes begin. In particular, I want to highlight the threats to personal security that face many women in public life, which in turn discourage potential participants from entering the political process.
Many Canadians have heard about and are concerned about violence against women, including the particular challenges faced by aboriginal women. Many may have also read news reports about the 2003 assassination in a Stockholm department store of the Swedish foreign minister, Anna Lindh, who ranked among the most high-profile supporters of Sweden joining the euro zone in the European Union. Some Canadians will likely recall the shooting in 2011 of U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in the parking lot of a Tucson supermarket where she was holding a meeting with her local constituents. More recently, Canadians may remember the murder in 2016 of the British Labour MP Jo Cox, a proponent of Britain's remaining in the European Union, when she was outside a local library while on her way to meet with her constituents.
We rarely discuss or even acknowledge acts of violence against women legislators in political systems that are similar to Canada's, even though these events should haunt us. We know that men parliamentarians in Sweden, the U.S., and the U.K. have also faced violent threats, but historically there were far more men than women in elective office, so the probability of the assassination or attempted assassination of a woman politician, assuming such attacks are random, would be much lower for a woman than for a man.
At the time of the incidents I described, Anna Lindh, Gabrielle Giffords, and Jo Cox were all mothers and they were all progressive politicians with very high public profiles. The subsequent investigations indicated that each was explicitly targeted by a male assassin. This pattern is consistent with international data gathered by the National Democratic Institute, which is a non-profit, non-partisan organization based in Washington, D.C. The mission of the NDI is to strengthen democratic political institutions. In March 2016 the NDI launched a social media initiative known as #NotTheCost, Stopping Violence Against Women in Politics. If we read the NDI website, and I quote:
Over the last few decades, gender equality in political life and public offices has grown substantially, bringing with it a host of positive effects for women, democracy and society. However, as more women have emerged as activists, elected leaders, officials and voters, they have encountered increasing levels of harassment, intimidation, psychological abuse — in person and, increasingly, online. This backlash discourages women from engaging politically, creates a serious barrier to their ability to freely and safely pursue their rights to political participation, and undermines democracy.
The text of the website continues, and I quote:
Violence against women in politics fits within the international definition of violence against women. It encompasses all forms of aggression, coercion and intimidation against women as political actors simply because they are women and is used to control, limit or prevent women’s full and equal political participation. This violence is both physical and psychological in nature, and includes the growing trend of cyberbullying and other forms of online violence. Women who are victims of violence may know their attackers, or the perpetrators may be unknown — even anonymous or acting across national borders, in the case of online violence.
While political violence happens against both men and women, violence against women in politics targets women because they are women, in ways that apply particularly to women (e.g., sexual violence and sexist attacks), and discourages all women from political activity, with a particularly negative impact on young women or new entrants to politics.
The website of the National Democratic Institute encourages readers to report incidents of violence against women in public life and flags the reported incidents on a map of the world. I looked at the map yesterday and I was struck by the fact that the entire map of Canada remains entirely free and open, uncluttered by any indication of even a single incident. I bring this matter to the attention of the committee because a survey by two Canadian scholars finds that women members of the House of Commons have avoided posting on the Internet the names and photographs of their children because of safety concerns.
Also, I'm currently editing a book that examines the 11 Canadian women who have led our provincial and territorial governments. The media reports that have been used in that research show that two contemporary women premiers in Canada have faced unprecedented levels of hostility, and they are both leaders of progressive governments. Data from the Ontario Provincial Police and the Toronto police, cited in a 2017 article, show that Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne was the object of particularly venomous threats because of her sexual orientation. A 2017 report on Premier Wynne's social media accounts presents in detail the grotesque, often highly sexualized, messages that she received.
If we look at a 2017 report, we see that Alberta Premier Rachel Notley was the target of at least 11 death threats during her first three years as provincial leader. That story details 386 pages of what the Alberta Department of Justice calls “occurrence summaries” that document, and I quote, “...an alarming tweet, vulgar email, threat or call aimed at an Alberta politician—most often Premier Rachel Notley” during her first two and a half years a premier.
Alberta Justice also compiled a longitudinal record of threats against all Alberta premiers who held office between 2003 and 2015. It found that Premier Notley was by far the most threatened premier during that period. In the roughly seven months between winning a majority government and the end of 2015, Rachel Notley was the subject of 19 threats outside of social media out a total of 55 for all premiers, and these threats were logged over a 12-year period. We know from these data that former Alberta Premier Alison Redford was the target of 16 threats between 2012 and 2014. In other words, two women premiers in Alberta who were only briefly in office during the period that was studied accounted for about 56% of the threats.
My purpose in bringing these data about women MPs and provincial premiers to the committee's attention is to shed critical light on the assumption that all is well with the security of women in Canadian public life. Notwithstanding the map of Canada on the website of the National Democratic Institute, there have been many troubling incidents in this country. I recommend to the attention of committee members the work of the NDI and of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which has also published online the findings of research about violence against women in public life as well as recommendations to address it.
The IPU report concludes that as is the case with the general issue of violence against women, no action on problems affecting political women can occur unless members of Parliament and members of the public acknowledge there is a problem that warrants civic attention. In the words of the IPU authors, “...once the phenomenon is visible and recognized, solutions either exist or can be found or invented.”
As long as we continue to live in denial of this phenomenon, the challenges will continue to be considered the private troubles of public women. Given the mandate of the House of Commons, notably for Canada-wide action in the areas of public safety and crime, I urge members of the committee to begin at the very least a directed national conversation about the security climate facing women in politics.
Thank you for your consideration.