Here’s how we get more women into leadership roles
Roderick Benns is the publisher of The Advocate. An award-winning author and journalist who grew up in Lindsay, he has written several books including Basic Income: How a Canadian Movement Could Change the World.
It’s been a month since Coun. Tracy Richardson stunned the Kawartha Lakes community by announcing she would not be running again for council.
Online and in-person harassment, violent threats, intimidation, and general discourtesy by so-called fellow citizens of this city drove her from public service. We are worse off for it, not only for the absence of this person, but for the message it conveys to other women who may have pondered running for election.
I miss the days when average people didn’t have a voice. I know that sounds elitist. But I specifically mean an online voice. Gen Z and younger can’t conceive of such a world, but yes Virginia there was a time when you didn’t get to call yourself CharmingSquirrel70 on a message board and spew your hateful vitriol to the world at large.
In the old days, the repugnant and asinine didn’t get a megaphone. They maybe had a few friends who shared their unsavoury views at a backyard barbecue or the local bar. But that was where the chain link was broken.
So what to do about this toxicity, especially vis-à-vis attracting good political candidates?
Just a couple years ago, RCMP commissioner Mike Duheme made a few suggestions to the federal government, including:
Platform moderation: Social-media companies must put more effort to find, limit, remove, or down-rank abusive content.
Legal protections: Many threats fall below current criminal thresholds, so targeted legal reforms to raise the cost of harassment.
Party-level support: When political parties provide security, rapid response, and public backing, women are more likely to run and stay.
Quotas and proportional representation: Structural reforms change a lot. Quotas and PR increase the number of women elected and normalizes female officeholding, which has positive effects over time.
More than 130 nations in the world have some form of quota system. In many cases, it’s the political parties themselves doing this voluntarily, like alternating male and female candidates. And in other nations, there are outright quotas in law for their electoral systems. For example, in France, Spain and Belgium, the parity law for genders at the national level also applies to municipal councils in cities above 1,000 people.
In Iceland and Denmark, seven of the last 10 years were governed by a female prime minister. Over in Norway, eight years. This is common in Scandinavia, to see this level of female participation in politics, because political parties have made it normal to alternate between male and female candidates.
Research from BMJ Global Health shows women leaders are associated with improvements in health outcomes and attention to social policies. When women get the chance to be leaders, we all win.
The only question that remains is whether parties – or governments – will ever step up and take action.
Restoring a Clear Civic Boundary
If Kawartha Lakes wants more women — and more good people generally — to step forward for public service, we need to restore a basic civic boundary.
Criticism is democracy. Residents have every right to question council decisions, challenge spending, oppose policies, organize politically, and vote elected officials out of office.
But intimidation is not democracy.
Threats, harassment, stalking, targeting someone’s family, showing up at a home, or trying to make public service feel personally unsafe are not forms of accountability. They are attempts to make people afraid.
Kawartha Lakes has already seen how serious this boundary can become. There is an active local case in court involving charges related to alleged criminal harassment, uttering threats, and intimidation of a justice system participant – a public official. Those charges remain allegations unless proven in court, and the presumption of innocence matters. But the broader civic lesson still stands: the line between angry political disagreement and alleged criminal conduct is real. Public disagreement must not become personal intimidation.
This matters especially for women in public life. Women often face a different kind of scrutiny and hostility than men. When public service comes with abuse directed at one’s safety, family, home, or livelihood, many capable people will decide it is simply not worth the cost.
That is a loss for the whole community.
The answer is not to shield elected officials from criticism. Politics should be open, vigorous, and sometimes uncomfortable. Council decisions affect taxes, housing, roads, services, development, and the future of our communities. Residents are entitled to argue forcefully.
But there must be a clear line.
Challenge the policy. Question the vote. Demand better leadership. Organize opposition.
Do not threaten people. Do not harass them. Do not target their families. Do not make cruelty the price of serving the community.
If we want healthier local democracy, stronger candidates, and more women willing to lead, we should begin by making that civic boundary unmistakable – and unacceptable to cross – and when it is crossed, there should be timely action to address it.
One way to make that boundary clearer is for the justice system to deal with cases involving alleged intimidation of public officials in a timely way. This is not about prejudging anyone’s guilt. It is about showing the public that these matters are serious, that due process works, and that the boundary between civic disagreement and intimidation is not merely theoretical.
It has now been more than two years since the charges in the local case were laid. Kawartha Lakes deserves resolution. Public officials deserve protection. The accused deserves due process. And the community deserves to see that this civic boundary exists, matters, and will be upheld.
In this case, however, the public is left with delay, uncertainty, and silence. A publication ban may be legally necessary, and it must be respected. But the result is still deeply unsatisfying: a case involving alleged intimidation of public officials remains unresolved, while the community is left unable to fully understand what is happening or why it is taking so long.
That is not how public confidence is built.
If the justice system is meant to show that threats and intimidation are outside the boundary of democratic participation, then timely resolution matters. Until that happens, Kawartha Lakes is left waiting — not only for the outcome of one case, but for a clear public signal that the boundary between civic disagreement and intimidation is real.
There is another public interest at stake as well. Area First Nations have publicly rejected the claimed Indigenous authority the accused has assumed and warned that such claims can confuse the public and undermine legitimate treaty rights and consultation processes. They, too, deserve timely clarity.
A case touching alleged intimidation of public officials, disputed claims of Indigenous authority, and the boundaries of lawful civic participation should not linger unresolved for years in Ontario courts.
It not only sounds but openly and blatantly is elitist to “miss the days when average people didn’t have a voice”. That is how we got gay bashing and Starlight Tours and why we still tolerate largely unseen abuses in many of our penal and other institutions, including our bureaucracies. But it is hard not to sympathize with that nostalgia as well, especially as we are all now targets of malicious bots and anonymous trolls on social media.
I disagree with RCMP Commissioner Duheme that it is the responsibility of social-media companies to “put more effort to find, limit, remove, or down-rank abusive content”. What is abusive content to some might not be abusive content to others and different connotations in different cultures mean different things to different people. In today’s entertainment democracy, “abusive” often means politically incorrect. We might as well try to stop the fourth industrial revolution entirely. But I’d endorse a law that requires every single person, politicians and security personnel included, to pass a course on social media usage for every social media platform we use and to be required to repeat that training yearly in order to enjoy the privilege of engaging in social media. I don’t think that would necessarily reduce the number of bots and anonymous abusive accounts or organized foreign political campaigns to undermine confidence in western justice but it might serve to remind everyone how much power we all have to control abusive content on social media. It is what the BLOCK function is for. To quote Warren Kinsella: “Block early and block often”. Each of us has the power to control our own social media community. It is the best way to survive and the most fair. It allows each of us to determine and moderate what we individually find abusive in content and tone and what content we are willing to live with in the evolutionary globalization of community at the same time as we maintain maximum freedom of expression. Prosecute the criminal but tolerate the offensive.
In-person harassment, violent threats, and intimidation are all Criminal Code violations. But as you note, much of what we call social media abuse is really just political views and personal insult we find offensive and that those expressing the offensive views consider their Constitutionally protected freedom of expression. And they have a point. Ignorance and insult are not criminal offences. Restricting what we might consider “abuse” but what others consider beliefs foundational to their standpoint epistemology could easily morph into not only politically-motivated allegations of misuse of authority and oppressive overreach but also the real deal. We need to be very careful if we value the freedom, human rights, and democracy that are the bedrock of our peace, order and good government.
I would support providing our elected officials with panic buttons for safety reasons. Many of our federal and provincial officials travel with security 24/7. Maybe it is time for municipalities to extend the same sort of protection to politicians we pay to defend our human rights, freedoms and democracy. But for that extra expense, I want our politicians to merit that protection and not use it to oppress the views of those constituents they hear say should be marginalized and ostracized for speaking out against human rights abuses and corruption in government.
The biggest danger to government restrictions on who can speak and who can be heard is it can lead to revolution when those whose voices are oppressed feel oppressed too much. Look at what happened during COVID with those the PM characterized as a “fringe minority”. Perhaps the best way to deal with those whose views we find offensive is to make judicious use of the BLOCK function in social media and in in-person conversations, to limit the time we allow the public to express their views. A healthy, functioning democracy requires we treat everyone – even those whose views we find offensive – with respect.
Council bylaws mandate our elected officials to serve those who elect them. That is the model for council behaviour – service – not personal ambition or even the realization of personal or municipally, provincially, or federally collective political goals. Our elected officials are mandated to serve their constituents and sometimes that may mean speaking truth to power that other members of council may find offensive. I think it is positively shameful the way Pickering Councillor Lisa Robinson has been treated for expressing the sometimes politically incorrect and personally offensive views of her constituents. I think it is a misuse of the office of the Integrity Commissioner to try to force her, a single mother, out of politics by docking her pay for months on end.
If we want more women to run for office, we must stop using the Integrity Commissioner as a weapon to enforce politically correct views and start using it to educate councillors, not to punish them for representing and voicing the views of politically marginalized constituents. So long as civility is the standard, the right and duty of our elected officials to offend with politically incorrect beliefs on behalf of the constituents they serve must remain protected.
Finally, we should make no mistake about how organized some campaigns to drive women from politics are. Any woman who has stood up against corruption in private or public life knows what reprisal feels like. Sherron Watkins, the Enron whistleblower, said her research shows most whistleblowers die from the reprisal. Unless a woman has politically well-connected women and politically and/or privately well-connected men in her family and on her team, it is nigh on impossible for a woman to successfully run for office in our current political environment.
It is the duty of all of us but especially the men to support women who run for office, not to support their candidacy or their campaign necessarily, but to support their right to run for office free from threat of physical harm.