Since the publication ban on the name of the victim of Harold LeBel was lifted, a symbol strikes me as particularly heavy. Catherine Fournier, now mayor of Longueuil, was also the youngest woman ever elected to the National Assembly, in 2016, at 24 years old.
The youngest female MP in the history of Quebec, therefore, was sexually assaulted by one of her colleagues.
The symbol is striking, because when you have been a young woman in politics—whether as a volunteer, employee of a political party or even elected—you know how real the risks of sexual violence are and that vigilance is always required. Mme Fournier herself, in an interview at The Pressevoked this week the particular nature of the political environment, where “promiscuity” is particularly strong between colleagues who go through very long days together on Parliament Hill, outside their original environment.
Take this intensity of social relations and add to it the culture of alcohol, ordinary sexism and ageism, particularly acute power inequalities between different generations of colleagues, job insecurity and, ultimately, partisan cultures that value loyalty to the team above all else: this is a perfect recipe for creating a particularly dangerous professional environment for the young women who will evolve there.
At a press conference this week, the leader of the Parti Québécois, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon had to answer questions from journalists about his reaction to the affair. The elected first explains that he became aware of the allegations against Mr. LeBel at the time of his arrest, and that he was quickly exposed to contradictory information within his caucus. His reflex, then, was not to contact the alleged victim or the accused (quickly excluded from the caucus), in order to let the legal process take its course.
Until then, we follow his reasoning.
The press conference thickens when he is asked, in English, if he would again let a young woman from his party spend the night with an older colleague. Mr. St-Pierre-Plamondon responds that outside the workplace, “people make decisions with their private life”. “The employer has no information on this,” he adds, “and the employer is not expected to start managing how each employee’s privacy will be governed.”
It’s a type of speech that sounds, let’s put it nicely, pre-#MeToo… Let’s explain.
Higher education is another one where ordinary sexism and ageism reign — the hierarchical pyramid there is very steep — and where young people depend on the mentorship of their professors. With feminist mobilizations, universities have been forced to take notice of how rape culture operates within its ranks, often when professors interact with female students outside of classrooms.
Since 2017, a law has been passed to force higher education institutions to stop reasoning… like the leader of the Parti Québécois. CEGEPs and universities must therefore adopt framework policies that define sexual violence, modernize the management of complaints and invest in prevention and awareness initiatives for the entire community.
We have therefore gone from a culture where we are surprised at the existence of sexual violence in each case reported, where we enjoin people to file a complaint, then where we “respect the work of the courts” , to a culture of prevention where we work to inform everyone on campus of their rights and responsibilities.
Even if there is still a lot of work to be done in CEGEPs and universities, we must admit that this paradigm shift is major.
When we hear M.me Fournier talk about her thoughts in the days and months following the attack, when she did not want to “disturb” her political training by denouncing a man respected by all, we see at work the typical reasoning of a victim within an organization that has not yet made this paradigm shift. This is what happens when you can file a complaint in theory, but when in practice, the social taboo and the dynamics of power within a given environment make it more precarious, even tend to punish the people who harm ” stars “.
It is also very telling that M.me Fournier only felt the strength to denounce after having decided to sit as an independent. In context, a post-mortem of the Harold LeBel affair that did away with a critical reflection on the culture within political parties and focused only on the examination of the judicial process would miss a piece. essential.
If the issue of sexual violence was on the agenda of orientation activities for newly elected officials, if political parties were obliged to make their members aware of the phenomenon, if a complaint process for their employees and volunteers was framed by the Chief Electoral Officer of Quebec (we are talking…) or that of the National Assembly was reviewed and corrected to better serve the victims, the political milieu would then begin to move forward in this paradigm shift already at work in the milieu higher education, but also arts and culture, for example, since the #MeToo movement.
Since the lifting of the publication ban on his name, Mme Fournier herself launches in the public space several ideas that go in this direction. While she was still a deputy, she also already supported, moreover, the collective The voice of young people count, which pushes for a framework law against sexual violence in primary and secondary schools.
For her courage, but also for her ideas, and her choice to use her voice to prevent others from suffering the same fate, we all owe Catherine Fournier a proud debt. From the bottom of our hearts, we must therefore say thank you.
Anthropologist, Emilie Nicolas is a columnist at Duty and to Release. She hosts the podcast Detours for Canadaland.