Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams. On the podcast today, New Westminster Councilor Nadine Nakagawa joins me to talk about the toxic environment faced by women, gender minorities, and people of colour on municipal councils.
Speaker: When a woman resigns from political office or makes a decision not to run for re -election, one of the most common reasons given is the toxic environment that they face on the job. From sexual harassment to online bullying and threats of violence, women politicians face far more challenges in public life than their male counterparts.
Speaker: A new research project took a close look at what women, gender minorities, and racialized politicians face when they get elected. It was conducted by the Feminist Campaign School in partnership with the Climate Caucus.
Speaker: Nadine Nakagawa is a city council in New Westminster, first elected in 2018 and re -elected in 2022. She's one of the lead researchers in the project and an author of the Barriers Project report. Hi Nadine. Hi there. So the report is based on the experiences of local government officials. Why did you decide to focus it that way on municipal politicians?
Speaker: What is interesting is that municipal politicians or municipal politics is the least representative level of government, which often surprises people because it is closest to the communities. People would assume that it's the most accessible because people don't have to fly off to Ottawa or to Victoria.
Speaker: They get to stay in their home community and work on really local issues. But in fact, it is much less representative, meaning that there's many fewer women, and there are no stats on other types of identity markers, such as race or disability status.
Speaker: And there's also very little research about this level of government. There have been studies that have been done about federal politics or provincial politics, but not as much about the municipal sphere. And so it's hard to understand what the problems are if we're not talking about them openly, and even harder to find solutions. And so as somebody who is serving in local government, I do hear from many of my colleagues about their experiences. And it's quite horrifying
Speaker: both in how deeply it affects them, but the impacts it has on our communities as well. After my first term in office, a lot of really excellent women city councillors chose not to run for a second term simply because it doesn't work for their lives. The toll it took was too great. And I really think that that's a huge miss for their local communities, which are all around the province, but also for our larger community because they were doing really important work.
Speaker: How did you go about collecting the data that you talk about in the report? Well, so we did this. We got a grant from the federal government from Women and Gender Equality Canada. And this was some of the funding that came through during the pandemic. And so we took that funding and we did a survey of elected officials in Alberta and BC, specifically women and people who identify as gender minorities.
Speaker: recognizing that there really isn't any good research on this as well. Generally, we have classified people as a binary, you know, either a man or a woman, ignoring a whole range of other folks are deeply underrepresented local government, but also we need to collect that information to know for sure. So we put out a survey in Alberta, NBC,
Speaker: And then we followed up with one -to -one interviews asking about experiences, including barriers. And then we did some focus groups, workshopping solution ideas, because at the end of the day, you know, it gets pretty tiring to keep talking over and over and over again about the barriers that women face in any field of work without really getting into, so what are we going to do about it?
Speaker: When you break out the demographics of the survey participants, a very small percentage identified as people of color and an even smaller number is gender minorities. What does that tell you?
Speaker: Well, it tells you that we have more work to do to make sure that our city councils look like our communities. And this is really personal experience for me in 2018, along with my colleague Chino Doss. I was one of the first people of color elected in the city of New Westminster to a council seat in 2018. And this is in a community that's incredibly diverse. And so again, it's really troubling because often people will say, well, people aren't putting their names forward.
Speaker: Well, there's really real reasons why people would choose to not put their names forward. But it's not good enough if our city council's decision -making tables that exclude such large swaths of the demographics. And there's lots of questions, more questions that we could ask. We did ask, for example, we had conversations about caregiving status.
Speaker: knowing that if you're caring for children or for elders, that's an additional barrier. We didn't get as much into data, for example, on housing tenure, because again, renters are really underrepresented. So there's lots of demographic information that we chose to collect. There's lots that we didn't have a chance to collect. But it really painted a picture of who's really serving at city council tables and who is being excluded.
Speaker: So among the responses you got from people who responded to the survey, and we should say these were then largely identifying as white people, what kinds of discrimination did they face?
Speaker: Well, it was really interesting to look at the survey information and also have the conversations with people. And there were stark differences between what people said their experiences were in Alberta and BC. But something that came up time and time again was people would say, oh, no, I've never experienced gender -based discrimination. And then they would go on to describe many circumstances that I would certainly classify as gender -based discrimination.
Speaker: And they would sort of realize that as they were talking about it and say, oh dear, you know, that really was sexism, wasn't it? So it was really revealing, you know, having these conversations with people sharing what their experiences were. Another big trend that came up was around disability.
Speaker: Knowing that again, the job of being a city councilor is not very accommodating for people with lots of different types of disabilities. And so we found that people who are disabled were deeply underrepresented in the statistical information that came back. But again, when people started to talk about it, they would disclose
Speaker: Disabilities that maybe didn't understand them as such or felt the need to keep them secret because they felt that their constituents would then discriminate against them essentially as a result of them so yeah lots of information about that coming up.
Speaker: But really needing to have conversations with people to help them understand their experiences and put them in perspective. That was a big theme that arose for us as researchers that came up time and time again that people weren't necessarily understanding them that way or were used to masking or sort of pushing through these barriers, thinking, I just need to have a thick skin, which is something we hear a lot when we're talking about the experiences of women in politics. And then as they started talking about it, yeah, better understanding their own experiences.
Speaker: There were stories in the report of sexual assault by other council members, high rates of online harassment from the public, physical threats, almost stalking situations. I mean, these were not minor incidents.
Speaker: not minor incidents. And as people who have experiences in our lives, we know how much these – often they're referred to as microaggressions, not the sexual assault. Obviously, that is a very serious situation. But some of the things they seem small or minor, they're hard to point to as an example. But when they come altogether as these ongoing experiences over and over and over again,
Speaker: They really pile up. The online harassment, I don't think any of us are surprised to hear that people are being, especially women and gender minorities, are being harassed online. That's not new news. That's unfortunately pretty well known. But I think what was quite stunning is the rates of harassment and assault by colleagues. That was quite stunning.
Speaker: deeply upsetting to hear about because there is so little recourse. You know, when people are elected, it's very hard to advocate that, oh, I don't want to sit next to this counselor because he is violent to me, threatens me. He sexually harasses me when they've been elected to do that job. And there is no recourse on these things. If you're experiencing that, your recourse is to go to either your mayor or the CAO, basically the CEO of the city, the city manager.
Speaker: But what if it's them that are harassing you? Then there is no recourse. We also come into, if you're asking for repercussions for a member of council, sometimes those things fall along political lines that if, well, that's my political ally, I'm not gonna sanction him. And so again, there is no safe sort of workplace practices like we'd expect in any other workplace. This really falls outside of that, this ability to seek a workplace that's free of harassment and abuse. Apparently as city councilors, we don't have a right to that.
Speaker: Did you find a significant difference between BC and Alberta? There is. This story is unsurprising. I think the stories of sexual assault were worse in Alberta. There was also a deeper sense of isolation amongst the councillors there. They were really encouraged not to talk to one another, which again, we know is a really good way to preserve the status quo for abuse and harassment.
Speaker: We also asked a question about identity as a feminist. And one of the reasons we asked that is trying to understand what kind of analysis or perspectives people would have around their own experiences. And we found that the women elected to city councils in Alberta were much less likely to identify as feminists. And what that says to me is that perhaps you're also less likely to see these experiences as gendered if you're not seeing it through a lens of equity or equality for genders.
Speaker: So there were differences. There was differences in recourse mechanisms in Alberta and BC. But in general, I don't want to say it's worse in Alberta because it really depends on the municipality, but the sexual assault by their colleagues was worse in Alberta in a way that was quite shocking. I understand that the study itself actually became a target. What happened?
Speaker: This is another example in Alberta as well that when we shared the survey in Alberta, because we don't want to guess who identifies as what gender, we sent it out more broadly and basically asked people to identify what gender do you identify as, seeking that if you identify as a cisgender man,
Speaker: then we're not actually looking for responses for you. And that apparently was very triggering for some cisgender men who responded to the survey telling us that we're idiots. We had people who received the survey, therefore elected officials in Alberta, basically calling the project manager and harassing her, people insisting that there was only two genders.
Speaker: And so it was really, the irony is so interesting that they're kind of reinforcing what the surveys found, which is that these people can be very abusive and can really strongly attack people based on just even having a question about gender, apparently made it seem like we are reasonable people to attack on that, and they went out of their way to do it.
Speaker: And so they really emphasize the point that even having conversations about gender will flare up that kind of very aggressive response. But then if you layer in that, yes, we're talking about the experiences of women and gender minorities sitting at the tables, but we also want to talk about the policymaking, the types of policies that they are going to make
Speaker: as a response to their lived experiences being that substantive representation, meaning, I'm going to stand up for my community. I'm going to do things that support women and gender minorities policy -wise. Can you imagine if you're a woman at one of those council tables trying to talk about gendered services or gendered experiences in the city? I can only imagine what the response of their colleagues would be if they went out of their way to call a research project in BC to harass them, how they were to respond to their colleagues if they brought up something even remotely similar.
Speaker: Yeah, it was quite shocking that it went that far, but I think it really reinforces the nature of the problem. You make a number of recommendations in the report, including a provincial integrity commissioner for local government. What kind of role could that person perform? Many jurisdictions actually have a similar role to this, including the city of Vancouver, the city of Surrey.
Speaker: But really, we are looking for a more enhanced role in that we really feel that a provincial integrity commissioner should have the ability to investigate more deeply if there's allegations of harassment or abuse or harm, and that they should actually have the ability to remove elected officials from their role if they're found to be harassing their colleagues or abusive in some way.
Speaker: which doesn't currently exist that if you're elected to this role, you really can't be removed from a role as a city councilor. You're there for four years. So we wanted that, but we also thought there was opportunities to provide training about topics relating to anti -oppression like disability rights or things relating to gender identity. So I think there's really proactive work that somebody could do in that role. And also we need some sort of accountability mechanism that doesn't currently exist. If one of my colleagues is harassing me at the council table,
Speaker: really, there is nothing that I can do about it. And that is not acceptable. And it makes it really difficult to invite people, say, you know, I think you'd be great in this role. I think you should serve at local government, knowing that you're inviting them into a sphere where they're going to be harassed and there's no accountability. You also call for an end to the normalization of abuse. What would that look like?
Speaker: Well, you know, this is a larger topic. We know we live in a system that is deeply harassing of women and gender minorities. And so it's some things like whistleblower protections, for example, there is a whisper network of people who are harmful. And so if I'm lucky enough and I'm at a conference and
Speaker: There's somebody there who is known to be a harasser of women. Hopefully one of my colleagues will say, hey FYI, maybe just take some distance. But we're not always lucky enough to know somebody or have somebody sort of give us that nudge. So having whistleblower protections where people could raise an alert about people.
Speaker: and be able to speak out in a protected way. I think it's also naming abuse. We have to be able to talk about these abuses as racially motivated, gendered, targeting people with disabilities, targeting people who are oppressed in some way. We recently presented this at the Union ABC Municipalities event and something that got a lot of support, there was a lot of enthusiasm about was the idea of bystander training.
Speaker: Because too often, if I'm the one who's being targeted, I'm left sort of to stand up for myself. And one reality, I need people who might identify want to be allies.
Speaker: to know how to support me in a meaningful way and actually step in front of that harm and abuse that I'm experiencing. So there's a few different ways. It is a really difficult problem to solve because again, these systems are much, much bigger than just local government tables. But I think there's concrete ways that we can start to create accountability processes and create more knowledge within what are essentially workplaces to better protect people who are stepping into these roles. Well, there's so much in the report and I'm going to point people to where they can find it.
Speaker: but I just want to thank you so much for talking with me about this today. Yeah, it's really my pleasure to get the opportunity to share what we learned from it. I've been speaking with Nadine Nakagawa, City Councilor in New Westminster, and one of the lead researchers into a study of the barriers faced by women, gender minorities, and racialized politicians. And you can find the report at localrepresentation .ca.
Speaker: The Red Eye Collective is based in Vancouver. You can check us out at coopradio .org slash redeye.
