After the scathing letter she received on Friday from Conservative Senator Claude Degenais, which was in response to the Senate abolition flier that he received, NDP MP Charmaine Borg decided to move a point of privilege in the Commons, and to claim that Degenais’ letter was somehow misogynistic.
No, seriously.
I’ve read the letter. There is absolutely no gendered language in it. And because it’s in French, that’s quite apparent. In fact, most of the conjugations are in the masculine plural, as he is largely addressing the NDP caucus as a whole (the letter was sent out Hill-wide in response to Borg, not just to her personally). It may have been condescending and rude, but there is no misogyny.
Oh, Borg claims – he makes it sound like I’m a little girl! He’s attacking me, a young woman! He makes it harder for other young women to get into politics! The problem with Borg’s claims is that she’s the one who’s invoking gender, and by making that move, she’s the one who is implicitly making a sexist assumption – that because she is a young woman that the Senator shouldn’t be mean to her. Never mind that her age and gender are not mentioned anywhere in Degenais’ letter. Borg’s argument that he wouldn’t have made the same attack if she had been “an old white guy” doesn’t exactly hold water either if you consider the riposte that Senate Speaker Noel Kinsella sent to Thomas Mulcair last week after Mulcair smeared him in the House under the protection of privilege, in which Kinsella warned that if the NDP wanted a war between the two chambers that the Senate was going to bring it. Degenais himself said that if the NDP were going to attack the Senate, he was going to defend the institution. Was his letter the best defence? Not in the slightest. But Borg’s attempt to make this about her age and gender are overplaying her hand entirely.
Despite the abuse I got over the Twitter Machine Monday afternoon by NDP trolls when I typified Borg’s response as whinging – the very same term that I have applied to both Charlie Angus and Nathan Cullen’s treatment of this very situation – there is a serious side to my calling out Borg’s overreach, and that is because misogyny is serious. And let’s not kid ourselves – there is a hell of a lot of sexism and misogyny in Canadian politics. I’ve heard from many a female MP about the kind of abuse they face daily, wherein they are accused of being whores, or that they only got to their positions by offering sexual favours to the Prime Minister, or so on. Let’s also remind ourselves of the difference between sexism and misogyny, in that misogyny is about the hatred of women by men. And yes, hatred is a very specific term with specific meaning and intent.
There was nothing in Degenais’ letter that qualifies as hateful. I would have a hard time calling it sexist because there is no gendered language. And when Borg tries to call it misogynistic, she is diminishing the actual sexism and misogyny that female MPs face every day. It doesn’t matter that this hurt her feelings – that’s politics. It’s a rough game, and if she doesn’t have a thick enough skin to endure a bit of the rough-and-tumble, then perhaps she should reconsider why she is in the Commons. There is also zero basis for a question of privilege – nothing that Degenais did or said impedes Borg’s role as an MP. She tried to claim that because he sent it to the entire Hill distribution list that it was public humiliation. Erm, he could have published it as an open letter in her local newspaper and the effect would have been the same. That’s not impeding her job – dealing with tough criticism is part of it.
Borg could have chosen to challenge Degenais’ points that she is ignorant of the constitution, or that her constituents find her useless, or that she wasn’t elected on her own merits (though that one would be tough, considering that she never even visited the riding before she got elected and that party headquarters concocted a number of fabrications to cover for her absence, which she later copped to). But she didn’t. While she said that he didn’t engage her on ideas, she didn’t either and instead made a vile accusation against him because he was mean to a girl. It’s hard to see how that is living up to the very standard that she is espousing he live up to.
This is politics, like it or loathe it. If you want to play in the big leagues, you have to take a punch. Especially if you picked the fight, which Borg did by signing off on those ten percenters with her name on them.