Alberta NDP MLA Shannon Phillips speaks at a news conference in Ottawa on June 28, 2018.PATRICK DOYLE/The Canadian Press
For most of the country, this week’s announcement by Alberta NDP MLA Shannon Phillips that she is leaving politics passed with little notice.
That’s a shame. It was one of the most consequential developments in our politics in many years. Frankly, it’s a decision that should concern us all, one that should make us worried as a country.
For those who don’t know Ms. Phillips, let me offer a short introduction. She is a thrice-elected NDP MLA from Lethbridge, a city not exactly known as a bastion of progressivism. Her victories speak to her tenacity and ability to find common ground among people with a broad spectrum of views.
She was a very good environment minister in the one-term NDP government of Rachel Notley. In her spare time, she would take out her frustrations on a roller derby oval, participating under the nom de plume Gnome Stompsky, in homage to the social critic Noam Chomsky. As environment minister, it was her proposal to protect more provincial parkland near her Lethbridge riding that irked some members of the local police force.
In 2017, two members of that police force (who were also offroading enthusiasts, an activity proposed to be limited by new park protections) decided to put Ms. Phillips under surveillance, without cause, in a gross violation of her privacy and personal safety. This is the sort of stuff you’d expect from law enforcement agencies in the southern United States, not Canada. Equally alarming: Alberta’s Crown Prosecution Service last month decided not to take the matter to court, despite a recommendation from the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team that there was a strong case to be made that criminal activity was carried out by the Lethbridge officers.
Perhaps it was not surprising, then, that Ms. Phillips cited this in her statement announcing her departure from politics next month. She called the activities of the police “so far outside the acceptable norm of the rule of law and the institutions of a liberal democracy for which they have never been held accountable and never shown a whiff of responsibility.”
Think about that. It doesn’t matter if you live in Markham, Ont., or Peggys Cove, N.S., or Pouce Coupe, B.C., this is something all of us should be angry about, that this can happen in this country.
The other reasons Ms. Phillips gave for her decision are no less distressing, and sadly, all too familiar: a coarsening of our political discourse; the horrible spread of disinformation; the abuse and hatred directed toward politicians, particularly women; the quickly disappearing ability to see public office as a worthy aspiration.
All of this is a threat to Canada. And it’s been cited by many other politicians, a majority female, as the reason why they are departing public life for one that is safer.
I accept that politicians are, at least partially, responsible for the degradation of public life that we are witnessing. To pretend we have not imported some of the vile politics on display in the United States is to be grossly ignorant of reality. The lack of decorum in the House of Commons is worse than it’s ever been and no one cares. Proceedings are ruled over by a Speaker who many don’t respect and some are aggressively trying to get rid of. The result is a daily scene that looks like a class of high schoolers acting out in front of a helpless substitute teacher.
Honestly, who in their right mind would want to get into public life today? What sane woman – what sane person – would want to subject herself to the vile, deflating abuse (online and otherwise) that seems to now be part and parcel of being a politician in Canada? The lure of good salaries and potentially excellent pensions (if you can last in the zoo for six years) only has so much attractiveness.
(I guarantee you that minutes after this column is published online, there will be keyboard warriors tapping madly: “Boo hoo. If women can’t stand the heat they should just stay in the kitchen.” And this will be liked many times over, and others will chime in with equally brilliant witticisms.)
Meantime, we will gather at summer barbecues and talk about how lousy our politicians are and bemoan the fact that nothing ever seems to get done in this country to fix the many problems we have. We will conveniently ignore the rot that is eating away at our politics, one that will eventually lead to the floor falling out of our democracy as we know it.
Some will say that’s hyperbole, and alarmism. Maybe. I’d like to think of it as a prediction of what will happen if we don’t wake up to the realities currently swamping and suffocating our politics.