Club Friday Q&A: Sabreena Delhon on Why Canadian Politics Isn't Made For Women
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: Joanne Klimaszewski
Over the past couple of months, I interviewed some of Toronto’s mayoral candidates for town halls hosted by the West End Phoenix, and it has made me think a lot more than usual about the experience of being a politician. As a voter I always pay attention to candidate platforms (I don’t know about you, but I personally resent being asked to make major decisions around who should be responsible for leading my city/province/country based solely on ~vibes~), but my interviews with Chloe Brown, Mitzie Hunter, Josh Matlow and Mayor-Elect Olivia Chow also required me to think more deeply about what it’s like to run for office—especially as a racialized woman who knows she’s going to face sexist comments, not to mention actual online abuse. So, when the opportunity came up to interview Sabreena Delhon about Humans of the House, a new podcast from the Samara Centre for Democracy and Media Girlfriends, it was an immediate yes. Yes, Humans of the House focuses on former MPs, which isn’t quite the same thing as running for municipal office, but overall, the podcast’s insights can apply to all politicians… especially women, who face unique (and uniquely awful) treatment from their peers, constituents and random online commenters. Read on for our chat about why Parliament isn’t made for women, why that matters and, most importantly, what we can do about it.
Let’s start by talking a bit about you and your role at the Samara Centre.
I'm the executive director of the Samara Center for Democracy, and we are a national nonpartisan registered charity. Our mission is to realize resilient democracy in Canada, where we've got an engaged public and responsive institutions. So, the short version is that we want to make it easier for people to talk about and participate in politics. I come to this role as a sociologist, and I previously worked in the justice sector and in academia. A lot of my career has focused on making things that seem boring or intimidating accessible to the public.
I feel like the work that you're doing feels aligned with the work I'm doing, but almost on the flip side. I'm trying to take things that people tend to say are superficial, don't matter or aren't important and I'm like, ‘Actually, they're very important. Let me give you all these studies.’ And you're doing the opposite, where you're like, ‘Here are these things that people know are important,’ but you're saying that they’re also actually interesting.
It seems like things that seem fancy or smart are over here, and things that seem like they’re ‘just’ entertainment, or ‘just’ pop culture are over [there]. But all of this is a part of our society, and how we understand ourselves, what we have to talk about and where our time and energy goes. So, segmenting it in that way really doesn't make sense for our world. For someone who is reading Friday Things, their Instagram feed probably has a lot of other smart accounts that they follow, and yours is right in the middle of it, in addition to whatever other accounts they're following. So if that's how you're absorbing content, why can't we talk about it as intersecting? Why does there have to be a hierarchy? We're all in different moods and modes as human beings all the time, so it should be okay to talk about what's happening in the world and the people in the world that fascinate us, too.
Let’s talk specifically about Humans of the House. How did that come about?
The Samara Center has been around for 15 years and one of our signature projects is a study where we conduct exit interviews with former Members of Parliament. And as anyone who's ever left a job knows, you talk about the experience very differently when you're not in the role. We've done over 160 interviews to date and we've published our findings in reports and in books, but Humans of the House is our first podcast. We're drawing on a dozen of our most recent interviews with former MPs who left the House of Commons between 2015 and 2021.
We felt it was so important to hear the voices in these interviews because the conversations are so broad and wide-reaching, and at times quite raw. We know that podcast listeners are able to tune in with their hearts and minds at the same time, and that you can really tell a compelling human interest and political story in a really impactful way using a podcast medium. So, we were thrilled to be able to work with Media Girlfriends on this.
Over six episodes, we break down the experience of being an MP from the first notion that it's something you would want to do, to what it was like to navigate the job in the first few days, to how you found a way to make change, and then ultimately a reflection on whether it was worth it or not. We talked to 12 very different individuals, leaders in their communities, different political backgrounds, personal backgrounds and lived experiences, and weave their voices together to hear a very complex and nuanced story about life and politics in Canada.
Were there common threads in what you heard from female politicians?
Yes. Some of our guests—Cheryl Hardcastle, Lisa Raitt and Kennedy Stewart—commented on their observations of sexual harassment and toxicity in the workplace. And this isn't about what they were getting from constituents or from the public; this was from their colleagues and what was normalized as the working environment for women. These are people who had come from other sectors into Parliament with a certain expectation about conduct and decorum, and they were shocked by what was normal day-to-day. The language that they use to describe it is pretty severe; Kennedy Stewart mentions that this was the worst place he ever worked, in large part because of how he observed his female colleagues being treated and what they experienced. Cheryl Hardcastle uses the word ‘nightmare’ to talk about Question Period and how some of the younger women colleagues were spoken to by elected male colleagues.
The public needs to know this because the experience, working conditions and the environment that an MP is working in affects us, the people that they serve. We don't want anyone to experience that at work, and definitely not someone who's working for us.
If we think about this from a representation perspective, so much of the conversation around democracy and elections is around ‘Let’s get this person in here, let’s get this new perspective in there, let's increase representation. Ask her, vote for her.’ That sort of energy, which is great. But what about once they're there? What sorts of supports and policies and cultural expectations need to be in place so that we can have a functional work experience?
This reminds me so much of the conversations that we've been having about race, especially post-2020, where the focus was on getting new people and voices into these historically white spaces thinking that was going to solve the problem. But that’s not necessarily the case. I mean, I was just reading about how companies ramped up hiring chief diversity officers after 2020, and how there's since been a decline in hiring.
It's unreasonable to expect one person to manifest a change that is systemic and has centuries behind it, right? That is just not reasonable. And already when we're talking about who gets to be an MP, or who's selected to be a chief diversity officer, these are exceptional people to begin with. So if something is untenable from this person's vantage point, we really need to take that seriously.
Isolation and alienation is a theme that comes up in our exit interviews time and time again. It is lonely; you gotta go to Ottawa, then you gotta fly back to your riding. No one really knows what it's like to be you and in the headspace that you're in; you have to be accountable to your party, you have to be accountable to the people who voted for you, you have to be accountable to yourself and what put you there in the first place. And then you've also got a life, family responsibilities, other people in your world that you want to maintain your relationships with. So, it's a lot of pressure.
Some would say, ‘Well, you should go into that with your eyes wide open. It's a public position, and you're paid a decent salary, so get on with it.’ But I think increasingly with Humans of the House, we've been able to illuminate how this is part of a broader conversation around the future of work and dignity. Being an MP is an important job. It's a serious job. But there are some basic aspects that need to be there in terms of conditions at work that aren't in place.
I always hear about a sense of responsibility, especially when we're talking about women and women of colour. Like, the reason that so many women of colour step into these roles or pursue these roles is not just because they have a personal desire to be in leadership positions, although often like we do, it's also the sense of like, ‘Well, someone's got to do this and it may as well be me.’ So the idea that we’re depending on the most marginalized groups to do this work, and they also have to face these indignities, is extra disturbing to me.
There's a lot of extra emotional labour. In our SAMbot project, we track toxic tweets received by candidates in elections and we know that the type of content that comes towards women is more personal and sexually explicit; it will have that misogynistic dimension to it. So, if you look at the burden placed on candidates, what is placed on women to function and thrive in this role is considerable. Men get toxicity as well. The higher your profile, the more toxicity you're going to get. But it's deeper and more personal and more insidious for women. And it's also things that maybe aren't as terrifying as a death threat, but are the insidious kind of ‘death by 1000 cuts’ comments, like “you’re fat” coming at you day after day. So, you have to put energy in psychologically blocking that, and you've also got all this pressure, because you're the first or you're the only, and everyone's watching you, and all this toxicity is coming at you in a public space, so everybody can see that it's coming your way as well. That's an incredible burden to bear.
And also, because the women who stepped into this arena are really strong and really exceptional, they're not going to complain, right? But if we are all bearing witness to it, then we as a society need to be responsive to it, too. We need to say that that's not acceptable, and that we are committed to a culture of continuous improvement in Canada. And that if we're looking to change the status quo, and evolve our democracy to be more functional and sustainable, then these are the types of things that we need to be responsive to! Because they have a chilling effect on who decides to step forward, who decides to vote in an election—it's connected to the feeling of disengagement and despair that a lot of people feel when it comes to conversations about politics.
Tell me more about the SAMbot project. How did you go about tracking those tweets?
We use machine learning to track toxic abusive tweets received by candidates in Canadian elections. To date, we've analyzed over 3 million tweets, monitored over 1,000 candidates and written reports that looked at the 2021 federal election, the 2022 Ontario election, and most recently, eight municipal elections. (We'll be sharing that analysis in the coming weeks.)
What we do here is measure the obvious, because we know online harassment is a big problem faced by candidates and politicians, and we know that the online conversation is at its most toxic during elections. So, we're using AI for civic inquiry. I'm trying to get a better understanding of the working conditions of the digital campaign trail, and also get a better understanding of the online political conversation so that overall, we can get a better sense of technology's influence on our democratic culture. And so when we monitor tweets, we don't just count how many are toxic. We can also drill down and determine, was this sexually explicit? Was this profane? Is there an identity attack? I can share some results from the Toronto election that we tracked in the fall: We tracked 131 accounts and looked at over 91,000 tweets. In total, 18% of those were abusive, so that's about 16,000 tweets. And of that, we had almost 7,000 threats, 2,300 tweets that had sexually explicit content and over 3,000 identity acts.
We may or may not want to think of Twitter as our digital public square, but it says a lot about the state of the political conversation there. That's not the only place that political conversations happen, but it is an influential space and it does shape the understanding and relationship we have to our democracy.
I don't think that our laws necessarily reflect the fact that online spaces are real social spaces, and I think there's still a large segment of our society that similarly just doesn't see it that way. What do you say to the segments of the society who say that abuse that is happening online isn't real, or isn't representative of what people actually think?
That's one of the motivations behind the project. That's why we describe it as measuring the obvious. When we think about that language—’online harm,’ ‘it’s a tweet’—it really obscures how severe and violent a lot of this content is. We're talking about people getting death threats.
When we share results from the SAMbot project, we have received a lot of media attention. And when the conversation with the producer or the interviewer is over, they will say, off the record, ‘Thank you so much for doing this work, because it really legitimizes what we're experiencing and what I've seen my colleagues experiencing.’
But when we say, in the federal election, we tracked 140,000 tweets with sexually explicit content, that hits home. When we quantify it, it feels legitimate, true and substantive. So what we're trying to do is take this quantitative and then pair it with the qualitative. And it just so happens that our MP exit interview studies and this new SAMbot project, which has been around for two years, are converging as our understanding of life and politics in Canada within this technological moment is evolving as well.
Do you know whether these tweets are coming from people, or if they’re generated by bots?
One of the pros of working with machine learning is that each time we deploy SAMbot, we're able to get better and smarter with what we're doing. So in our Toronto by-election results, we'll be able to share more of that; we've been able to assess whether it is a bot attack based on the number of tweets and what time of day it is happening. (If there's 1,000 tweets being sent at 3am, for instance, we know that's a bot; time zones vary and things like that, but there are ways to to get a sense.)
Because the follow up to that question is, I obviously would prefer no abuse, but would one option be easier to solve?
I think it's about looking to strengthen and restore the pro democracy aspects of social media, right? When I started my career, that's when I was getting more into social media, and that's when I had more exposure to women of colour leaders that I never could have approximated through in-person networking events. So, there's a lot of pro-democracy aspects of social media tools. But we're in that period of transition and evolution; we need to get a handle on what we want, and how we're going to take good care of it. So if a candidate is expected to be on social media, because it's mandatory for campaigning, then what are the conditions under which they are allowed to block someone? And who does that for them? Who protects them? What are the expectations? What are the employer's obligations? If the expectation is that being a participant in the political conversation requires you in some form to be online, what are the conditions of engagement there? What are the obligations of the platform's? What are our expectations as a society? All of these questions are not answered. We're so far down into having social media be such a key element in so many of our lives, but we still haven't figured out what's an appropriate amount of time for us to be online, the conditions in which we are online and what our standards are. So, there's a lot for us to figure out from a policy perspective, but also from a health and cultural one as well.
So many of the former MPs you talked to must have been like, ‘Yeah, we need to change,’ especially those who were talking about harassment and the fact that Parliament is not made for women. But do you have a sense that there's a wider appetite for change in Canadian politics?
The appetite is about us. Are we ready to change it? Do we want it to change? And how much do we need to know about what is happening there before we feel equipped to do so? There's a lot of important, good work and good leadership within Parliament, but we're talking about future proofing. How are we going to secure a certain level of representation? How are we going to ensure sustainable working conditions? And we're thinking about it there, because we're thinking about it everywhere.
I think there is an appetite for that space to evolve, but what we hear is that the role is so demanding that you have to focus so narrowly on what you're trying to accomplish in terms of what's right in front of you, so it's really hard to make this bigger systemic change. So, our understanding that you just vote someone in, and then that will take care of that is far too simplistic. And, the dominant notion that being democratically engaged is to vote in elections is also missing the point. That's not the story. So, what we're trying to do at the Samara Centre is foster a vibrant culture of civic engagement, where we're having thoughtful conversations with good evidence about what can come next for our democracy writ large, what can we imagine that's positive, hopeful, substantive, responsive to the information that we have.
We have very complex problems that we need to deal with in Canada today. But if we think about this as a recruitment and retention issue, and as a service issue, then I think that can help guide us in a way that removes this focus on tradition, and instead gets us focused on just getting this done, done well and with the right people. Let's get this done well, and let's get this done with the right people.
What we're experiencing right now is over-representation of polarization, and that's really draining on everybody. It's important for us to understand that there are plenty of instances of hope that we can draw on. We don't have to get sucked into this binary polarizing conversation. There are other ways for us to do things and other ways for us to mobilize to make that the viable and dominant conversation about democracy today.
What are the things that need to happen to make Parliament a more welcoming space, not just for women, but also people from all sorts of marginalized backgrounds?
I think we need to really go upstream and focus on civic education as young as possible. Kids are knowledge brokers in their families; there's a dominant narrative that parents teach their kids to vote, but I know from growing up in my immigrant family that if you have a model minority family, they might not vote because they feel like it's asking for too much. They don't want to be bad guests in any way. But if I had received more civic education younger, then I would have been able to help encourage my parents to be more civically engaged sooner as well. So let's think about this from a generational perspective, and really invest in civic literacy as a national imperative. We would love to see that particularly in terms of media literacy right now, with regards to disinformation, and how much kids have been online during the pandemic. So that's one key area that I think would make a really big difference.
And, when we hear the former MPs in our podcast, their recommendations for making the job better are so hilariously mundane and relatable. They want better onboarding in the job? We all want that. They want to be paired with a former MP that they can go to with their questions. They're asking for a buddy! This is basic. And then when they're done, they want to be off-boarded. They have an off-boarding process right now, but they want more opportunities, coaching and assistance to find their next opportunity, because getting involved in politics actually closes a lot of doors, and that's explored in our last episode. Because if you're trying to go back to your old career sometimes you can't just hop back in. Plus, you made a commitment to a political party.
So there’s a perception of bias.
Right. That's why we see so many people from federal politics move into the municipal world as well. When we interviewed Kennedy Stewart, it was as the mayor of Vancouver, right?
That's so interesting. I think I thought about it as more self-directed, like they get bitten by the political bug and never want to leave that space. It didn't really occur to me that maybe they couldn't leave that space. But that's extra important, because maybe you don't have to worry about what you're going to do after if you're already at retirement age. But if what we want is a political kind of community that is better representing us, we probably need people of many ages, who then may leave politics and still need to pay their bills.
It is important for us to reflect on who got on this path in the first place. Who are they? How did they get there? And what happens after? Because when it all ends, it is a very difficult, challenging time in their lives, because it really shakes their sense of self. And we have a responsibility, I think, as Canadians to say thank you for your public service and think about how we can support these former MPs and help them have a next chapter as a professional.
Can we end by talking about something you said earlier, about imagining a ‘positive, hopeful, substantive, response to the information that we have’? I was thinking about what I would feel if I was hearing story after story about women about being sexually harassed, demeaned and diminished, and I don't know that hopeful would be the place that I would go, you know?
Yes. But there must be something else that they are getting from this role. We have established they shouldn't have to deal with that at work, but the sense of power, agency and satisfaction of making change for their constituents and for their country was paramount. I think we get into this in episode four and five, where we say, ‘Okay, you found your feet, you figured out the culture, what are you going to do now?’ So, Lisa Raitt talks about the safety mechanism she was able to put into place following the Lac-Mégantic disaster. We hear Romeo Saganash talk about what he was able to do in terms of UNDRIP. We also hear the story of Celina Caesar-Chavannes, who talked about the investment she was able to get for mental health funding. And so there is a lot of satisfaction and energy that comes from being in this position—Lisa Raitt describes it as the best job that she ever had.
I think when you're listening to these stories, it's important to bear in mind that you're not listening to observers of politics; these are people who actually have lived it and they’re looking back and they're telling you what it was like. We don't get that perspective very often. Increasingly, on social media and in the news, there's a lot of commentary from political commentators, political strategists, political analysts, and they have a function to play, to be sure. But we don't get much of the real talk after people are done being in these roles, unless they decide to write a book or something like that.
Ultimately, this is a hopeful story. Politicians need to go in with their eyes wide open about the tough stuff so they can steel themselves and find ways to get the support they need. And we need to find a way to make policy and culture change solutions that will make this more sustainable work environment, because if we're not talking about it, it's not going to get better.
To hear from from Sabreena, listen to Humans of the House, and be sure to follow her and the Samara Centre on Twitter.
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