OTTAWA–The woman who sits in the most powerful office in Ottawa is grappling with the #MeToo movement’s arrival on Parliament Hill.

From parliamentary page to the prime minister’s chief of staff, Katie Telford has seen first-hand the multiple levels of Parliament Hill’s power structure.

Now, she’s reflecting on the issue of harassment on the Hill from two different perspectives: as a former young staffer who navigated her way through the parliamentary precinct, and as a manager trying to support staff coming to her with their concerns.

“There are things today that I think back on and think, ‘Hmm, I wonder . . . ,’ ” Telford said in a rare on-the-record interview.

“It just didn’t cross my mind way back when, nor do I remember talking about whether you would report something . . . (unless) you were uncomfortable to a degree that you had to confront it or leave. It was that kind of an environment.”

Telford described an “informal approach” to harassment issues during her time on the Hill in the 1990s as a page and 2000s when she was an opposition staffer, where staff might approach their boss or a colleague for support.

Sometimes, someone would have words with the men involved. But that would be about it, she suggests.

“I think most people would agree that there was probably not much consequences to any of that,” Telford said.

“There was, hopefully, support through friendship and collegiality to the woman . . . . But no, that is not good enough. That is not good enough at all.”

Parliament has been trying to play catch-up to modern workplaces and broader societal change for some time.

Gone are the “Wonderful Wednesday” parties, where MPs, journalists and political staff mixed drinks and mingled together until the wee hours.

Gone is the National Press Club, where politicians would eat light dinners and drink beer between their duties, some later having to apologize for being “tired and emotional” on the floor of the House of Commons.

And largely gone is the near-total male domination of the press and political office.

But the past several months have seen women come forward with stories of inappropriate comments, groping or worse — reminding Hill denizens that while some of the Mad Men-style trappings have gone, the culture of harassment remains.

The harassment conversation came to the fore recently with allegations against Patrick Brown, the former provincial PC leader, accused by two young women of inappropriate sexual behaviour during his time as a federal MP.

Since that report, ex-Progressive Conservative party president Rick Dykstra has been accused of sexual assault, former Liberal cabinet minister Kent Hehr faced allegations of inappropriate comments and touching, and former NDP MP Peter Stoffer has been accused by multiple women of lewd comments and unwanted touching.

The New Democrats have suspended MP Erin Weir from caucus duties, pending an investigation into unspecified harassment allegations.

None of the accusations has been tested in court, and Brown, Dykstra, Stoffer and Weir have denied the allegations.

But Telford said the conversation about harassment on the Hill had been happening for some time before those allegations made headlines. At one of the quarterly lunches she organized for female staffers in the PMO last fall, Telford said she went in expecting to talk about politics. Instead, the conversation was almost entirely about harassment.

“I’m not surprised with the numbers in the sense that, just the conversation is everywhere. So it’s not surprising to me that more women would be coming forward now,” Telford said.

“I think it’s an uncomfortable conversation in a lot of cases right now, but that discomfort, I’m hoping and truly believing, is going to lead to more comfortable conversations in the medium- and long-term.”

According to workplace harassment experts, the conversation in Ottawa is long overdue. And they have little time for the excuse that Parliament is thought of as a “unique” workplace, or that political staffers don’t need the same protections other workers have.

“We can’t use it as an excuse, to say ‘we’ve been behind, and you have to cut us some slack’ . . . I think that we just have to stop treating some workplaces as special, or giving exceptions, or thinking that we can’t apply the same rules,” said Western University researcher Barbara MacQuarrie.

“There’s absolutely no reason why anybody working for the government of Canada should be more at risk of harassment than somebody working in another workplace elsewhere. It’s not logical; it doesn’t make sense.”

MacQuarrie said she has a hard time being “lenient” with political parties who are trying to address harassment now, as more and more stories come out.

“The only reason that they’re struggling with this is because for so long they’ve been allowed to ignore it,” MacQuarrie said.

In 2014, the Liberal party could not ignore it any longer. Justin Trudeau, then leader of the third-place party, kicked two MPs out of the Liberal fold — Scott Andrews and Massimo Pacetti — for “personal misconduct.” It was later revealed two NDP MPs had accused the men of sexual misconduct.

“We were really confronted with the fact there was no process. There was no person to call. There was nothing there,” Telford said, recalling the episode.

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In the wake of the allegations, an all-party committee recommended a code of conduct that governed MPs’ interactions with each other. But political staff, known as “exempt staff” in Ottawa parlance, still lacked the basic protections most Canadian workers have.

That would change under Bill C-65, put forward by Labour Minister Patty Hajdu and currently under consideration by a Commons committee.

“I think if you talked to many of the staffers around this Hill, especially the vulnerable ones, especially the young ones, we live and work in an environment here on Parliament Hill that is ripe” for harassment, Hajdu told reporters last month.

“We have young, young staffers, often in precarious work positions . . . who are working with much older, much more powerful people. There is liberal access to alcohol. You know, this is an environment that actually sets up a culture that allows and perpetuates this behaviour.”

Telford noted that all Liberal MPs took mandatory harassment training at their 2017 caucus retreat. The Prime Minister’s Office has also set up its own small team to field any complaints or concerns that come to members and advertised that team to all exempt staff in an email last year.

But while the PMO is getting external experts to advise it on how to address those complaints, there has been some criticism about the steps it has taken.

In a Huffington Post blog, Myriam Denis said the PMO reached out to her after she posted on Facebook about Claude-Éric Gagné, a senior Trudeau staffer who recently left the PMO after harassment allegations.

Denis said Gagné sent her messages after she had interviewed for a position in the government, hitting on her. When the PMO brought in a third-party investigator to look into harassment allegations against Gagné, Denis wrote a public post on Facebook detailing her experience with Gagné.

She said she was later contacted directly by Brett Thalmann, one of two PMO staffers who handle harassment complaints, who offered Denis the opportunity to talk about her experience with Gagné.

“I was, once again, speechless,” Denis wrote. “When there is an external party doing that kind of investigation, it is extremely inappropriate for any employee of the concerned organization to contact potential victims to do their own inquiry.”

Telford did not address Denis’s criticism directly, but defended her staff.

“Every move that Brett is making, that I’m making, that (Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s principal secretary) is making, and the three of us make these decisions together . . . we are getting external professional advice from people who are working on this all the time and are seen as experts in the field,” Telford said.

Still, the Liberals, like the other major parties on the Hill, are “learning as (they) go,” Telford said.

“It’s not easy. But I don’t know that anybody is thinking this is easy. These are very personal and difficult circumstances.”

It’s likely that more stories of inappropriate behaviour, harassment and assault will emerge from the corridors of power in Ottawa. New revelations seem to come every week.

Telford said one of her concerns is that the stories will keep young women from coming to work on Parliament Hill. She points to her own experience over the last three decades as a reason they still should.

“There is a place here that is open and collaborative and listening and trying, and I genuinely think that Parliament Hill can turn this around,” Telford said.

“It would be awful if the takeaway from some of these stories is for the women to stay away and not come until it’s fixed. Right? Because we have to be part of solving this.”

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