Conservative MP James Bezan stands in the House of Commons during Question Period on Parliament Hill, in Ottawa, Wednesday September 24, 2014. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Fred Chartrand

It was only three years ago — exactly three years ago this weekend, in fact — that the House of Commons came up with an official policy to deal with sexual harassment in MPs’ offices.

A code of conduct to cover MPs themselves, and how they deal with each other, came months later, in 2015, just before Parliament was dissolved for the last election.

This week, we saw a vivid illustration of why it took so long for federal politicians to wrap their minds around the problem of sexual harassment on Parliament Hill. It’s just too easy for this serious issue to get tangled up in silly, partisan politics.

Watching this strange dispute play out on Monday on the floor of the Commons between Liberal MP Sherry Romanado and Conservative MP James Bezan was bizarre and exasperating. Did it really need to be played out in the public arena at all? Was anything gained or learned as a result?

For those who may have missed the latest he-said, she-said drama in federal politics, what follows is Bezan’s version of events. (Romanado has said she doesn’t want to say anything more than what she said in the Commons on Monday, and a request for further details went unanswered by her office on Tuesday.)

Back in May, Bezan and Romanado were being photographed together at Ottawa City Hall, along with another person. Bezan, standing for the photo, made a comment he now admits was “inappropriate and flippant” — “This isn’t my idea of a threesome.”

Bezan said he meant the comment as a partisan joke. Romanado said it was an “unwanted and humiliating” sexual remark that is still causing her problems today. “These comments have caused me great stress and negatively affected my work environment,” she told the Commons on Monday.

The incident landed with the chief human resources officer of the House of Commons soon after it happened, and Bezan offered to go into mediation (as the code provides) so that he could apologize. The request was denied.

He then apologized in writing during a formal review — a review that concluded in August with no finding of sexual harassment and no discipline recommended against the Conservative MP. Still, Bezan arranged another apology through the whips’ offices of the two parties and completed sensitivity training.

This is what partisan politics does to serious issues of personal and legal complexity — this is why petty partisans can’t have nice, sensible things, like a sexual harassment policy. This is what partisan politics does to serious issues of personal and legal complexity — this is why petty partisans can’t have nice, sensible things, like a sexual harassment policy.

It’s not clear to me what more Bezan could have done. It’s similarly unclear to me why Romanado can’t seem to let this go. Now it just looks petty all around — as I said on Twitter, a stupid remark and a stupid complaint really ought to cancel each other out.

But of course, when it comes to partisan politics, any incident, large or small, can get warped beyond redemption. And no points are awarded for making peace, compromising and moving on.

If we cast our minds back three years, in fact, to the events that forced the Commons to finally confront matters of sexual harassment in 2014, we’ll remember that partisan differences made a bad situation worse then, too.

Justin Trudeau, then the leader of the third party in the House of Commons, learned in the fall of 2014 about two cases of alleged harassment by his Liberal MPs; two New Democrat MPs, both women, were the reported victims. The two Liberal MPs were summarily ejected from caucus — permanently, as it turned out, under a shadow cast over their entire political careers. Scott Andrews tried, without success, to come back to Parliament as an independent MP from Newfoundland in 2015. Montreal MP Massimo Pacetti left elected politics altogether.

Immediately after Trudeau expelled the MPs from his caucus, he ran into backlash from the NDP and some other critics. Why did he do this publicly, then-leader Tom Mulcair complained? Were the Liberals trying to “revictimize” the NDP MPs who made the complaint?

Only in partisan politics could someone face political heat for punishing offenders in a sexual harassment complaint. The NDP was accusing Trudeau of playing politics with the issue; the Liberals said the NDP was doing the same. Never mind what actually happened — what quickly became the story was the back and forth between the warring opposition parties.

At the time, it often sounded a lot like the NDP leader’s office was more annoyed at Trudeau than the Liberal MPs accused in the incidents.

Again, this is what partisan politics does to serious issues of personal and legal complexity — this is why petty partisans can’t have nice, sensible things, like a sexual harassment policy. Only when the partisan heat died down, away from the headlines, did the MPs knuckle down and give this issue the attention, and the policy and code, it required.

Sexual harassment stories are much in the news these days, of course, with prominent men in the media, politics and the entertainment industry losing their jobs over reports of abuse. On the whole, this feels like justice, even if it’s justice delayed.

It’s a cultural moment, in politics and beyond. We are in the midst of a period of zero tolerance, which sounds like a good thing. But we should be careful.

I do know that I can only write this because I’m a woman, but I worry that zero tolerance in harassment cases could easily turn into zero-sum justice, where one side is always right (the accuser) and one side (the respondent) is always wrong.

Politics, at its most petty, does this to all kinds of issues by obliterating the middle ground. It would be a great shame if that happened to the sexual harassment policy — the one that took so long to become a reality on Parliament Hill.

No one wants to go back to the bad old days when sexual harassment was a private joke in the club of Parliament Hill politics. But as this week demonstrated again, it doesn’t get fixed in the open, partisan arena either.

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