Alberta-Based Politicians on Toxic Politics and What Needs to Change

Late last month, Government House Leader Mark Holland called for a more human approach to politics, saying there was “something broken” in the way MPs treat each other.

“This place needs to be more human,” Holland told a House of Commons committee, speaking about his own personal trauma and the effects of politics on his mental health.

His comments came amid a political climate that has become “very problematic for democracy”, according to Lori Williams, associate professor of political science at Mount Royal University.

“This idea that you can’t accept other people’s point of view, you call them names like traitor and worse,” she said.

“One of the biggest issues here is that we all need to take responsibility for doing things differently – not for rewarding that kind of behavior.”

With that in mind, CBC News reached out to three current and former politicians at the federal, provincial and local levels based in the Calgary area to get their thoughts on modern politics and what they believe needs to change.

Michelle Rempel Garner

Michelle Rempel Garner, Conservative MP for Calgary Nose Hill, says there is a seriousness among members of all political stripes when it comes to the importance of maintaining democracy in light of global instabilities. She says it’s important that individual politicians resist taking the low road.

“It’s a job for people in positions of great political influence. And it’s also incumbent on the electorate to demand this type of behavior from the people they elect, so that they respond accordingly. “, she said.

Strongly rumored as a favorite for the leadership of the United Conservative Party of Alberta following the departure of incumbent leader Jason Kenney, Garner refused to enter the race in June, citing internal discord within the party.

Over the years, she has been a vocal critic of workplace harassment rules in Ottawa. At the end of 2021, she asked the House of Commons to determine whether its workplace harassment policy went far enough end a “culture of sexual misconduct” in Parliament.

She says that since she started her term, she has seen some improvement in this regard, but the work continues.

“If we don’t solve these problems in the halls of power of our country, how can we hope to solve this for other Canadians?” she says. “So it’s less about me and more about showing that our democracy is sound and that we’re setting an example of what workplaces should look like.”

Ottawa also tends to yell at each other “about dogmatic purity,” according to Garner, and that prevents real work from being done.

“It calcifies our positions, so that we see positive social interaction as association with people in a very narrow worldview. And all that serves to do is divide us into factions.”

Shannon Phillips

More than most politicians, Shannon Phillips, Alberta’s NDP MP for Lethbridge-West, has seen direct impacts on her personal life as a result of politics, having been surveilled by the Lethbridge Police Department when she was environment minister for the NDP.

A year ago, she received an anonymous “whistleblower” letter alleging that someone had threatened retaliation against her and a CBC reporter for exposing misconduct within the force.

Today, she says there’s no doubt the past two years have been “extremely tough” for her. On a daily to weekly basis, this leads her to question whether she should leave public life.

“But if we dwell on that, we end up in a situation where others don’t want to enter public life. The kind of things that happened to me don’t happen to everyone,” he said. she declared.

She says she is reluctant to talk about mental health or serious issues that emerge after becoming a target, as that can tend to shift the conversation to an individual, and not the structural issues that persist.

“It has become much more difficult for women, LGBT people, visible minorities, black people and Indigenous people to justify their participation in electoral politics, given what the public sees of what is happening there. “, she said.

“It goes way beyond, ‘let’s all try to be nicer to each other’ and make sure people are actually safe… if we’re not safe to do the job, then it doesn’t matter what we do. manners.”

Jerome Farkas

Former city councilor Jeromy Farkas says he thought he was often portrayed in the media as one-dimensional, but, according to him, a recent 4,270 kilometer hike he took to raise funds for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Calgary and area made a difference.

“A lot of people approached me through social media posts and everything, saying they were very interested in what I was doing,” he said.

“It really surprised me to see that there were a lot of people who weren’t necessarily in favor of my policies, or who supported me in the last election, but who were really much more interested in what I was doing on a human level.”

He said politicians are expected to present a strong front and project confidence, and self-doubt is often identified as a weakness.

“It doesn’t seem like voters encourage or reward weak candidates. But the truth is, throughout life we’ve all been there. We all have struggles, we have difficulties or successes, we’ve chess,” Farkas said.

Calgary police last week said they would launch an investigation in an alleged conspiracy to trap former mayor Naheed Nenshi. Farkas spoke about it on social media this week.

Farkas said it’s unfortunate that the policy has become so extreme that many will turn a blind eye to such behavior if it’s his “own camp” that perpetuates it.

“There were people on the more conservative end of the spectrum who reached out to me and they weren’t happy that I was saying nice things about the former mayor,” he said.

“But it’s kind of ridiculous to see people on any side of the spectrum doing the mental gymnastics that’s necessary to justify what would have been done to the mayor just because you define it as politics.”