Last week, in response to the shockingly sad death of 17-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons, Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered an extemporaneous comment to a group of reporters in Calgary. He was responding not only to the teen?s death, but also to growing public sentiment that not enough was being done by police to collect evidence and lay charges in the case.
?First of all, obviously, our hearts here go out to the family. I think everybody who has heard this story, seen this story, were shocked, were saddened,? Harper said. ?I can just tell you, you know, Laureen and I. . . . As a parent of a teenaged daughter, you?re sickened seeing a story like this.? Then he continued: ? I think we?ve got to stop using just the term ?bullying? to describe some of these things. Bullying, to me, has a kind of connotation . . . of kids misbehaving. What we are dealing with in some of these circumstances is simply criminal activity. It is youth criminal activity. It is violent criminal activity. It is sexual criminal activity and it is often Internet criminal activity.?
The prime minister concluded by saying he was pleased to hear that justice officials in Nova Scotia were considering reopening the case.
Not only did Harper sound exactly the right tone in the wake of Rehtaeh?s bullying and death, his expression of his own empathy and that of his wife, as parents of a teenage daughter, humanized him more disarmingly than the previous calculated attempts to show his softer side.
It was more effective than his blue sweater, more effective than his Beatles song at an arts gala, more effective than even the series of tweets meant to offer a glimpse into a day in the life of a prime minister. And it was unscripted and seemingly devoid of crass political calculation.
More than anything else we?ve seen lately, these few words revealed the heart a prime minister with whom any parent who has ever had a teenager could relate. He spoke for many of us.
It?s useful to recall what happened to Rehtaeh Parsons. Two years ago, she?d gotten drunk at a party with some friends. Another teen allegedly had sex with her and yelled at a friend to ?take a picture.? Over the following months, that photo was passed around via cellphones and the Internet. Rehtaeh was mocked and ridiculed. Even among her friends, she became a figure of contempt. It was character assassination by association with that one incident.
?She was never left alone. Her friends turned against her. People harassed her. Boys she didn?t know started texting her and Facebooking, asking her to have sex with them, since she had had sex with their friends. It just never stopped,? said Rehtaeh?s mother, Leah Parsons, after the family decided to take the girl off life support following a suicide attempt earlier this month.
It?s a terrible story and teaches lessons about the complicity of those who remain silent amid bullying that ? yes, Harper had it right ? isn?t just kids misbehaving, but borders on low-level criminal activity.
Ironically, three days later, as Justin Trudeau was called to the stage in Ottawa to accept the federal Liberal party?s call as its new leader, the Conservative Party of Canada?s ?black ops? unit went into overdrive. It released ads mocking and ridiculing Trudeau as a dilettante, a lightweight and a prima donna, using quotes that were taken out of context, pirated video from an online news organization, and selective bits of information, some of them set against circus music.
The party distributed its photos, messages and video using traditional mainstream media, but also social media, e-mail and websites. The hope: an effective, quick and viral takedown of the newest challenger on the parliamentary block.
All week I?ve been listening to experts and ?insiders? debate the merits of negative ads. They manage to do so with an air of clinical authority. Yes, it?s unsavoury, they say. It?s sometimes regrettable, but it?s part of the game, they say. It?s even occasionally necessary, they say, especially when your party has no other way to gain traction. Besides, they say, it just plain works.
We rightly declare as ridiculous and intolerable any claim that what happened to Rehtaeh Parsons was just normal socialization among teens. That it?s typical schoolyard behaviour, as young people stratify, find their cliques and identities and establish a natural pecking order.
Yet negative advertising in the political sphere that holds challengers up to ridicule, attacks their character, mocks them, and declares them worthy of nothing more than dismissal or contempt is, oddly, acceptable, sometimes necessary and often unavoidable. We?ve seen it at the federal level, in Ontario and, currently, in B.C.
Yes, going negative works. In the microcosm of her world, Rehtaeh Parsons became proof.
It works in politics, too. The difference is that, in politics, the only real casualties are the willingness of talented potential leaders to run for office, the reputations of those already in service to the public, and citizen engagement, as expressed by disdain for the system and its players, not to mention voter turnout.
Ah. No matter then.
Larry Cornies is a London-based journalist and educator.
cornies@gmail.com
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