Women In Poliltics, Diversity in Society

“If that vitriolic anger that we see directed at women is collected in one place for all of us to get a chance to talk about, I think that’s a major contribution that women in public office will make to our country and to our civic life. Because this happens to women every day in offices, and workplaces all across Canada.”

 

 

Anger is a reactive emotion, as is fear.  Both serve a purpose - to motivate people to respond to threats through either fight or flight.  The problem is, these limbic reactions paint with a pretty broad brush - we will feel equally uncomfortable around someone with a physically manifested contagious disease (like Ebola) as we will around a burn victim.

 

So, we fear things that our reactive brains perceive as threats to our health, safety or ability to promote ourselves - our status.  Even when they're not really threats to begin with.  Even when they might just be opportunities for growth, instead.  The more competitive, combative we are as a society, the more prone we are to potential threat identification, which is basically what stigma is.

 

Women in politics increases the pool of potential competitors in an already narrow field.  If you're hyper-combative, anything that whittles away your odds of getting a seat or, more broadly, a job in general is seen as threatening your chances.  The same applies to laws that make it easier for New Migrants to vote or seek work. 

 

Like any fear, we are only controlled by it so long as we refuse to recognize and confront it.  When we do so, we realize that FDR was right - fear itself, not the thing feared, is the problem.

 

For this reason it was incredibly smart of Kathleen Wynne to confront head-on her gender and sexuality right out of the starting gate.  Consider it a kind of inoculation that helps people get past their fear and instead, focus on solutions to the broader challenges society faces.

 

Which is a non-combative, strategic approach to politics that perhaps plans more than one political generation ahead.  While I agree that it is great that a rising number of women in Canadian politics is giving society cause to address gender prejudices, don't short change women the wealth of other contributions they bring to the table.

 

This isn't the first glass ceiling women have had to break through.  It takes a hell of a lot of persistence and planning to change a society, yet it's continues to happen, doesn't it?

 

Progress is like water that way - one way or another, it'll change the landscape.

Justice For Mental Health - Now, With a Justice's Endorsement

 

School discriminated against boy by cutting special-needs program: top court

Kirk Makin - JUSTICE REPORTER

The Globe and Mail

Last updated Friday, Nov. 09 2012, 9:07 PM EST

 

 

Jeffrey Moore, the boy at the centre of a discrimination case based on his learning disability, became an adult and a successful plumber in North Vancouver in the years it took his case to reach the Supreme Court of Canada. (John Lehmann /The Globe and Mail)

 

A landmark Supreme Court of Canada decision has put schools on strict notice that they cannot evade their responsibility to accommodate children with special needs.
 

Waving aside the financial woes of a North Vancouver school board, the court concluded on Tuesday that it had discriminated against a dyslexic child who was not given adequate help to attain literacy.

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Madam Justice Rosalie Abella ordered school authorities to reimburse the family of Jeffrey Moore for several years of costly private education they sought after Jeffrey fell far behind in school.
 

“Adequate special education is not a dispensable luxury,” Judge Abella said for a 9-0 majority. “For those with severe learning disabilities, it is the ramp that provides access to the statutory commitment to education made to all children in British Columbia.”
 

Advocates for the disabled were overjoyed by the judgment. They said that school boards that cannot furnish compelling evidence to justify under-funding must henceforth provide genuine help to children with learning disabilities.
 

“I’m ecstatic,” said Yude Henteleff, a Winnipeg lawyer representing the Learning Disability Association of Canada. “This is a profoundly important victory. Time and time, school divisions say: ‘We can’t afford this.’ Well, now they can’t afford not to.”
 

Mr. Henteleff said that parents of any child with a learning disability can demand action from their school board. “If they don’t get it, there will be a plethora of actions all across the country,” he said.
 

Rick Moore, Jeffrey’s father, expressed elation. “This case is about the thousands of kids who can’t afford a private school education and ... are stuck in the public school system; who end up dropping out and become a burden on society,” he said.
 

Mr. Moore, a bus driver in Vancouver, said that his family scrimped to pay Jeffrey’s private school tuition. Aided by the Vancouver Community Legal Assistance Society, they simultaneously waged a 15-year war with the school system that led them through human rights tribunals and law courts.
 

The family’s lawyer, Frances Kelly, said she focused the case not just on Jeffrey’s plight, but on the high price society pays when frustrated children fall by the educational wayside.
 

“We had evidence that jails and welfare systems and hospitals are full of people who have learning disabilities that were never properly addressed in the education system,” Ms. Kelly said.
 

Now a 24-year-old plumber, Jeffrey Moore recalled losing his confidence as he struggled to complete school assignments. “I had no idea why everyone in class was moving forward and I was on the sidelines,” he said. “I didn’t even know how to put a word together.”

 

 

He said it is immensely satisfying to have helped future generations. “Kids won’t be left in the dark,” he said. “They are going to get the help they need before the damage is done; before they feel stupid or that they are unable to do anything.”
 

One of those children – nine-year-old Griffin Lajoie – has waited many months for Toronto school authorities to provide resources that will help him rise above a visual-spatial learning disorder that was diagnosed last year.
 

“I am over the moon that the Supreme Court has ruled that our kids will have access to resources that they need,” said Griffin’s mother, Lesley Sargla. “It is a basic right. It is a reasonable expectation that children with learning differences be held to the same academic standards as their peers and that our kids graduate from public school being fully literate.”
 

Governments fought hard at the Supreme Court hearing to prevent judges from taking a role in setting educational spending priorities. An Ontario government brief also warned that reimbursing the Moores for their tuition expenses could badly skew educational priorities.
 

“If this remedy is upheld by this court, private school tuition payment orders will be a widely sought and sanctioned alternative to requiring boards to provide appropriate accommodation within public schools,” it warned.

 

 

A. Wayne MacKay, a Dalhousie University law professor, said that the court has left governments a certain amount of wriggle room to reduce spending on special-needs programs – but only if they can show that their budgetary concerns are truly pressing.
 

Prof. MacKay said it was unusual for the Supreme Court to intervene in a policy area such as education, particularly with a decision that has serious cost implications.

 

 

“In my opinion, this may be the most important human-rights case in the last decade or so,” he said.

With a report from Caroline Alphonso

Preview - next CFN Column, on Bullying

For me, these aren’t academic questions.  I know what it’s like to be bullied.  A December baby, I was always the youngest in my classes.  Added to this, I have Attention Deficit Disorder, a “disability” which went undiagnosed until I was well into my teens.  Being the smallest and a bit different in how I interacted with the world, I was a natural target for those on the lookout for someone to diminish as a way of aggrandizing themselves.  From about Grade 1 all the way into high school, I was on the receiving end of vicious taunts, torment and physical abuse. 

...

It also takes leaders to set examples and develop the kind of work or school cultures that manage down this bullying instinct. Former Ontario Premier Mike Harris famously fostered a competitive culture within the Progressive Conservative Party, believing that ambitious people would produce the best results.  Instead, the internal fighting became so toxic to the Party that Harris had to lay down the law for his cabinet ministers.  It’s the exact seem scenario that’s being fueled by the heightened, competitive rancor in Queen’s Park now.  Somewhere along the way, our political leaders have forgotten that it’s possible to be in total disagreement with someone without denigrating them as a consequence.

Lead By Example and Stop Bullying

Fifteen-year-old Amanda Todd was found dead in a Port Coquitlam home at 6 p.m. Wednesday, five weeks after she posted a heartbreaking video on YouTube detailing how she was harassed online and bullied.

Students and staff at Amanda’s school were grieving her death Thursday.

I'm sure her bullies are among the grieving. 

 

Here's a question for you - is it a dog-eat-dog world where only the most competitive survive?  Do you have to be tough to get ahead?  That's frequently how office politics works.  It's certainly how politics proper works.  Now, with clamp-downs on information flow, a reduction in social supports and heightened security measures, that's how government policy is working.   

 

If you really believe that a job is the best social program and that people should fight aggressively for the positions that are out there, then you must feel this young woman was a whiner unwilling to do what it takes to survive in this world.  Terrible thing that she killed herself, but probably best all around. 

 

Does that shock you?  Why would it?  We all buy in to political attack ads that denigrate individuals.  That's bullying.  Despite all the talk about mental health in the work place, aggressive micro-management and bosses with tempers are tolerated as "management styles."  Really, though, that's bullying, too.  When staff get that favoured talk, "look to your left, look to your right, one of you is going to be gone," that's a way of fostering healthy competition - by encouraging your team to work against each other and come out on top. 

 

It drives me nuts when people try to tell me "but it's different."  In what way is it different?  Is taunting not bullying when it comes from Members of Parliament?  Is calling people useless or worthless not bullying if it's someone's boss saying the lines? 

 

We might not like to look at it this way, but we have a whole culture of bullying:

 

- Students who are bullied and/or cyber-bullied face increased risk for depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicidal attempts.

 

Studies have shown that protracted exposure to stress caused by living in an uncivil environment lowers morale and increases the chances of developing coronary heart disease and other illnesses

 

The American Psychological Association has estimated that workplace stress (considering absenteeism, loss of productivity, medical expenses and turnover) costs U.S. businesses about $300 billion a year

 

Bullied teens commit suicide.  Bullied employees underperform, take anxiety meds, end up in ERs thinking they're going to have heart attacks and snap at their families.  Folk at the bottom of the social ladder bullied by the social system find their own ways to excise their pent-up cortisol.  Even people in prison being treated like rats in cages engage in self-harm.  Folk will say that adults should be tougher, that a bit of aggressive smack is healthy for workplace competition, etc. Nobody can ever tell me why, other than to use the confabulated excuse "it's different." That's not good enough.

 

BC Premier Christie Clark says “No one deserves to be bullied. No one earns it. No one asks for it. It isn’t a rite of passage."

She's missing the point.  Bullying isn't an add-on behaviour - it's genetic.  Aggressive people bully.  They tend to get ahead that way, too, encouraging more of the same.  People under resource pressures - like those who are worried about their economic stability when a pink slip comes in the mail - react biologically to their stress with a flight or fight response.  Fight might mean bullying the staffer next to you; flight might mean suicide.

 

We live with this head-smacking cognitive dissonance that bullying is bad but that the solution largely rests in the hands of the bullied.  We deplore bullying in one context when we ourselves are bullies in another.  The why is easy - we don't want to accept that just maybe, we're responsible and to avoid causing future such challenges, it's us, not them, that need to change.

 

 Bullying if a form of aggressively controlling or minimizing threats from opponents for resources, pure and simple.  Very useful genetic tool to have in a survival-of-the-fittest environment, it lets you remove opposition.  Rather detrimental in a social context, though, as we can see.

 

The more resource-challenged people are, the more aggressive or despondent they will become.  People who are supremely focused on getting themselves ahead will do so at the expense of others, reducing threats through tactics that embody the very essence of bullying.  We like to question the "mental health" of people who commit suicide, but perhaps we should be be dedicating an equal amount of energy looking at the cognitive functioning of their bullies.

 

It's a culture shift that needs to happen if we are to ever address bullying properly.  We owe this to every future Amanda Todd, their families and their communities.  Our leaders can decry bullying all they want, but until they start leading by example and exhibiting the behaviour they wish to nurture in our youth, our workplaces and in civil society, no one is going to listen.

Mental Health, the Knowledge Economy and the Cognitive Labour Movement

"An investment in knowledge pays the best interest."

  - Benjamin Franklin

Last night, I had the privilege of attending a Why Should I Care discussion around the theme of Mental Health – its Challenges and Solutions.  There was a lot of focus spent on the fact that mental health and addictions are the underfunded cousin in our national health care strategies.  One of the speakers, Dr. Paul Garfinkel, said that while there is presently an upswing in public sector engagement and funding, he’s seen this same boom-and-bust cycle of interest come and go in the past to no lasting effect.  Priorities shift, he suggested; new generations of political and business leaders, police chiefs, etc. lose the thread, then it’s back to square one.

Another key theme discussed was the fact that, as I’ve posted elsewhere, natural resources might be a get-rich-quick scheme that will work in the short term, but that isn’t going to sustain us over the long-term as we continue our social progression from a manufacturing/industrial based economy to the Knowledge Economy.

These two points are linked.  What what we’re experiencing now is something similar to the first rumblings of the labour movement of the last century, or other labour-related movements that came before it.  Whereas it was physical harm that led to protest and eventually led to a more humanely-designed, more productive manufacturing/industrial work environment, we’re now repeating the cycle from the angle of mental stress and mental illness.

New Relationships in the Workplace

Creativity, innovation, out-of-the-box thinking and the ability to process and synthesize are the skills the market is demanding now.  An Internet check on the most frequently asked interview questions provides an insight into the "real world" out there with questions such as: What do you look for in a job? Why should we hire you? Define success at work? How do you feel that your education has prepared you for this job? to Why is a manhole cover round?

The focus of labour is therefore shifting from individual success (dog-eat-dog competition) to collaborative achievement.  This is fundamental for nurturing innovation.  Ideas don’t form in a vacuum; they require inspiration, exposure to diversity, critical thinking.  Like building a nation, collaboration simply cannot occur without a collective meaning that people can rally behind and a social framework to encourage sustainable growth. 

As an example, look at the boom-and-bust of Political Parties; they get into power on the backs of employees and volunteers that have drunk the Kool-Aid, really believe that together, they can build a better province/nation/community.  As power progresses through elections, the bright-eyed staffers become jaded or disengaged and new bodies that come in are weaned on a culture of “us-vs-them”, with very little in the way of idealism surviving the cut.  If you want an example of this, just look at Canada’s Federal Liberal Party.

Collaborative achievement, out-of-the-box thinking and candle-problem solutions require a different skill set then those typically seen as desirable today.  Before, employers wanted “hungry”, confident people who could take charge, force results through, maybe break a few eggs in the process.  There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance; arrogant people aren’t prone to listening to and contemplating the ideas of others.  When competition is the focus, our reactive brain take charge, our blinders go up and we miss lateral possibilities that are only visible when we consider the notion that maybe our way isn’t the best way - maybe someone else has valuable insight.

How many leaders achieved success by being tough, competitive and aggressive?  How many of them are good at fostering innovation and collaboration between their employees?  How much emphasis do they put on life-long learning?  The carrot-and-stick approach of bonuses/raises or demotions/firing might speed up work, but it doesn’t provide the kind of motivation needed for innovation or critical thinking.

What’s happening now is that these A-type personalities are downloading responsibility for value-add to their employees.  “I want you to think up new markets and innovative opportunities – and your bonus will be tied to your success.”  It’s an approach that won’t work, because at a neurochemical level, it can’t.  The naturally creative people will still produce, but in a less focused way.  For everyone else - pressuring them to be innovative is like throwing a kid in the deep end of the pool and telling them to jump.  This approach is going to further frustrate already frustrated employees, exacerbating already-high levels of workplace stress.

The response will be a public backlash, not unlike the rising tension that nurtured the physical labour movement.  We already see the social tension rising with Occupy, street violence, work-to-rule and strikes.  As little bits and pieces of policy up the friction, people will respond with increasingly reactive, limbic-based behaviour.  When the consequences become dire enough, decision makers will start to realize that a John Woo standoff isn't their way out and will move to appease the masses with some proactive cognitive-labour legislation and programming.  Given the connection between mental illness and social service uptake (many conditions being treated as, say, cardiac illness have a strong mental illness component), politicians and the bureaucracy will begin to see solutions to our fiscal woes in proactive mental fitness strategies, essentially taking the lead out of the water instead of trying to cure lead poisoning.

Employers will also come around to what the stats are already telling us – that properly designed workplaces and more humanely-designed work foster better, more innovative performance, help employee retention and reduce sick days.  Police are already starting to see the benefit in mental health awareness training for the satisfaction, safety and success of their front-line officers; as this trend continues, they’re going to start looking to the rest of society to do more, keeping people with mental illness from ending up in police confrontations in the first place.

You can add to this the growth of mental health curriculum in Ontario’s school boards and the rise of Social Emotional Learning as a component of education, particularly at younger ages.

What Comes Next

Mental health isn’t just about sickness any more than overall physical health is.  You can train your muscles to do more and do it with greater ease – the same holds true for our grey matter.  As we aren’t paying attention to how our brains work and how our social environment and lifestyles impact our cognitive development, we’re creating unnecessary harmful strains that make us less effective collectively.  That’s a trend that can’t last if we’re to be competitive in the Knowledge Economy.  The outlier leaders in our society are going to see the potential of proactive mental-health strategies and new tools to help empower people to use their grey-matter better and things are going to change.

Look for:

- Open-sourced training opportunities and work-time dedicated to exploring other interests tht can enhance your job performance and contributions.

- Cognitive workplaces that are designed a bit more like libraries, with a comfort feel, individual and collective workstations.  Work culture will become a bit freer; employees will have margins and timelines but greater freedom on how they spend their time

- Corporate collaboration - increased specialization that works in tandem with other parties.  This will lead to a reduction in duplicaiton, gaps and overlaps.

- More focus on team-building; work will consume more of people's time, but they'll get more meaning from it, too.

I see it as only a matter of time before such things become more common-place.  The only question, really, is how hard we’re going to resist the tough medicine that will ultimately make us all better.