SECTION III: VOICES FROM WOMEN IN MEDIA
       TROISIEME PARTIE: VOIX DE FEMMES DANS LES MEDIAS



WIELDING POLITICAL CLOUT: A PANEL DISCUSSION

Debra Clarke, editor
Trent University

Marisa Haensel, transcriber
Trent University


(From "Women in and Behind the Media," sponsored by the
McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, University of
Toronto, Spring 1991)

Andrea Arbic: Our moderator tonight, Sylvia Stead, has been
associate national editor of _The Globe and Mail_ for the
past two years.  During her sixteen-year career with the
_Globe_, she has held a variety of positions, including
assistant national editor, Queen's Park reporter and courts
reporter.  I feel that we are in very good hands with her,
and I'm sure that you are as anxious as I am to get right
into things, so I'll turn it over to Sylvia to introduce our
speakers for tonight.

Sylvia Stead: As you know, the topic is "Women In and Behind
the Media."  I hope we will have a lot of time for questions
and answers afterwards, but just briefly, before I introduce
the first panelist, I was struck in this question with the
numbers involved in women both in and behind the media.
When I started at the _Globe_ sixteen years ago, there were
four women on staff in the news department and two of them
worked for the women's section.  Luckily, when I was hired
as a summer student, half of the summer students were women,
and now we are up to 35 or 40 per cent of the staff.  It's a
remarkable turnaround in sixteen years.  Not only has that
happened behind the media, but the women in the media, the
women we see on TV, people like Sheila Copps there, have
also seen a remarkable transformation.  It used to be men
all the time and now we are not up to the 50 per cent that
we should be, but we're getting there.

     Now, one of the questions we are going to look at
tonight is: "What is special about being a woman when one is
thrown into the media spotlight as both an object of
attention and commentary?"  Obviously, there are good and
bad things about this, about being special.  One of the
other questions is: "What is and what could be a special
contribution of women, either wielding political power or
working in the media?"  Some of the other questions I
thought of were: "Do women in the media have something
substantially different to offer than men, and should they?"
"Are the lives and demands of women both in the media and
behind the media different than their male colleagues and in
what way?"

     To talk about some of these questions, our first
speaker is Maureen O'Neil, who has an incredibly impressive
biography.  She is the President of the North-South
Institute, which is an Ottawa-based think tank.  She has had
an extensive and long career in government and was recently
Deputy Minister of Citizenship in the Ontario government.
She was Secretary-General of the Federal Human Rights
Commission and head of the Status of Women Canada.  She has
held a number of policy positions in the federal government
and in the government of Manitoba, and internationally,
Maureen O'Neil represented Canada on the UN Status of Women
Commission and on Canadian delegations to UN conferences on
the status of women.  So, Maureen ...

Maureen O'Neil: Thank you very much.  When I thought about
the questions that we were to address tonight, I decided
that I would have to draw a distinction between my own
experience in and around the media and what is thought to
happen to women in general, because I realized when I looked
back on the way in which I had been covered, both as
somebody who was doing particular things and hence had
stories written about me, or now that I am heading up a
think tank and I'm one of the "experts" who gets called upon
to comment on different things, that I could not honestly
say that what I had been saying at any given time at any
different stage in my career had ever been trivialized or
that I had been dealt with differently.  I think that there
is a difference in the way in which women politicians are
dealt with and women who are called upon to be so-called
"experts" on different things.  Since I have been called
upon as an expert to speak on issues as diverse as the
impact of the Gulf War in developing countries to, when I
look back twenty years, the early days of the women's
liberation movement, I think there may perhaps be something
to that, that experts get dealt with differently than
politicians.  So I thought it would be a good idea to look
at what the academic literature is saying now about how
women politicians are treated by the media.

     There is an excellent paper that has just been done
which quotes extensively from Sheila Copp's autobiography,
in fact.  Sheila will talk about it herself.  This is a
paper that was done for the Royal Commission on Electoral
Reform by Dr.  Gertrude Robinson from McGill and Armande
Saint-Jean from the University of Quebec in Montreal
[reprinted in this issue: eds.].  They looked at the media
implications of Canadian female politicians' minority status
in all political parties as something that influences the
way in which they are dealt with in the media, and they
looked at the way in which media coverage of women
politicians has changed from the 1950s onward.  Mind you, in
the 1950s, you would have been hard pressed to find a female
politician to cover after Ellen Fairclough and Grace
MacInnis.  You know, the pickings were slim.  The third
thing they looked at is something that they call (here is
where I have such difficulty with academics, it took me a
long time to figure out what they meant): "Future Media
Narratives and the Political Challenge of Women."  I think
what they mean is "how was it exactly in the future that we
expected women to be covered."  They looked at different
cohorts of women in politics and, not surprisingly, found
that things are not static, that there have been noticeable
differences in the way in which what women said was
reported, and how women were behaving was reported, and what
women were saying.  Now, in the 1990s, when political
recruitment of women politicians has reached about 20 per
cent and party restructuring has haltingly begun, the
researchers are suggesting that there is now a third
generation of women politicians who are feminist, who see
themselves as feminists, who say they are feminists and, in
contrast with the women who were in politics earlier, see
politics as a career for which they prepare in the same way
that men do.  They get active in constituency organizations,
they take part in the back rooms, and they move ahead.
Militant feminists, again according to the researchers, the
original pathblazers, look as though they have vanished from
the public scene, and these new types of leaders, women
politicians who are feminists, move ahead with the agenda
that used to be seen as resting solely in the hands of
militant feminists.  So one can say that there has indeed
been progress, but at the same time people worry because the
media keep declaring that the women's movement is dead.

     The first thing they looked at was the implication of
women being in the minority in virtually all political
parties.  The obvious points are made.  First of all, that
in some provinces there aren't any women in the government
of those provinces, and also, because there are so few women
politicians, they are obviously highly visible.  It is hard
to miss them sitting there in the midst of a kind of wall of
grey suits, so that if you are looking for people and
looking for comments, it's easier to go to somebody who is
going to stand out and be recognizable than to make a stab
at picking one of the others.

     The other element that the researchers touch on is the
increasingly important role of television in politics.  Now,
you have to remember that if one looks at television as a
whole, and people who are involved in the McLuhan Centre
probably don't need to be reminded of this statistic, two-
thirds of all television characters are male.  We are not
talking politics now.  We are just talking in general.  So
that women are a minority _anywhere_ on television, not just
in political reporting.  So, given that television has women
only as a rare commodity, not just talking about public
affairs but talking about the entertainment programs, and
given that television itself is re-shaping politics, then
there is an even bigger challenge for women politicians.

     The other interesting statistic that the researchers
came up with is that 91 per cent of the experts called upon
to comment on politics or anything else are men.  I found
that a staggering statistic since I know that CBC has been
building up their card files on women experts since they did
a study in 1978 when they noticed that they didn't use very
many.  So I was really struck by that statistic.  I have to
believe it since I didn't have any of my own to draw on.
The other point that the researchers make is that, because
women are often not in positions of power within their
party, they are not called upon nearly so often to actually
comment on political life.  This is even if they are not
sitting as active politicians but rather are in the back
rooms, and in fact tonight, when some of us were having
dinner before coming over, in the room next to ours in the
restaurant there was a group of liberal economists getting
together to talk about the future.  And, I have to say that
even in 1991 there was not among that group of twenty
(albeit interesting) men, there wasn't one woman.  So there
is still some way to go.

     As I mentioned, the researchers drew lines between the
first cohort of women politicians and up until the present
time broke them into three groups.  Up to 1970 their
analysis of media coverage of women suggested that the
biological aspects seemed to be of consuming interest to
journalists, so that politicians like Judy LaMarsh were
always being asked: "Are you a woman or are you a
politician, which comes first?" [laughter] There was a sort
of unhealthy focus on women politicians' domestic
activities.  Judy LaMarsh, in her terrific book of memoirs,
said that: "Columnists ask me about anything and everything
except my job: my home, my cooking, my hobbies, my friends,
my tastes, my likes and dislikes.  All of them became public
property to a degree suffered by none of my colleagues,
including the new Prime Minister."  Now I suspect that that
actually did change with the Prime Minister later on.  But
Judy LaMarsh and Flora MacDonald kept coming back to this,
which was obviously a great irritation, to be asked if you
are a politician or a woman, as though the two were mutually
exclusive.

     As you move on in time to what Robinson and Saint-Jean
refer to as "the transitional period," where the focus of
stories was very much on where women were in the power
structure, there was a change in how women's role was
viewed.  Remember that 1970 was the cut-off point for this,
for the last cohort of early women politicians.  In 1970 the
Royal Commission on the Status of Women report came out,
which was then and still is a path-breaking document, and
there was a very serious focus on women in politics.
Ironically, the women in politics background papers were
written by Flora MacDonald, who at that time was at a very
early stage in her career.  Florence Bird, who was the head
of that Royal Commission, was later kicked off the Refugee
Advisory Committee by Flora MacDonald when the Tories came
to power.  That's what always makes me think twice when
people say that when women are in politics they will behave
differently, that somehow love will flow and the nasty
business of doing other people in will vanish.  I don't
believe it for a minute.  But the Royal Commission changed
the whole concept of what women could do and what women
could be.  And the economy of the seventies changed that
too, because the needs of the economy for women skilled in
the resources were part of the push - along with the
ideological shift at that time - part of the push that saw
women going into the labour market.  Very very rapidly, the
changes between 1950 and 1970 in the women's labour force
were enormous.

     The third thing, of course, in the seventies is that
the women's movement was a radicalizing force; it got its
start in the sixties.  I mentioned that I was a spokeswoman
for Ottawa's women's liberation in the late sixties.  But
the seventies really saw the blooming of the women's
movement in Canada with the creation of the National Action
Committee in 1971 and all the various offshoots of that, so
that the climate for a woman politician in the 1970s was
substantially different from, say, between 1950 and 1970.
First of all, there were just a lot more women doing more
things in the 1970s, politics or otherwise, and the
political parties began paying more attention to women, not
necessarily women's issues, but women in the seventies.  I
think all political parties during that decade had women's
commissions or women's caucuses devoted to increasing the
number of women candidates who were running and also
focusing on issues that concerned women.  In the seventies,
too, there was a discovery of the gender gap, predominantly
by the Americans, but certainly it was thought in Canada to
be a major element as well.  In fact, before the 1984
election, the Tories' poll suggested that only 28 per cent
of working women would actually support the Tories.  So they
had a quick mail campaign, and they are so adept at getting
individual letters out to great hoards of women, to convince
them that they would in fact look after their interests.
And the gender gap appeared to fade.  Nonetheless, the
gender gap was discovered then, which meant that whether it
was true or not almost didn't matter because it still had an
impact on political thinking, that if women were going to
vote differently than men, then it was important to pay
attention to what they were going to vote for.

     The last cohort is women politicians today.  I think it
is full of enormous contradictions.  Not only do we have
women who are standing for politics as feminists, and I
think if one looks in Ontario at the moment and looks at the
percentage of the women in the cabinet who are not only
women but who are feminists, this is something that women or
indeed men could not have envisaged in the 1950s, but as
Charlotte Gray in an article in _Saturday Night_ pointed
out, in a group of women who have come to power along with
the Conservative government in Ottawa, to be a feminist is
not thought of as a good thing, and in a sense they are
being criticized for not sharing that agenda, possibly
unfairly.  And they are being criticized essentially for
being there in a fairly large group and acting as though
they were just one of the boys.  From that we may take the
broad conclusion that we can't win either way.

     I want to turn now very briefly to the question of
whether or not women may actually make a difference when
they are in politics or in the media.  On this I would say
that, when we think about women in politics or in
bureaucracies or in media, we have to think about it in two
ways.  First of all, it's not fair if they are not there,
but on the other hand, because somebody is a woman isn't a
guarantee that they are going to be supportive of an
equality agenda or what would be viewed as an agenda that
would be positive and supportive for women, again
remembering that women are more likely to make up more of
the poor and require access to more services.  There is no
guarantee.  There is no genetic correlation between
femaleness and support for what might be regarded as a
progressive agenda.  While it is certainly true that if we
look back at significant gains that were made legislatively
and if you just think back over recent times, it was Judy
Lamarsh who was heavily involved with conceptualizing and
putting into place the Canada Pension Plan, which, I would
argue, is one of the most significant pieces of social
legislation.  Judy Erola and Monique Begin were both key to
putting into place the equality provisions in the Charter of
Rights.  If Flora MacDonald hadn't been in the Conservative
cabinet, there would not now be employment equity because
she was wonderfully clever politically in the way she got
that piece of legislation, however imperfect people think it
is, through cabinet at a time when the government's main
agenda was de-regulation, not regulation.  And we can think
about women in other significant positions.  The Supreme
Court would certainly have been a different place without
Bertha Wilson.  But these were all women who had a clear
interest in advancing social issues, advancing equality
issues.  It wasn't simply because they were women; it was
because they had a clearly defined agenda that touched on
those issues.  I think I will leave it at that.

Sylvia Stead: Thank you very much, Maureen.  I can think of
no one better suited to discuss this topic, because she has
been on both sides of the media.  Sheila Copps, after
studying at the University of Western Ontario, the
University of Rouen in France, and McMaster, then became a
newspaper reporter with the _Hamilton Spectator_ and then
the _Ottawa Citizen_.  Following that, she had what you
could only describe as a meteoric rise in politics,
beginning as the constituency assistant to Stuart Smith.
She very quickly became elected MPP for Hamilton.  She ran
for her party's leadership.  After that, she quit provincial
politics to run federally and very much went against the
tide, winning as a rookie MP in the Conservatives' 1984
sweep.  She has been very much in the public eye as a
prominent woman, as a member of the "rat pack."  She ran for
the leadership of her party and has recently been appointed
deputy leader of the opposition and is now acting leader of
the party.  Not only is Sheila Copps one of the most
powerful women in Canadian politics, I think it is fair to
say that she is one of the best known women in the country.

Sheila Copps: Well, thanks for such a lovely introduction.
I don't feel that meteoric.  Actually, I celebrated my tenth
anniversary in elected office on Monday, and about fourteen
years of flogging it out in the streets.  Certainly it's
been a checkered career and I wouldn't trade a moment of it.
I think, however, that whenever you get into a debate like
this you have to be very careful because you are kind of
damned if you do and damned if you don't.  If I give you the
facts and just the facts, it's likely that tomorrow I will
have a few of my colleagues after my throat or something of
that nature, because I think reality must always be tempered
with political realism.  On the other hand, I would like to
spend a moment giving you the world as I see it from the
perspective of somebody who has been on the outside and
tried to kind of claw her way in.

     We have, in fact, I think made a lot of progress, when
you consider that sixty odd years ago, women weren't persons
and I think that in my mother's generation, it's ironic when
you mention Judy LaMarsh, because there is a marvellous film
that was done about her by TV Ontario.  I don't know if you
have ever seen it, but it is a very touching film because it
shows a side of Judy LaMarsh ...  I remember as a kid
growing up in Hamilton, I used to watch her in the House of
Commons, and she was a role model for young girls who didn't
see a lot of women in politics.  Of course, we saw Judy much
in the way I think a lot of women are perceived in politics,
as gutsy, "feisty," aggressive, but you never saw that sort
of "feminine" side of her.  In this interview - and I think
it is the dilemma that we probably all face because of the
point that Maureen made about people always confusing your
biology with your career objective - she was being
interviewed by Tommy Hunter.  First of all, she did a thing
on the Tommy Hunter show and she came on with a boa feather
and she did this dance, just she and Tommy, and this was
just after she had been heavily involved in the Royal
Commission on television violence.  So she did this
light-hearted little dance and then Tommy interviewed her.
If you get a chance to see it, I think actually she was
interviewed by another interviewer who said: "Now, Judy, you
have done all these wonderful things in politics, but what
about your real life?  You haven't had a life, you've never
been married, you don't have a family."  And she said
something which in a way is so ironic because it's sort of
the first stage of life that a lot of women set for
themselves.  She said: "If I had to trade it in tomorrow, if
I could have had a family and those kinds of things, I would
have traded it in a moment."  When I saw that I was so
shocked, because I had this perception of Judy as a rough
and tough politician, and I'm sure in her heart of hearts
that probably wasn't the case, but she was also living up to
this sort of ideal that we all expected of women, of course:
the mothering side and the familial side and the biological
side must de facto take precedence over the other side.

     I think in a sense that is the dilemma that we have to
analyze because I do believe that there is a gender
correlation, however skewed it may be from time to time and
depending on the political personages.  But there is a
gender correlation between femaleness and your involvement
in political issues.  If you take any political party, you
will see people whose views span the spectrum from the
so-called "left" to the so-called "right."  But if you had
to take a critical mass of women and men, at least in my
experience in politics, women generally tend to be more
involved and more outspoken and more progressive in the
issues that really affect family life and the so-called
"nurturing" issues.  I think that the dilemma we face as
women in politics is that, on the one hand, we are told that
to succeed you have to be like a man in a man's world and,
on the other hand, if in fact you throw off those qualities
of femaleness that make you, then what's the point?  You are
constantly walking a fine line because if you are focused
too much on the issues that are perceived to be only the
female issues, then in the context of your colleagues you
become marginalized.  I am sure Wendy Mesley can see that in
the context of the debates in the House - who is listening
when people get up to speak, what questions get covered,
what issues get covered.  This is the dilemma of any woman
who is a feminist but who is also involved in issues
relating to nurturing.  I could go through the statistics,
but I think you have probably heard it all before.  There
are some marvellous studies.  I would love to get the one
that Maureen referred to.

     Lisa Young, who is also doing some research for the
Royal Commission, did a study recently and I think the Royal
Commission actually is going to come out with some very
interesting possibilities for involving more women and
minorities around the whole issue of empowerment.  She did a
study where she looked at who is there in parliament now and
what kinds of jobs do they have.  It is true that now we are
up to 14 per cent, which is a substantial increase even from
1984.  It is also true that of that 14 per cent, we comprise
only 7 per cent of the membership on the so-called "hard
issue" committees, like finance, like public accounts, the
economic portfolios that are deemed in the political scheme
of things to be "more important."  It is also true that we
represent 21 per cent of those in the "soft" committees.

     Now, the dilemma you face is then, do you want all
women to get on the "hard" committees or do you want to make
the so-called "soft" committees the committees that are
really important.  I think that there is always a dilemma in
both because, on the one hand, we can say that we can
achieve equality by taking on all the financial or economic
portfolios, or the defence portfolios, but on the other hand
isn't there a greater challenge to bring the part of us that
makes us different to the political forum to make that the
focus for greater public attention?  I think also, in that
regard, certainly, the media do play a role.

     There was a marvellous paper which was published in the
_New York Times_, following a conference at Columbia
University.  Judy Mann, who is a columnist for the
_Washington Post_, was analyzing why it is that women are
leaving the readership of newspapers in droves in the United
States.  She discovered in her research that between 1983
and 1987, newspapers lost 25 per cent of their women
readers, and she was examining why that was happening.  To
quote her, "modern women don't recognize themselves in the
media.  The media decide what to cover."  Now, she is
referring specifically to the print media.  The media decide
what to cover and what to render invisible by not covering
it.  News, says the editor, is what I decide it is.

     Although we do see a tremendous increase in the number
of front-line women making the news, like Wendy and others,
in fact, the decisions largely are made behind the scenes by
editors who tend to be men, and this is in the words of Judy
Whiteman.  I say that advisedly because I gave a
presentation to a conference on women in the media several
months ago, and I was quoted as saying, "it's only white men
who run the country and as far as I'm concerned, you can't
change the John Crosbies or replace them."  The next day,
one of my colleagues came up to me and said: "Well, is your
job up for grabs?"  This was her perception of why it is
that they are losing readership, and she was launching a
challenge to newspapers, saying, look, examine the amount of
money spent on the budget for the sports pages and the
budget for the so-called "women's" or "family" pages.  And,
in fact, her quote: "Devote as much space to the juggling
act that women are doing in our own lives as you do to the
pigskin act that football players are doing and you will get
women readers back."

     Women readers are leaving because they live very busy
lives.  Many of them are juggling two jobs inside and
outside the home and they only spend time reading what is
relevant to them.  I think also, and I don't want to dwell a
lot on this because I think there are probably plenty of
examples, but I would just like to read a couple of
vignettes that show how, in the leadership race that I ran
in, there was a perceptibly different treatment of my
femaleness than there was of my male colleagues.  I'll just
read some quotes without drawing any conclusions.

     One was about Paul Martin:

     The millionaire Liberal leadership candidate has
     built a business machine spread across the nation.
     Martin is a former Power Corporation exec and now
     sole owner of CSL.  He is a nice guy but not
     exactly a riveting speaker.  He married the former
     Sheila Cowan.  The father of three sons has put
     together an impressive supporting cast ... the
     type of man that we need to direct the party in
     the future.  He has to show he has substance.

     That was one quote.  And then Jean Chretien:

     Jean Chretien is from the moderate, tolerant
     mainstream of North American business.  He is the
     man who strong-armed the banks and cabinet into a
     government-backed bail-up package.  As Canada's
     Minister of Common Sense, he has scored another
     triumph for pragmatism and conciliation.  He is
     renowned for his folksy, combative platform style.
     He can ignite a crowd unlike anyone else in
     Canadian politics.  He is a well-liked scrapper,
     he is loose, confident, dynamic and passionate.
     His wit and wisdom don't translate into the
     printed page.

     And then Sheila Copps:

     A thirty-seven-year-old single mother, Sheila
     Copps has the courage to enter the race with a
     two-year-old in tow.  She is bright, attractive,
     dressed in white blazer and black dress.  She is
     good-looking, nice smile.  She brings youth,
     energy, freshness and shines with savvy and style.
     She was all mouse browns and greys; now she is a
     rainbow.  She wears designer outfits ...  Sheila
     Copps has succeeded in Operation Seduction.  We
     find her pretty, very pretty even.  She can hold
     an audience.  As Doug Pillings, a cab driver from
     Hamilton said, `You wonder if you've got some sort
     of Hollywood figure here.' [Sheila Copps: This was
     in the _Toronto Star_!] But wait!  Skirts
     fluttering in all directions, Copps, hysterical,
     had to be held back while she was screaming at St.
     Stephen's.  She has the reputation as a shrill
     trouble-maker.  She is too shrill, too emotional.
     But her emotion is not a drawback, but her
     judgement.  According to a Tory, she was a 'God
     damn ignorant bitch'. [laughter throughout]

     Actually, in analyzing that, I think it is very easy to
pick on that particular issue.  What I would like to do is
take you through one day in the life of a newspaper.
November 9th, I did an analysis randomly picking major
newspapers across the country to try and look at who was
writing what about whom, and how it was being interpreted.
So we looked at _La Presse_, _Le Soleil_, the _Free Press_,
the _Vancouver Sun_, the _Toronto Star_.  One-quarter of the
stories were from female reporters.  They covered mostly
social issues: School Board election in Montreal, school
enrolment decline in Manitoba, rapes, police and court
chronicles, obstacles to global warming treaty, while men
largely covered "the serious stuff": war in the Gulf, the
anniversary of the fall of Berlin, GST, the QFL's call for a
sovereign Quebec, Bonn and the Warsaw treaty, UFOs in
Montreal (I don't know how serious that is!), Hydrobond in
Manitoba.  And, of course, men on that particular day almost
exclusively dominated economics, sports and editorial
sections.  When women did write in the real estate section,
they mostly talked about issues like home decoration.  And
this was 1990.

     In arts and entertainment, men were a majority and
covered music, rock and classical, theatre, and women were
mainly film critics.  Women wrote the recipes while the
restaurant reviewers were largely men.  The large majority
of stories relating to women were about rape, the collapse
of the daycare system, and the decline of breast-feeding.
Some noteworthy exceptions were the election of Mary
Robinson as Irish President and a protest by women in Saudi
Arabia to gain the right to drive cars.

     It's not surprising, then, that more men than women
read newspapers, and in fact, recent data from the Newspaper
Marketing Bureau show that 74 per cent of men but only 62
per cent of women do read newspapers.  I think what we have
to look at in this debate also is, if we focused on
involving women only, we're missing the whole issue of
empowerment.  I think this issue is not just about getting
more women into politics and whether it will make a
difference.  First of all, I am starting from the premise
that it _will_ make a difference.  But I think it is also
about breaking down the barriers to people who don't have
power, and that should in fact democratize the system, not
only for women, but for minorities, whether they be visible
minorities, the physically challenged, or others.  The
obstacles that they face to getting into the system are the
same if not greater than those many women face, because
right now, let's face it, the electorate, I don't believe,
discriminates against women.  I think women, once they get
on the ballot, have a very good chance of winning, and if
anything, the public disenchantment right now with the
historical old boy's network actually makes women
potentially more attractive candidates.

     The difficulty that women face, which is true also for
others who are not in the perceived power bases, is getting
on the ballot, the nomination process.  There was a very
good study done by Janet LeDuc of Carleton University, which
looked at, in my particular party's case, women candidates
in the 1988 general election.  What she discovered was that
when women made it onto the ballot, they stood every bit as
good a chance, if not better, as men of getting elected.
But the problem was getting on the ballot.  One of the
difficulties is the whole issue of funding for campaigns,
and it lies primarily not in the process of the election,
because on the federal scene, the Canada Elections Act is
very stringent about what you can spend and there are
certainly tax credits that make it desirable for people to
be involved financially.  The problem is getting women
involved at the local level, at the nominations level, in
terms of federal politics, because in places like the city
of Toronto it's estimated that a nomination could cost in
direct monies up to $75,000.  That's what she found in
looking at the candidates who ran for nomination before they
ever got their name on the ballot.  So, clearly, that is an
obstacle.

     I think one of the things that we have to be aware of -
because we believe, and we like to believe, that we are
making progress, and I think we are - is that right now,
perhaps at no other time in the recent history of our
country, has there been the potential for such a backlash
against women.  I am referring, for example, to the specific
surge in popularity of movements like the so-called Reform
Party.  I don't know how many of you have actually looked at
the political elements of their so-called "reformism,"
because as far as I'm concerned, they should change their
name to the "Regressive Party."  I had a chance to look at
their political agenda, and one of the things that they are
suggesting is that for a person to be a candidate in their
political party, they should be in the top half of the
salary range, which, taking a look at the fact that women on
average earn less than men, it certainly isn't too desirable
to us.

     But what really shocked me is that they have a
forty-page questionnaire that you have to sign, and you have
to get your spouse to sign, to acknowledge that they have
read the terms and conditions of what your life must be like
as an MP before you can even be a candidate for their
political party.  They want you to provide medicals, they
want the names of your doctors, they want information about
your bank account, and what's really scary is that this
particular movement is having some small success in terms of
the public opinion polls.  Now, be that as it may, people
can go to the polls and decide, but what I am concerned
about is, if you look at the work of the Royal Commission
which is going on right now across the country, and
unfortunately women have played too small a role in the
shaping of the process, because the information that they
have received about electoral reform ranges from the view of
the president of the PC Party of Canada that there should be
absolutely no limits on any kind of spending, any kind of
donations (in other words, there should be no cap on
corporate or any kind of donations) through to the views of
Preston Manning, who said in his particular brief that as
far as he was concerned, we should abolish all tax credits
and political parties should have no public assistance.  But
in fact he saw no problem with private interest groups
having unregulated, unfettered access to the system in terms
of shaping public policy.

     If, in the worst case scenario, the Preston Mannings of
this world were able to influence the agenda of the Royal
Commission on Electoral Reform, which is scheduled to table
its final proposals in early summer with the anticipation
that there will be a bill before the House, you could set
back the activities of women and the democratizing of
parliament by decades.  I mean, one of the things that I
think has also contributed in a very positive way to the
increase of women in the federal House has been electoral
laws which create a scenario where once you get the
nomination, you don't have to go bankrupt to be a political
candidate.  And if you follow the recipe promoted by the
Reform Party, they are suggesting banishing all tax credits,
banishing all public assistance or public subsidies for
candidates who receive 15 per cent of the vote, and
essentially returning us to the days when the Judy Lamarshes
of this world were able, by hook or crook, to get into the
system.  But most people who sought and achieved public
office were there by virtue of the fact that they came from
the monied class and they could afford to do that as a
contribution to God and country, but they represented a
particular perspective.  In the last fifteen to twenty years
we have seen an evolution, if not a revolution, in the kinds
of people who are beginning to represent us in the political
process.  You don't always have to be a lawyer.  Despite
what Kim Campbell thinks, people other than lawyers are
smart sometimes, and you can also have people from various
backgrounds, you don't have to come from the monied class
with a particular business interest.  And that's been a
marvellous chance for us to move ahead.

     What I am frustrated about right now is the sense that
political party agendas are written by somebody else behind
closed doors.  We need to move to an open system where there
is public participation in the nomination process, as there
is right now in the elections process.  Clearly, the public
has an interest in cleaning up the system and the public
will also benefit from an open book system where you don't
have nomination processes where people contribute behind
closed doors.  I was the first political candidate of any
federal political party to publish a list of my
contributors.  The fact is, whether you like it or not, if
you have closed door, behind the scene donations that the
public isn't aware of, the public has a legitimate right to
ask themselves whether that is affecting your future
political judgement.  We've got to move to an open book
system, and to do that we need solid, good legislation, and
the Royal Commission can be a marvellous vehicle for that.

     So if you do have some specific ideas that you want to
bring forward, the Royal Commission would be a great way to
start, because that takes the politics out of it.  I mean,
you can always argue, well, if you want to do that, do it in
your own political party.  No political party is going to
move for massive electoral reform if they feel that the
other political parties are still going to be able to work
by the old rules.  It has to be a level playing field for
everybody, and there is great motivation now because the
public really wants a more open process.  I see women as
benefitting in that process, but I also see the public
confidence being restored in a way that I think we really
need right now.  So I think those are my comments, and I
would be happy to give you some details about some of those
proposals.

Sylvia Stead: Thank you very much, Sheila.  Our third
speaker is Wendy Mesley, who is certainly one of the best
known people in Canadian television news.  She is National
Affairs correspondent for CBC and, to use Sheila's words,
she reports on the serious side of things, not the social
side.  She is a specialist in federal-provincial relations,
certainly Meech Lake, and more to come, I guess, and the
GST.  Before that, Wendy was parliamentary correspondent in
Ottawa.  She has also been The National's reporter in Quebec
and in the Maritimes.  She studied journalism at Ryerson
Polytechnic Institute in Toronto and she has also worked
free-lance for a number of local radio stations, and even
CTV, briefly.

Wendy Mesley: I think we all agree on the basic theme that
women have come a long way maybe in the last little while,
but there is still a lot of progress that needs to be made.
When I first started, I was at a radio station.  Not
terribly progressive at the time.  I'm not sure whether it
has changed.  Chum Radio.  This was in the mid-seventies,
and they had no women.  Well actually, they had someone who
did weather reports in the afternoon.  And that was it.
Other than commercials, there were no female voices.  And I
remember reading stories about women in broadcasting at the
time, and the constant theme then was that women could not
be taken seriously: if the news was to be told or reported
by a female voice, no one would take it seriously and it
lacked all authority.

     I started off at CHUM answering phones, and gradually
they let me go out with a tape recorder.  My first big
assignment was Donald MacDonald on the end of wage and price
controls; he was giving a speech here in Toronto.  I went
off with my tape recorder and interviewed him briefly with
the other reporters after his speech and came racing back (I
was all excited about this) and wanted to do a story (I
think their newscasts were about a minute long, so it
wouldn't have been a very long story).  But they weren't
interested.  They wanted me to write a short little story,
pick a clip, and then a _male_ voice would put it on the
air.

     A couple of years later, things really started to
change very rapidly, so that now there are almost as many
women in the business as there are men.  But in the upper
ranks, which are still considered to be the "hard" topics,
such as politics and foreign reporting, there are not nearly
as many women as there are men.  When I first moved to
Ottawa, Margarite MacDonald had been there doing social
affairs, social politics.  But she could never cover
anything as complicated as a caucus meeting.  You know, that
was for the boys to cover.  Gail Scott had been there for a
couple of months, but at The National, all of the reports,
all of the federal politics had to be covered by men,
forever, as far as The National was concerned.  That was
five years ago.  It's changed now.  There are now more women
reporters for The National in Ottawa than there are men.
I'm not sure how long that will last.  It may be a fluke,
but I hope not.

     We've done a couple of studies at the CBC and I have
found it quite interesting, because it shows that in terms
of what you see on the air, there are an awful lot more
women.  We are now up to - across the board in producing,
reporting, editing and all of the decisions that are put on
the air are determined by these people - we are up to 36 per
cent, which is not bad if you consider that women in the
work force are only 37 per cent.  At least, that is the
argument that CBC head office gave to me when I asked for
the statistics this afternoon [laughter].

     But if you look at political reporting or foreign
reporting, the numbers really drop off at CBC and other
broadcast outlets across the country.  I think that is
partly because it takes awhile to rise to the top.  It's
been fifteen or twenty years since the revolution really
began in earnest and we are now at a level where we are
rising very quickly to the top.  The next batch of foreign
correspondents for The National, if we look at the pecking
order inside our own house, the next batch will almost
certainly be, nearly all of them, women.

     In management, the same sort of thing is happening.
There are a number of women in very senior positions.  The
head of News and Current Affairs, the head of Radio, the
head of Newsworld are all women.  But, overall in
management, at the senior levels of the CBC it's only about
16 per cent, so there is obviously a lot of progress that
needs to be made there.

     I find it more interesting that when we talk now about
women, the role of women in media, we concentrate not so
much on numbers, but the kind of topic that we are on
tonight, which is what difference has it made, is there a
feminist culture or a women's culture?  Has it made a
difference that women have actually wormed their way into
positions of influence in the media?  And there were a few
numbers that I found interesting.  There was a thesis that
was tested.  Now that there are more women in broadcasting,
are women interviewing more women?  The answer comes back:
"No."  In fact, men interview more women.  The difference
is, I think, one per cent.  Of all the people women
reporters interview, about 20 per cent are women, and of all
the women that male reporters interview, it is 21 per cent,
so we don't seem to be going out of our way to find other
women to interview.  Probably, that is because a lot of the
people that we interview are institutional, they are
official spokespeople, in federal politics in particular.
Until Audrey McLaughlin was elected leader of the NDP, there
had been no federal women leaders.  So however much we may
want to interview Sheila every night, unless the leader is
sick and she is filling in for him, it would be seen as very
rude and she wouldn't agree to speak for the party.  So, to
a certain extent, we have to deal with what we've got.

     It's not just in federal politics, it's across the
board.  Until very recently, most of the provincial leaders
of nearly all political parties have been men.  That is
starting to change substantially just in the last two or
three years.  It's the same thing for unions, it's the same
thing for business groups.  The official spokespeople who
represent different sectors of society are nearly all men,
and until we as people start choosing women as our leaders
instead of men, we in the media are in a bind.  As much as
women reporters may like to interview other women, it's hard
for us to be activists in that role and say, we've decided
that just because you are a woman your opinion is more
important than the union leader who has been elected by all
members.

     There was obviously very much an activist role taken in
hiring more women in the CBC.  I like to think we have been
more progressive, or maybe in the old days we had more money
to spend on studying things like this.  I don't know whether
any of the private broadcasters have actually done studies
on the influence of women or the role of women in news.  We
have, and we have also done such things as vocabulary lists.
We are not supposed to say "businessman," and we actually
have some quite activist male editors who come back at us
and say that we are still allowed to say "fisherman" but we
can't say "mailman."  We can't say "spokesman," even if it
is a man.  We're supposed to say "spokesperson" because
that's to give the idea that not just men can be speakers.

     About the stories that we cover, I very much like the
idea put forward by Sheila that there are hard stories and
soft stories and that maybe instead of saying that women, as
they are seeking more influence and power, should be trying
to get into areas of influence in those hard areas, that
maybe we should be paying more attention to those soft
issues, and I think that is happening.  It used to be that
issues such as daycare or stories about AIDS or Alzheimer's
weren't treated terribly seriously.  Now, either because
women are in a position of wielding more influence in
newsrooms, or because men have agreed to share more of the
duties of caring in our society, these issues are now
becoming more mainstream.  You are hearing a lot more
stories about daycare, and it's not just that the political
pressure has increased; it is now seen as something that
affects everybody.  That could be just as much because men
realize that it's half their job, and it's also because
women are making it - and women reporters are forcing it to
become - a much more important issue.

     It is difficult to point to something concrete as to
how women reporters cover stories differently.  I am sure
that there are differences, just as there are differences in
the way different men would report a story, because while
women politicians or even women judges can have opinions,
they are paid to have opinions, they are paid to propose
ideas.  As journalists, unless we are pundits or columnists
or editorialists, we are paid to be objective and to not
take one side over another, even if it is women's issues
over men's issues.  So I'd like to think that all
journalists share some pretty basic and fundamental values
which are objectivity and fairness, and that matters more to
us than promoting women's issues.

     But, there obviously has to be a difference.  I'd like
to think that since women have started reporting for The
National in Ottawa, that there have been subtle differences
in the way that we cover stories.  We do have different
sensitivities and sensibilities about things, and there are
things that will prick our ears and we'll say that there is
something not quite kosher in that.  We would point that
out.  I was reminded of Peter Kormos and the troubles that
he got into these past couple of weeks.  A decade ago, that
probably wouldn't have created a stir at all.  He said it
was his women colleagues who made him realize that he had
done something that wasn't terribly intelligent.  But if
there had not been women in politics to say to him the next
morning, "hey, goofball, that wasn't the most intelligent
thing to do," which he has acknowledged since the case was
made to him, it never would have been an issue.  Who knows
whether that was the reason Bob Rae fired him, but it is an
issue that I think comes up because there are women in
politics and women in the media.

     Sheila was making comments earlier about the way that
she is portrayed in certain newspaper accounts and I think
there was a reference to you being shrill.  I've noticed a
couple of times during Question Period, I sit up in the
gallery and you may have noticed that Sheila has a rather
commanding voice.  Sometimes when she gets angry and is
yelling questions, her voice rises because this does happen
to women when we yell, our voice rises.  Well, five years
ago it was quite an issue.  A number of her male colleagues,
across the floor of course, tried to make fun of her and
started doing shrill impersonations of Sheila's voice.  Very
much to her credit, instead of being embarrassed by this,
she got angrier and probably got shriller.  She said: "This
is a biological reality: women's voices, when they rise, get
higher.  Get used to it.  I'm not going to stop yelling at
you."  Now, if they do snicker and try to make fun of her,
at least they try to hide it because they know it's not okay
any more to try to intimidate a woman because of genetic or
biological factors.  I think it is subtle things like that
which have been happening as women enter higher and higher
levels of influence.

     The other subtle difference, which meant the most to
me, is this.  Sheila and Maureen both talked about Judy
LaMarsh as someone who had influenced them greatly.  The
most important thing to me has been not so much that we as
women do things differently, but that it is now perceived as
correct that we are allowed to be there and do things
differently, that it is normal that women be in any position
of authority, power and influence.  When I was in high
school, I used to listen to Barbara Frum interview world
leaders on As It Happens every night and this meant so much
to me because I wasn't used to women in the public eye
calling men up on the carpet and saying "Hey buddy, be
accountable on this.  I'm going to pose all the questions
that I want.  I've done my homework, and I have the right to
ask you this question, and I know so much about this
particular issue."  To me, the message was that a woman, as
long as she worked hard and was prepared to do her homework,
could do anything and be anything that she wanted to be.

     I think that's what's so important about being visible.
Women in politics and women in the media being there and
doing it sends a message to women, and young women in
particular, that there should be no limits on what women can
do, that there is no such thing as a man's job or a woman's
job or a role for women or a role for men.  So, I'd like to
feel that we have come a long way in television, but
unfortunately the furthest we've come is in the on air
positions where it is easy for the CBC to make an argument
that "yes, we are progressive, and yes, we do have a lot of
women reporters."  Behind the scenes in management and even
at the editorial level to a certain extent, and definitely
at the technical level, you still don't see very many women
with cameras on their shoulders.  But mostly at the senior
levels we have a long way to go and I think that it's
discussions like this tonight that make us, as politicians
and reporters, think more about how we can promote it from
the inside without taking one side or another.

Sylvia Stead: Thank you very much, Wendy.  We'd like to open
it up now to questions from the audience.  If you'd like to
ask a question of one of the panelists in particular, please
say so.  If you would like to just open it up to anyone,
that's fine.

Question: I've been working in the area of employment equity
and human rights for the last four years, and I've really
noticed a major change in terms of regression.  It is really
somewhat scary to watch the negative backlash that seems to
be occurring around issues of pay equity.  The comments that
I hear in major governments, at least at the municipal
level, relate to the problems that everyone is having.
Before, people were a little more subtle, but now it's said
that if women would just stay in the kitchen barefoot and
pregnant, there wouldn't be any need for daycare, and we
wouldn't have these problems therefore having an impact on
all these other social issues.  Those comments seem to be
coming out much more forthrightly.  Somehow, it wasn't
kosher to talk in that way a few years ago, and yet somehow
now it's okay.  There is an increasing backlash around a lot
of issues, not only women; it seems to be a national thing.
For me it's a challenge to deal with it when you are working
in this area.  How can you respond, because the media seem
to be feeding into it?

Sheila Copps: I think it is a bit of a dilemma because I
think Wendy mentioned about how important it is for people
in certain roles to maintain their objectivity, and when you
are a woman, whether it's as a reporter or a politician, you
are always afraid yourself to actually get pigeon-holed.  If
you are perceived to be only promoting certain issues, your
credibility goes out the window.  But there is no doubt that
we have undergone two decades of very rapid change.  I mean,
you look at my mother's life and my life and what my
daughter's life can be.  In the space of two generations,
there has been a radical re-structuring and a radical
change, and change is threatening to people who have lived
by and benefitted from the status quo.  Maureen may have a
better assessment of the political science of it, but you
have seen the emergence of the New Right in the United
States, and I think it is also true that it's much more
fashionable now to be a National Citizen's Coalition free
thinker who wants no government involvement and who would
like to see us return to an agenda of a very few privileged
people setting the political structure.  How do you deal
with that?

     I think one of the points you have to make is that, as
women, we never got ahead by being ladies.  I think that is
an important statement, because you have to be on the
cutting edge, but remembering also that you also have to
keep it in perspective.  When you do feel like you are two
steps forward and three steps back, remember how far it is
that we have actually come.  Political change, like anything
else, takes time.  As I mentioned at that conference, the
John Crosbies of this world don't necessarily change, but
they are being replaced, and for every person who rises up
in resentment of the fact that they don't have a large share
of the political agenda, we are starting to get a larger
share.  I think you do have a lot more people who are
beginning to be responsible, but it's a constant struggle,
and you don't want to seem like a carper.

     I just want to mention that we came in via the Island,
and we took Harbord Street, and just out of the sheer blue,
there was an advertisement there on one of the bus stops
advertising a local newscast.  It said everything to me
about how we shouldn't be sending messages to our kids, and
I think about my daughter and what message she gets, because
there was a picture of a man sitting on a chair, and the
woman had her arm on his.  It looked like a 1950s wedding
photo, which said everything about who was the chief person
in this newscasting team.  I mean, you can't go crazy over
every photograph, but now that I am a mother, I see the
influence.  My daughter made a comment today about the fact
that some job, I don't know even what the job was, but that
it was only a job for women.  And I just wondered where did
she get this, because I'm trying to teach her progressively.
So you just take it as it comes.

Wendy Mesley: I've noticed lots of things like that, not
just with pay equity, but there are a lot of issues that
used to be considered sacrosanct that no longer are.  For
example, I did a story last week on bilingualism which
people may have loved or hated, but it wasn't something that
a lot of people stood up and said it stinks, or at least not
the intellectual elite.  It wasn't something that was played
with.  Now it is okay.  Now the intellectual elite are
saying, it hasn't worked, let's look at improving it.

     There are all kinds of issues like that which are
coming up and pay equity is coming up as well.  What I
thought of as you were raising that question is what
happened in the abortion debate in the United States.
Obviously, there have been a number of steps backwards since
the Reagan revolution and so on in the States on that
particular issue, but there was, last year, a very
interesting phenomenon as the anti-abortion movement seemed
to garner strength, the free choice movement seemed to wake
up.  It had been dormant for a number of years.  Women who
had been politically active had not been speaking out, had
not been organized.  But as they felt threatened, as they
felt that they would lose the right to have an abortion,
they got organized again, and they were able to hold off, to
a certain extent at least, to tell a number of their
politicians "you are going to lose a lot of women's support
if you change your mind on this."

     There are ebbs and flows on every issue, and there
always will be in society.  If it goes too far for women,
then they'll have to get organized and force the issue
publicly again.  We can't as journalists.  If the National
Citizen's Coalition adopts their party platform and makes
the issue "let's stop pay equity," I can't go down the list
and pick issue #5 and ignore that.  As a reporter, I have to
report that.  There are a lot of issues and a lot of
policies that are coming up that haven't come up and I don't
whether it's for Canadians to decide whether they've changed
their minds about these things or whether it's time for
other groups to get organized and tell the other side.

Maureen O'Neil: My sense is that this lack of inhibition to
talk about issues in that way is not as clear now as it was
a few years ago.  If you think about the rise of reporting
on R.E.A.L. women, which I thought was a low point for the
discussion of many women's issues, because a group which was
really very small and not particularly influential, was
given coverage equal to the National Action Committee as
though they were similar in weight and numbers, etc.  That
coverage opened the door to a lot of negative views on the
issues that you have spoken on.  But my feeling is that that
is behind us.  I think that what we are going to see over
the next few years, as the competition for resources
heightens, are expectations that improvements in services
will be made, and there is going to be a bigger fight over
issues like daycare because there is going to be a bigger
fight over all public infrastructure issues.

     Since I've been speaking at different universities on
quite different topics, people are saying, "well, they are
going to need new faculty here, but they are only going to
hire women" - you know, very bitter male graduate students
saying this kind of thing.  It is a fact that a lot of
universities are hopefully going to be spending a lot more
time hiring more women, since they haven't done it in the
past.  So there are going to be losers.  There are losers in
the employment equity program at higher levels, and there is
going to be griping about that.  But I think on the other
front, the service front, the competition for resources is
going to be so great that there is going to be negativism.
But on the overall politics of the issue, I think that we
are moving back to a more positive agenda than we were a few
years ago, when a lot of things were called into question by
R.E.A.L. women and they were given disproportionate media
coverage.

Question: My question is for Wendy Mesley.  It seems that
women on TV not only have to be incredibly smart and
talented, but they have to be beautiful and look great ...

Wendy Mesley: What do you want me to tell you, that half of
my colleagues are ugly? [laughter]

Questioner: No, but when you look at men, they're allowed to
be overweight, like Mike Duffy.  Or they are allowed to be
bald.  Or you look at Irv Weinstein, he has acne scars, and
he is incredibly popular.  Women aren't allowed to look that
way.  Is this changing or is this double standard still
really enforced?  What's your perception of this issue?

Wendy Mesley: I think it is slightly exaggerated.  If you
look at The National, I don't think everyone is a beauty
queen, and not _every_ male is flawed [laughter].  I think
the thesis is a little exaggerated.  But there are certain
truths to that, and I don't know how we get around that.

Sheila Copps: One of the ways that you get around it is by
doing what that woman did in the United States.  If you get
fired, you sue.  I'm not suggesting that litigation is the
way in Canada, but I think that certainly sensitized people
to the fact that you can be an aging male reporter and get
by on the basis of your experience and credibility, but if
you are an aging female reporter, and you get dumped, as
Jane Pawley did, amongst others, that there should be public
attention.  And if that means going the route of litigation
or whatever, you may not win your case in the short term,
but I think it sensitizes people.

Wendy Mesley: I think at the CBC we're extremely aware of
this issue, and it is talked about, and there have been
remarkably few cases where anyone has made charges about
this.  There is only one I can think of, and it wasn't
because of her appearance, it was because she was shrill
[laughter].  But, yes, it does happen.

Question: I am with the National Action Committee on the
Status of Women and I can't agree enough with the comments
about R.E.A.L. women getting a disproportionate amount of
coverage.  I perceive this imbalance, which I find very
frustrating.  I would be very interested in your opinions of
strategies by the National Action Committee, or feminists in
general, that have _worked_, and things that you think would
be really helpful in the future.  I know that because we
never get this kind of forum, to put journalists on the spot
about what you see as really helpful or what is easy for you
to report, because we have become so media-focused now that
it's almost starting to affect our agenda.  The media are
setting our agenda, and that has been a major debate within
the women's movement in the country recently.  I would be
very interested in what you see as effective and what you
see as influential.

Wendy Mesley: I have to cop out on this because I'm not
allowed to give advice to any groups.  You know, it's almost
like being a consultant to you.  If you can think of another
way of asking the question ... [laughter].

Questioner: I'm really curious about what demands attention,
what gets ignored sometimes and what gets picked up.

Wendy Mesley: Well, there is a saying "the squeaky wheel
always attracts attention.  It does.  But if it's too
squeaky, then you lose credibility.  It's a very, very fine
line.

Sylvia Stead: Also, if it's too repetitious, as a general
rule what the media are looking for is something new,
something different, an angle, a point to a story.  What we
are looking for is something fresh.

Wendy Mesley: Yes, at The National in particular, we always
look for something called a "peg."  You know, the National
Action Committee said such and such, responding to today's
move to cut whatever.  When events happen, when the
government announces it's going to cut something or when Bob
Rae announces that he is going to spend more money on
education or less money on education, to gear your actions
to other news-driven events is always a good idea.

Question: It's just that there seems to be no logic to what
gets covered and what doesn't get covered.

Wendy Mesley: That's true.  There is no logic.  And if there
was logic, it would be fairly sinister because the only
logic is what is the news of the day, and then, on any given
day, you'll have a story that seems not terribly significant
that manages to get on The National because it was a slow
news day.  On another day, like today, I went to cover
Pierre Trudeau's speech, which I thought was quite
significant, and I argued very hard to get it on the air,
and in the end we're just running a quote of him or a clip
of him, because it was an extremely busy news day.  That
call was not mine, but on any other given day of the week
they would've wanted me to run half the news show on Pierre
Trudeau's speech.  So there is no logic.  It depends every
day upon what happens.

Sheila Copps: We go through that every day, because our
focus in the short term is obviously trying to get our
message out through The National.  I think the other thing,
in analyzing women and media, is that the CBC is definitely
much more progressive.  Part of that has stemmed from the
fact that, as a Crown corporation, it has had to be called
to account in the public way.  I think if you look at other,
private media, they tend to have been less progressive even
in terms of just getting more women into the process.  But,
we go through that every day.

     Last month or a couple of months ago, I can't remember,
CBC had a story about cow pies [laughter].  Actually, it was
contributing to global warming, because they had these cows
who were creating all this methane gas all over the
prairies.  One of my colleagues had had this marvellous
press conference and was waiting for his moment of glory,
and he got bumped by the cow pies.  Seriously, though, I
think one of the things that you have to do is try and put
yourself in the chair of that reporter and see what is going
to fly tonight.  The second thing is you have to permit your
agenda to be driven or shaped by national events that are
happening outside you.

     Last year or the year before, NAC came to Ottawa for a
two-day lobby.  I can't remember whether it was budget day
or it was just some day when you are going to be blown out
of the water; I mean, nobody, unless the Prime Minister had
a cardiac arrest, was going to be able to bump this story
from the agenda.  I don't know if it was the budget, but it
was some major, anticipated event, and NAC came up for the
lobby and were steamed that they didn't get a good hearing
by the political parties.  Well, again, I think you have to
try and dovetail your agenda.  I'm not saying allow the
media or the politicians to write your agenda, but recognize
that they need their peg and they need their follow-up.
It's funny to say, but Fridays tend to be slow news days.
It's a good day to get out a good story, even on the city
level.

     Also, do it early enough in the day.  I went out to
Saskatchewan on the weekend.  I was invited to speak to the
Liberal Convention there.  What they wanted to do was build
up this crescendo of activity, and so they paid tribute to a
couple of the senators who fought the GST, and then they had
somebody else with skits, and I was scheduled to speak
(theoretically) at 9:30.  This is Saskatchewan time, which
is 10:30 our time and that actually ended up closer to
11:00.  Well, I looked at the schedule and I said, if you
want to get any media coverage out of this, you'd better
change the schedule.  Don't do your soft stuff first.  You
do the hard stuff and the stuff you want in the national
news first, because the media also have a deadline.
Television media, unless you've got a fantastic story, like
to have it in the can by 3:00 or 3:30, so don't have an
afternoon press conference.  Do it by noon at the latest.

     There are certain tricks of the trade that you can
probably draw on.  It might even be helpful if you
formulated a questionnaire and circulated it amongst members
to get some ideas that way.  You can probably look at
members of parliament and find who has been successful in
getting their message out, and consistently it will tend to
be the same people.  The messages might be different, and
obviously if you are the leader or the acting leader, you
have a built-in chance, but there are lots of other members
out there competing to get their stories on the air, and
there are a few people who are consistently successful in
doing so.  Obviously, they have been able to do so.  Other
people can do fantastic work as members, but they aren't
able to utilize the message they are trying to get out, so
unfortunately it's the kind of business where it's like a
tree falling in the forest: if nobody reads about the fact
that it fell, you don't know that it's fallen.

Maureen O'Neil: I just have one more comment.  It's
interesting that with the media coverage that I work with,
Susan Helwig is probably the most influential person in this
country around national media who is a woman, which is a
reflection of what is happening in the CBC.

Question: I represent the management group of the Ontario
Community Newspapers Association.  You know, those other
media.  We suffer just like women do in certain
circumstances from an inferiority complex, especially when
we are amongst a group of television journalists and
dailies.  But one of the concerns that I have within our
organization is the fact that out of a membership of
approximately 260 newspapers, the ownership, in other words,
the control, of those media is in the hands of approximately
240 men.  There are only maybe ten or fifteen women who are
either sole owners or part owners with their husband or
another woman or another man, and they are in control of
just a few newspapers.  I would like to ask the panel for
your comments on the ability and the willingness of women to
take the financial risk to be in control of that kind of
medium.

Sheila Copps: Well, I think just on the strict business
aspect, clearly, the number of women getting involved in
business and being successful has just skyrocketed.  I think
the figures are that of every five businesses that are
launched, three of them are launched by women and they are
successful.  So there is, I think, certainly an interest in
women as entrepreneurs, partly because when you are your own
boss you are also able to control your working conditions,
and I think that's important in the context of the way that
we are trying to live double lives.

     Insofar as ownership of the media is concerned
generally, I mean, look at the masthead of the _Financial
Post_, and when he was talking earlier about who writes
columns.  Who are the major columnists?  Marjorie Nichols is
certainly a very influential national columnist.  But, by
and large, they tend to be men, and you've got good quality
people so you don't want to knock them off.  That's the
other problem that you face, because many of these people
have been around for a lot of years and I assume the
ownership of a lot of newspapers is a long-standing thing.

     Weekly papers are a boon to politicians because they
sit in your house all week long.  Don't under-estimate the
power of the weeklies.  Whereas usually in your daily
newspaper I think you read, what, three headlines and a few
paragraphs and usually you are too busy, the weekly sits
there and you go through it and you get a little bit of
local, I wouldn't say gossip, but local happenings.  It's a
very powerful tool and I think that people who are
interested in getting their message out should use the
weekly media a lot more, because they are also tight on
staff and they need stories.  If you give them a
well-written and well-researched story with a local angle,
you can almost guarantee that it's going stay in 50,000 to
100,000 households for the whole week.

Sylvia Stead: I'm surprised actually at what you say, that
it's changing and it's still men, because a former colleague
of mine, Gwen Smith, is now the publisher of the _Sun Times
of Canada_ in Fort Lauderdale, and my understanding was that
newspapers used to be an extremely expensive thing to get
into, setting up presses.  But I understand now that women
can do it by desktop publishing.  Any other questions?  I
think we have time for about one more.

Question: I'm the co-ordinator of a journalism program at a
community college in a small town.  We have a woman mayor.
Actually, it's not a small town, it's Oakville.  They still
call themselves a town.  Just one comment.  I'm really
concerned about the financial aspects of women getting into
politics.  It's quite true I don't think there is much hope
for a woman like myself if I wanted to even run for mayor,
and I don't.  Financially, I couldn't assume that burden
myself, and although I have contacts in the community and
the business world, I don't think personally I have the
contacts that would draw the money I need to run for office,
be it local or provincial.  I am really concerned about that
and I am really pleased that some steps are being taken to
alleviate that situation.  Just on the lighter side, is it
still true that women have to try harder? [laughter]

Sheila Copps: Well, Charlotte Whitten said that for a woman
to succeed in business or politics, she had to be twice as
good as any man, but of course that wasn't too difficult.
Seriously, though, on the issue of funding, the reason I
raise the issues in relation to the electoral commission is
because there is a move afoot to democratize it.  There is
also a move to go in the absolute opposite direction.
Ironically, the Royal Commission ran a seminar last fall,
which they held at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, and
the reason they ran it was because, in their travels across
the country, they only heard from about thirty women or
women's groups.  So they actually, on their initiative, put
this conference together in Montreal, and they have been
commissioning papers and doing a fair bit of academic
research into how you change the system.  But there is that
push-pull on the other side, of other people like Preston
Manning saying that the government has no business there.

     The other thing is you also have to be, to a certain
extent, prepared to take risks.  When I ran for the
leadership of the Liberal Party, looking back on it, I must
have been out of my tree.  It's a chicken and egg situation,
because it's a very expensive proposition and nobody wants
to give you money unless you are a declared candidate, and
yet you can't declare your candidacy unless you have money
in the bank.  We had spent, in preparatory work, maybe
somewhere in the neighbourhood of $25,000.  But when I
announced, the day I announced, we had $2,000 in the bank.
I'm still about $50,000 in the hole, which I am working on
and hopefully we'll have that wiped out by the end of June,
but we ended up raising $825,000.

     And I'll tell you that we started off with the premise
that we're not taking out any bank notes or bank loans or
anything like that.  And we spend what we have, and it ended
up that we went over.  In a way, we broke our own rule, but
we felt that it was within reason and we are dealing with
the debt.  But you do have to take some risks, and I think
that's the other side of it too.  Nobody is going to hand
you anything on a platter.  If you don't take risks in life,
you just sustain the status quo.  It's only by taking risks
that you can challenge the status quo and make changes.

Sylvia Stead: We do have time for one more question.

Question: I'm interested in knowing if you think there is a
possibility for women to create women's culture in the
context of the male culture that has created the media that
we work with.  I mean, you being judged as shrill or someone
being judged as attractive or not attractive, I see that as
a male cultural norm that we all operate under, and we have
to try to survive it.  Creating a female culture in which we
would judge ourselves, or not judge, is, I think, the
essence.  Do you think it's possible to create that?

Wendy Mesley: That's a very hard question.  I think we spend
so much time and so much energy trying to get there, to get
here, we are not quite there or here yet, that we are really
just starting to address that issue of what kind of world we
really want.  We spent so much time trying to be _part_ of
that world, and now finally we're in a position where we can
wield some clout.  It's very complicated because so far our
efforts have been aimed at doing away with the negative
sides of the male culture instead of establishing a brand
new culture.  I'd like to think that's where we will go in
the next decade, that it won't be fighting back, that it
will be creating.

Question: What kind of clout would we wield?  What would we
be wielding clout over?

Wendy Mesley: That's why I like the idea that Sheila was
raising earlier.  Instead of trying to show what tough
broads we are and that we can do the old stuff just as well
as the men, maybe we should be changing what's important.

Sheila Copps: But it's also true that to do that, to a
certain extent, you have to become a part of and buy into
the existing culture.  When I think just in very physical
terms, if you know that you are going to be judged not
directly by the content of your message but rather by the
way you look, you have two choices.  You can say, "the heck
with it, I'm not going to change," or you can say "okay, if
there are things that I can make better about myself."  I
mean, I took a lot of flack over the leadership from my
alleged transformation.  I went out and got my colours done
[laughter].  I was never very much into clothes, but I
understand how the media work and I understand the
psychology.  People want to hear the message from a
messenger who makes them feel good about themselves.  I went
to a couple of clothing factories in Toronto and I said, can
you donate some clothes.  So I bought into that cultural
thing.  I mean, it's fine to say, I'm going to wait until
the world changes and we are only judged by what's on the
inside, but you could be waiting for a long time.  I'd
rather say, okay, don't compromise yourself on the bigger
questions, but if there are little things that can help you
get there, you give and take on those issues.

Maureen O'Neil: I'd agree with Sheila on that.  I think also
that in countries where women make up 30 or 40 per cent (now
we don't have many such countries - we can look at the
Scandinavian countries and not much beyond that), but where
women _do_ make up a substantial portion of people who are
elected, 30 or 40 per cent, the atmosphere within which
political decisions get made is no doubt quite different
because there they are in fact forming their own women's
caucus; women's cultures and that kind of thing can come
through.  But Sheila, I think, is absolutely right, and
Wendy.  You can be on the outside for a very long time if
you are looking for the creation of women's culture at a
time when women aren't around the table discussing the major
issues.

Sylvia Stead: Now just briefly to summarize.  As Wendy began
her talk, she pointed out that there is certainly good news
and bad news that we have to reflect on.  From our
panelists, we heard that 91 per cent of the experts who are
interviewed are men, and yet we have had a substantial
increase of women in the work force.  We've had Sheila
suggesting that in fact it might be a good time now to run
as a woman because, in fact, given the backlash against the
old system, women can be more popular.  On the other hand,
she points out some concerns about the platform of the
Reform Party, and maybe there is another backlash coming.
Wendy points out that there are more women than men in the
Ottawa bureau of the CBC, which is quite remarkable, and yet
men tend to interview more women than the women reporters
do, so it is very much a mixed bag.  As everyone has said,
women have made a lot of progress, but there is certainly a
long way to go.  Thank you all very much. [applause]

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-




MEDIAWATCH/EVALUATION-MEDIAS: REPORT ON RECENT ACTIONS


Mary Ambrose
MediaWatch


     MediaWatch began its second decade with a bold move
into central Canada.  In order to protect our funding,
increase our access to and influence on, the broadcasting
and advertising industries, MediaWatch's national office is
now in Toronto.  We have a whole new staff, headed by a long
time player on the Canadian cultural scene, Meg Hogarth.
Hogarth has been a professional performer in Canadian film,
stage, television and commercials for over thirty years.
For two years she was the President of ACTRA, the Alliance
of Canadian Television and Radio Artists.  She was on the
Board of the Council of Canadians, and currently sits on the
Board of TV Ontario.

     MediaWatch celebrated its move to Toronto and its tenth
anniversary with the release of the _Media Directory of
Women: A Resource for Broadcast and Print Journalists_.
This is an invaluable resource for the media, which are
always justifying their lack of using female experts by
crying they can't find any.  Grouped under eleven different
themes, this Directory lists women able to talk on over 100
different subjects.  Included are profiles of the speakers,
who are listed geographically.  A bibliography listing
various sources will help researchers find other women as
speakers, commentators or experts.  Copies of the Directory
can be obtained from the National Office.

     The need for the inclusion of more women in the
Canadian media was underlined in our study of sexism in
Canadian newspapers.  In June 1992, MediaWatch released "A
Good Day to be Female?: A Three-Year Overview of Sexism in
Canadian Newspapers."  This national study examined one day
in the life of Canadian newspapers, and the ongoing dearth
of women it revealed is startling.  Over the last three
years, female bylines have dropped 10 per cent.  In news
stories undue attention is still given to women's
appearances rather than their actions or achievements.
Despite all of the talk of the "politically correct"
nineties, there is no move towards gender-neutral language
in Canadian newspapers.  You may have read about this study,
the press seems to enjoy hearing about itself, even if it is
apparently closed to reflecting Canadian women as equal
partners to men.

     A valuable resource which works in conjunction with
this study and is available to the public, is MediaWatch's
press clipping collection from seven Canadian newspapers.
This extensive collection of newspaper clippings from 1980
to 1991 focuses on women's portrayal and employment in the
media.

     One of the main objectives of MediaWatch is to empower
consumers, outraged by pervasive media sexism, to talk back
to the media.  We have long hoped that if the media and
advertising industry understood how promoting sexism not
only makes the world a more dangerous place for girls and
women, but also offends their customers, they'd make a more
vigorous effort to eliminate sexism.  In order to bridge
this gap between the producers and the consumers of media
products, MediaWatch launched three important initiatives.

     We developed an intervention kit for use by members of
the public at CRTC licence hearings.  This allows anyone to
understand how a broadcaster applies for, and secures, a
licence from the CRTC, and explains how individuals can have
a voice in that process.  This kit provides sample letters,
common questions and answers, and makes the public hearing
process truly open to the public.

     MediaWatch also conducted a study of the feasibility of
running workshops on sexism for the broadcasting and
advertising industry.  This study revealed that, although
the industry knows that identifying sexism in their products
is important, they were unwilling to purchase a workshop on
this issue.  Government advertisers, who are less reliant on
the economic caprices of the marketplace, were more
committed to the idea, but it would be impossible to re-coup
the cost of developing a workshop without a larger market.

     But women are notoriously adaptable and we found a
different way to work with the broadcast industry.  In
collaboration with Toronto Women in Film and Television and
Canadian Women in Radio and Television, a twenty-minute
video titled "Get The Picture" was produced for use within
the production community (broadcasters and advertisers).
Although it's very professional, it is designed for
educational use, not for broadcast.  It is available through
the MediaWatch office with the acceptance of a borrower's
agreement.

     MediaWatch also produced its own video entitled "What's
Wrong With This Picture?"  Its focus is media literacy and,
although geared to teachers, it is an excellent educational
tool for any group.  It comes with back-up print material
and has already been purchased by B.C.'s Knowledge Network
and Alberta's Access Network.

     The National Office of MediaWatch is located at 517
Wellington Street West, Suite 204, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M5V 1G1.  Telephone: 416-408-2065.  Fax: 416-408-2069.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-


REFLECTIONS ON THE SECOND ANNUAL "WOMEN IN THE MEDIA"
CONFERENCE


Annette Ruitenbeek
Free lance writer

     These are the memories that have lingered on with me,
from the "Women in the Media" conference organized by the
Canadian Association of Journalists, Vancouver, November
1991.

     Linda Hossie, foreign affairs reporter, _The Globe and
Mail_, offered the most profound, thought-provoking ideas to
a plenary session.  She suggested that:

     We're in.  I think we've exhausted what persuasion
     can do for us.  I think we've reasoned and
     demonstrated and rationalized and jollied all we
     can.  The resistance now is very strong ...  I
     suggest we move away from soft tactics and towards
     more defined ones.

     Proposed tactics included an industry-wide analysis, to
find points of systemic discrimination, followed by human
rights complaints based on the research.  Great, I thought,
allies in the industry.

     In the process of doing that I think we will
     demonstrate to people who doubt who we are and
     what our rights are: (a) that we mean it, and b)
     that it's not just some kind of fantasy that we
     have.  We actually have rights in this society and
     we're now going to exercise them for our own
     benefit and ... for the benefit of the industry.

     And for the benefit of all people, I thought.

     Looking forward to a debate on this proposal, I was
devastated to see that it was not even considered - the
session was taken over by responses from the audience to the
peculiar comments from Neil Graham, the executive
editor/dinosaur of the _Vancouver Province_.  As women lined
up to take pot-shots at him, or occasionally to praise him
for having the courage to speak his mind, the agenda of the
plenary was completely side-tracked.

     Rosemary Brown, in a stirring after-dinner speech,
announced angrily, "you fell for the bait."  She was right.
A productive work session was tossed out the window in
favour of emotional responses to a man's caustic comments
(e.g.  Neil Graham: "I for one am not going to look away if
you bring a pretty face into the newsroom," talking about
his support for women in the industry).  Was he playing
devil's advocate?  Did he mean what he said?  Is he
representative of men in the industry?

     Who cares?  Women cannot continue to second-guess our
opponents.  Better to ignore the silly man and get on with
our work.  Better to take Linda Hossie's advice and do the
work, rather than agonize about the painful stupidity we all
have to deal with every day.  Better to legislate against
sexism, to boycott sexist publications, to create realistic
images of women in our press and our own videos, to
infiltrate the male-stream media with our own clear-headed
representation of all people ... better to take action than
to bleed from our raw emotion.

     Anger is a powerful motivator.  Positive visions of a
better world are an equally powerful motivator.  Together,
they are a dynamic agent for change.  Anger and vision were
in plentiful supply at the plenary, and a suggested plan of
action was provided to channel the energy.  Yet women
responded to Neil Graham.

     Why do women care so much about a man who cares so
little about us?  Why do we doubt the urgency of our work,
and suspend it while we debate his comments and his right to
make them?  Why are we so damned nice, and thoughtful, and
considerate, and needing-to-make-things-right-and-fair?

     This incident had a profound impact on me.  Several
things were obvious to me:

     (a) There was no need for me, personally, to continue
my involvement in MediaWatch.  Women in the industry were
doing excellent work initiating the changes that are
required.  I could support them in other ways.  Perhaps the
most important work of MediaWatch lies in educating the
general public and lobbying government and the advertising
industry for changes in the representation of women and
girls.  As I no longer had time during the day to do this,
it was time for me to leave the organization.

     (b) Increasing women's self-esteem and finding ways of
getting on with our own lives remains some of the most
challenging work in the women's movement.  This challenge is
met by one woman at a time, one young girl at a time, as
individuals reject the nonsense that the advertising
industry feeds them, reject the nonsense that men like Neil
Graham speak of, reject the battering, walk away from it all
and find safe places.  Safe places to work, to live, to
play, to raise our children.  Safe places in ourselves,
where our self-doubt has been eradicated.  Safe places that
are eked out by consistent, vigilant women who demand
change.  Who take steps toward change.  Who dance around the
dinosaurs, trying our best not to dance in the shit the
dinosaurs leave behind.

     This is not easy.  I am currently working in a
hierarchical environment, in the government.  One of my
personal goals here is every day to change at least one
man's mind about women.  This can be done by challenging a
decision, insisting on women's participation in making a
decision, urging the women to be front-and-centre,
advocating action at all times.

     I have heard a woman say "I have never met a lapsed
feminist."  Perhaps this is because part of being a feminist
means taking action toward change, and those of us who are
powered by action don't lose steam.

     Ignore those who would take your power away from you.
If you can't ignore them, work around them and against them
until they must work with you.  Celebrate your victories.
These are the lessons I take from the women's movement.
Call me naive, but I think it would have worked at the CAJ
plenary.