Gender-based political violence in Canada: Comparative lessons on intersectional impacts and ineffective ‘solutions’

This paper will synthesize learnings from our ongoing research on gender-based violence in politics in Canada (see Collier and Raney 2018 a, b; Raney and Collier 2021, 2023 and forthcoming 2024). The Canadian case offers many comparative lessons that can inform work in other liberal democratic nations that similarly downplay the role that gender-based violence plays as a systemic barrier to democratic representation. Even though Canada was one of the first countries to enact legislative action aimed at curbing sexual harassment and gender-based violence in its national and some provincial legislatures, the country continues to see increases in reports of gender-based violence in a variety of political spaces, from online platforms to the halls of parliament to the campaign trail to local communities to traditional media coverage. Instead, many of the legislative steps taken across Canada have been largely performative and leave intact existing institutional arrangements that will not sufficiently address this problem. Our paper will highlight key insights from Canada that can help inform the work of researchers and policymakers in other similar jurisdictions including those with an ongoing history of colonial violence against Indigenous peoples, federal countries with multi-level governance models, other Westminster systems as well as multi-party democracies. Our paper will argue that in order to improve institutional responses to gender-based violence, researchers and policymakers should widen the definition of political spaces to transcend ‘formal’ institutions that are often the focus of gender-based violence research. Additionally, it is also germane to consider exactly how violence is experienced by diverse political actors in ways that reflect their intersecting and interlocking identities. Our paper also will argue that gender-based violence ‘solutions’ cannot significantly differ across multiple levels of government within a country if there is any hope of ending the practice as a political norm. The paper will conclude by suggesting ways to translate comparative learnings across jurisdictions to ensure mistakes are not repeated and that better democratic outcomes are possible in the near future.