Montreal City Weblog

Kate 22:42 on 2020-10-23 Permalink Reply  

• dwgs 09:00 on 2020-10-24 Permalink

  Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

• Tim S. 09:26 on 2020-10-24 Permalink

  A theory: left-wing/progressive parties put a great emphasis on finding diverse candidates, and are so excited to find a non-white male willing to run that they don’t vet carefully or consider if the person really is an ideological fit. We see this with Project, we also saw with the federal Liberals (who are into diversity even though I don’t consider them particularly left) and Jody Wilson Raybould and Jane Philpot.
  Just to be clear, I’m not trying to say that these women are unqualified – I much prefer independent thinkers to a bunch of trained seals. But from the point of view of a political organization that has a long-established process designed to recruit trained seals, and you throw a few wild cards into the mix, this is what happens.
  Anyways, I don’t know all the details in some of these cases, so it’s just a theory.

• J 09:48 on 2020-10-24 Permalink

  Same thing happened to Piper Huggins, female PM member from years ago who got ejected due to disagreements on how to handle the Notman Forest. This and the Sue Montgomery things continue that trend. Has this happened to any male members of the caucus?

• Ian 13:12 on 2020-10-24 Permalink

  Also Giuliana Fumagalli of Villeray- Parc Ex – S Michel.

  This is in fact the 4th time an elected official has been unceremoniously removed from Projet Montreal and yes, it’s always women, who are deemed “uncooperative”.

• DeWolf 17:36 on 2020-10-24 Permalink

  What’s most concerning in all of these cases is that the details of why these women were ejected from the party are very opaque. The most clear-cut case is Giuliana Fumagalli, who issued a mea culpa soon after the accusations of harassment surfaced, and even then it’s not clear exactly what happened.

• Chris 17:44 on 2020-10-24 Permalink

  Is the suggestion those 4 were booted *because* they were women? What’s the evidence?

  For Provost, the article says she’s the *only* party member to *publicly* oppose the marina project. Is that fact in dispute? When you publicly oppose your party… well, sometimes you get booted for that. Seems a much more straightforward reason than a sexist conspiracy.

• dwgs 18:37 on 2020-10-24 Permalink

  Not necessarily because they were women but how many people have been booted from party? Is it 4? What percentage of elected members of PM are women? It could well be coincidence but the numbers are starting to look a little troublesome. And I thought that PM were supposed to be a break from ‘politics as usual’ and progressive and such. One would think that a little dissent might be tolerated.

• Kate 06:12 on 2020-10-25 Permalink

  Chris, I never said that they were booted because they’re women. I simply stated what seemed an obvious common factor. Maybe it’s a red herring, but it’s certainly a trend within Projet.

• Chris 12:13 on 2020-10-25 Permalink

  Kate, I never said you said they were booted because they’re women. My reply was 1) a question 2) not even to you specifically. Many other responses hinted this is because she’s a woman, but it’s always hard to fully understand someone’s exact meaning from a few written sentences, and I always try to give most charitable interpretation, so if anyone does think that’s the reason, I was hoping to understand why.

  >One would think that a little dissent might be tolerated

  dwgs, I have no inside knowledge of how PM operates, but maybe dissent is perfectly fine *internally*, but once they debate amongst themselves, vote, and state a position *publicly*, then they may expect members to stick with the team decision. Provost didn’t.

• jeather 19:24 on 2020-10-25 Permalink

  So Projet Montreal has removed 4 members since the last election, all women. They have 35 city and 17 borough councillors, according to Wikipedia, and it looks like 28 are women, which — if my math is right — says it’s about 7.5% chance that if you picked 4 people at random out of 52, all four would be women given there are 28 . So it’s not an inconceivably low number, but it is very suggestive of women and men being treated differently, and I think the onus should be on PM to look at this and consider if in fact women are being held to a higher standard.