I hovered over the tweet button on this thread for a while before sending. I don't want to take away from what happened to McKenna and her staff - actually, I want to add to it. People are expressing shock and anger at the video of someone harassing her staff - and surprise.
Being and working in politics means you are a 24/7 target for some really horrific abuse, and unless you're in it, you don't understand the magnitude of it. And that is somewhat intentional. #cdnpoli
Politicians and political staff know this stuff happens more than people realize. It's not shared often, but that's because if we did share it, it would be all we ever talked about. Instead, we try to mitigate the harassment and endure it.
Constituency offices with emergency plans, ministerial offices with panic buttons, staff who manage social media on stress leave, vandalized offices & signs, death threats by phone, death threats by mail, death threats by email, death threats by facebook, death threats in person.
Staff who answer phones hardly last a few months in the job. The first time I opened mail and saw a creepy death threat, I took it to my colleague, thinking this would make the news or at least be a big deal. She added it to a stack and asked me to fill out a form. 😕
I was campaigning in the states once, and someone tacked a note to a campaign office door that said "I've got a box of bullets waiting for you." The next day, the office was open, everyone was at work. They said, "If we closed every time, we'd never be open."
Sometimes incidents happen and are dealt with by police without ever getting media attention, even a person walking around outside a political event with a gun. A news story about it might be seen as a distraction from your message, so you don't highlight it.
And this is it: when you put weeks of work into an event, organizing people, the venue and the tech, designing podium art and writing speaking notes, getting volunteers to help - you do that to get a message out. If the story is "death threat"- you don't achieve anything.
Putting it bluntly: Talking about how much some people want to kill you is not the story you want, and talking about that instead of what you want to do for people feels like you let the assholes win.
These are not uncommon isolated incidents and it's a mistake to blame it on mental illness. Maybe this *is* our political culture. And if you or your boss are BIPoC, a woman, fat, living with a disability - of course, it's all the more worse.
I feel for McKenna and her staff. I know that what we see probably barely scratches the surface of the hate she gets. #cdnpoli
Forgot to mention the bomb threats shutting down the parliamentary precinct in Ottawa. This isn't just a problem under a Liberal gov - I worked there from 2011-2014 and it happened regularly. In AB, I know the 2 largest parties both had to lock down their elxn HQ due to threats.
