25 Nov Mulcair, Trudeau, and the classic double bind

In the 1950s, the social scientist Gregor Bateson described what he called the Double Bind phenomenon: an emotionally distressing situation in which someone in authority delivers a pair of messages so conflicted that a successful response to one results in a failed response to the other, and the recipient is wrong regardless their response. It’s roughly the equivalent of being asked whether you have stopped beating your spouse.

Events of the last month in Ottawa show that, where allegations of sexual abuse against two Liberal MPs are concerned, Tom Mulcair’s NDP caucus has mastered the double-bind. Here’s the latest nugget, courtesy of the Hill Times:

The Canadian Press reported last week that NDP MP Craig Scott (Toronto-Danforth, Ont.), a former law professor, told Liberals that one of the alleged incidents, the way it was described to him, amounted to an allegation of sexual assault. Mr. Scott responded to the story last week with a terse statement saying his “good faith contribution to this meeting was confidential” and “had been broken in a way that disrespects the victim.”

How, exactly, does suspending an MP who may have committed sexual assault get turned into disrespect for the victim of that (alleged) assault? Let’s review the events leading up to this charge of “disrespect for the victim.”

• Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau became aware of the allegations through a chance encounter.
• He immediately put in place a mechanism for investigating the allegations with the cooperation of the NDP caucus.
• Based on those discussions, he concluded the allegations were serious enough to warrant suspending the MPs from his caucus until the issue could be resolved.
• He did all this in a matter of days, without identifying the complaining MPs or the caucus they belong to.

You can argue that Trudeau acted with such haste that he compromised the rights of the impugned MPs. Indeed, their political careers may never recover. But no, Mulcair, Scott, and their caucus argue that, by acting at all, Trudeau “disrespected” the purported victims of the Liberal MPs’ alleged abuse.

What a clever trap! Disrespectful if you do; disrespectful if you don’t. Had Trudeau failed to act, the NDP would have pilloried him for… “disrespecting the victims.” But since he acted with dispatch, the NDP must now pillory him for “disrespecting the victims.” Classic double bind.

I don’t like to speculate on motives, but it’s not hard to see how distressing it must be for Mulcair to have the youthful leader of the Liberal Party, thought to have wide appeal to women voters, act with rare urgency on an allegation of sexual abuse. Why it’s almost like having Lester Pearson adopt medicare.