The Globe and Mail's Jane Taber writes a popular "Hot and Not" column for her paper on Saturdays but she's made a serious and, to be honest, surprising error in this week's edition. While writing up a few paragraphs on women in politics, Taber says:
The bolded part is my emphais and it's a sentence I'm sure Taber knows is incorrect."Meanwhile, there are rumblings among some grass-root Liberal women that Mr. Ignatieff doesn't quite share that view. Mr. Ignatieff has few female caucus members in key critics' roles and has one senior woman in his entourage: communications director Jill Fairbrother . (Stephen Harper doesn't have a single senior woman.) The rumblings are that if more women were in high places, seeking consensus, we might not have come to the brink of another federal election this month.
As anyone who covers the PMO and the Conservatives know: The third most powerful person in the PMO -- after Harper and Chief of Staff Guy Giorno -- is a woman: Jenni Byrne, Harper's Director of Issues Management. If you ask most Conservative staffers if they'd rather be on the wrong side of Giorno or Byrne, I bet most would say Giorno. No one wants Byrne gunning for them.
And Byrne, unlike Giorno, has been there since day one of Harper assuming office. Byrne's unheralded influence for three years is largely a result, if you ask me, of the fact that she has never curried the kind of "inside-the-queensway" status that some other staffers are often interested in. I've asked some of the leading lights of the Parliamentary Press Gallery if they could pick Byrne out of a crowd and, even when she's walking down the stairs from PM's office right in front of them, they shrug in ignorance. For what it's worth: There are about four people in the PMO whose rolodex info I covet and she's one of them. Tough luck for me: I am told by many staffers that she is no fan of the Ottawa press corps and keeps them at arm's length.
Every Conservative staffer who matters in Ottawa hears from Byrne every day beginning at 7 a.m. when she holds her daily conference call to review what's in the morning papers, last night's newscasts, and what's the gossip on today's blogs and talk radio. She'll give marching orders or ask you to account for your activities the day before, particularly if there's a headline somewhere that she never saw coming. Byrne, I am told, can be a tough taskmaster and some staffers (women mostly, I'm told but I have no way of confirming) have quit because they felt Byrne was too tough. But other staffers, even those who have come in for a dressing-down by Byrne on those conference calls, says she has to be that tough because the meeting after her daily 7:15 a.m. call with staffers is with the prime minister and it's her job to make sure he is not surprised by anything a reporter or opposition politician might say that day.
When Sandra Buckler (another woman) was Harper''s director of communications, I'm told that she and Byrne often tussled over what the message of the day ought to be and then Buckler would decide how that message would be delivered. Buckler's successor, Kory Teneycke, I'm told, doesn't have the same kind of conflicts with Byrne. Teneycke, who is the director of communication (no 's' on that), seems to concede that it is Byrne's job to sort out the message of the day and Byrne seems to concede that it is Teneycke who knows best how to execute the communications strategy with that message. In other words: Byrne figures out what the message is; Teneycke does the messaging.
I would agree with Jane' s general thesis that a gender imbalance continues to exist among elected politicians and staffers but there are plenty of influential women behind the scenes in the Harper government:
- Carolyn Stewart-Olsen: I don't know how Stewart-Olsen could slip from Taber's mind when she says Harper doesn't have a single senior woman advising him. Stewart-Olsen, a former nurse, has been on the plane next to Harper for every federal election he's been in. She is Harper's longest-serving staffer (Tom Flanagan, in his book Harper's Team, said he hired her in 2001 when Harper was trying to beat Stockwell Day for leadership of teh Canadian Alliance.) exceeding the tenure of Ray Novak and Dimitri Soudas. She is tremendously loyal and protective of Harper. And, like the other women in Harper's inner circle, she (it seems to me) has no interest in building cozy relationships with the Ottawa press corps, even though she's now been in Ottawa longer than many members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. Stewart-Olsen is now a senior advisor and director of Strategic Communications for Harper. I'd say she outranks Ignatieff's Jill Fairbrother in terms of title, salary, and influence.
- Jasmine Igneski. I've never met Igneski and I know no reporter who has. And yet, her current title is Director of Priorities and Planning - a very important job in any PMO. Before her current assignment, she was one of Harper's senior advisors. Check out her meeting record with lobbyists: If there was an economic or business issue you needed the PMO involved with, you went to see Jasmine. As far as I can tell, Andrew Wallace is the new Jasmine Igneski. My lobbyist sources tell me Igneski was someone you needed to deal with if you wanted to get anywhere in the PMO.
- Isabelle Bouchard was once a separatist, then a member of the ADQ and finally a Conservative. She's not 30 (I think -- cuz we all know it's not polite to ask a woman her age) and was Gordon O'Connor's director of communications when he was defence minister. Now she's working with Byrne in issues management with an eye towards Quebec.
But it is inaccurate and unfair to say, as Taber does in a widely-read newspaper, that "Harper doesn't have a single senior women" in his office. There are, in fact, several women who play an influential and important role in the most senior office in the land.
