On Accountability, Change and Redemption

On Accountability, Change and Redemption

I've been thinking about the calls for Energy Minister Marco MacLeod to resign over the misogynistic and violent lyrics he recorded more than a decade ago, and particularly ADSUM's position that his apology isn't enough and that the material should disqualify him from public office.

The lyrics are awful. I don't have any interest in defending them, minimizing them or explaining them away as something a younger man once did. MacLeod was an adult when he recorded them. We can say plainly that they were misogynistic and degrading and still have a much harder conversation about what accountability is supposed to accomplish.

There is also a standard here that I think needs to be established from the beginning. MacLeod isn't simply a private citizen being confronted with something from his past. He is a minister of the Crown, holding a position of public trust, and that requires more than an apology. If he is asking Nova Scotians to believe these words no longer represent him, then I think he has an obligation to demonstrate what changed, how it changed and what accountability looks like now. Perhaps that ultimately means he cannot continue in public office. I don't know. But I don't think saying "that's not who I am anymore" is enough when you are asking the public to trust you.

This lands very close to the work I've been doing with Transformation of Dangerous Spaces, because the entire premise of that work depends upon something we don't talk about nearly enough: we have to believe that men are redeemable. Not excusable and certainly not absolved. Redeemable. There is an important difference. We have to believe that men are more than the culture that formed them.

Misogyny isn't something men are born carrying around with them. Much of it is learned. It is absorbed from other men, from locker rooms, music, pornography, jokes, families, workplaces, silence and all those small permissions we give one another about what is acceptable. If we believe misogyny can be learned, then we also have to believe it can be unlearned.

That doesn't happen by pretending the past didn't happen. In fact, I think it requires the opposite. A man has to be able to look backward without editing himself into a better person than he actually was. He has to be able to say: I said that. I participated in that. I thought that was funny. I stayed silent when I should have spoken. I was wrong.

And this is where I struggle. We keep asking men to examine these things, to understand the harm in them and to change. Surely, then, we have to leave room for the possibility that some of them actually do. If we aren't willing to recognize change when it happens, I don't know how we can keep demanding it.

MacLeod has apologized. He has said the lyrics were wrong, that they don't represent who he is today and that he wouldn't make them now. I accept that he regrets them, but regret and transformation aren't necessarily the same thing. He has begun reaching out to women and others in his community and having what he describes as embarrassing and open conversations. That may be part of accountability, and I hope it is, but it doesn't by itself answer the question I'm interested in: what changed?

I don't know whether Marco MacLeod has redeemed himself. I don't know him, and I don't think an apology issued in the middle of a public controversy is enough evidence for me to make that judgment. I also don't know whether he should resign. What I do believe is that because he holds public office, the responsibility is his to demonstrate that change. Redemption may be possible, but public trust is not something he is entitled to simply because he has apologized.

It also matters to me that MacLeod acknowledges he didn't disclose the recordings when he put his name forward for the Progressive Conservative nomination and now says that, in hindsight, he should have. That's not something that happened fifteen years ago. That's a much more recent decision, and I think it deserves scrutiny of its own.

So who has this man been in the years since? How has he treated women? What does his behaviour tell us? What has he learned about the misogyny contained in his own work beyond understanding today that the words were hurtful? Has the life he has lived since those recordings demonstrated that the man who made them is not the man standing before us today?

Those aren't rhetorical questions. I genuinely don't know the answers, and I think the answers matter.

I understand and fully support ADSUM's position, particularly given the work they do with women and families who live with the consequences of male violence. Their demand for accountability is important, and I don't see what I'm saying here as an argument against it. I think there is another question that has to exist alongside it: if we are asking men to confront misogyny, take responsibility for it and change, what does genuine transformation look like, and what evidence are we prepared to accept when it happens?

This is exactly what I'm wrestling with through Transformation of Dangerous Spaces. We ask men to look at the locker room, at silence and complicity, at the things we've said when women weren't around, the things we didn't challenge and the things we once thought were funny that we don't anymore. There isn't much value in asking men to enter those uncomfortable places if we've already decided there is no door out.

I don't think dividing the world neatly into good men and bad men gets us very far. The much more uncomfortable reality is that ordinary men can absorb harmful ideas, participate in a culture that diminishes women and sometimes go years without really examining any of it. If we're going to change that culture, we have to believe those same men are capable of recognizing it, confronting it and choosing something different.

Redemption requires accountability because there has to be something you are redeeming yourself from. But accountability and permanent condemnation aren't the same thing. The man who walks out of that reckoning does not have to remain the man who walked into it.

That doesn't mean we simply believe him when he tells us he's changed. It means we give him the opportunity to show us.

If our only interest is identifying misogyny, this work is relatively easy. If our interest is actually changing the men who have participated in it, the work becomes much harder.

For Transformation of Dangerous Spaces to mean anything, we have to believe men can listen, learn, confront themselves and change. At some point, we also have to be prepared to recognize when they have.

Redemption asks us to consider who someone has become. Public accountability asks them to show us.

Otherwise, I'm not sure what we mean when we say we want men to change. Change has to be allowed to count for something.

Christopher W. Quigley
Executive Director
ALCHEMIA Art Workshop