Last week while on holidays I saw a post on a LinkedIn group that caught my eye.  It was about women, family and  career success.

What prompted my colleague Lisa Ryan to start the discussion was a comment made by former GM CEO Jack Welch in his keynote address at the annual SHRM (Society for Human Resources Management) convention in July.  Mr. Welch said that women who wanted to make it to the top in the corporate world need to stay on a career track.  Taking time off to have and raise children will impact a woman’s ability to move into the executive ranks.

 His comments were picked up and discussed by a number of journalists and bloggers.  A subsequent article in the NY Times “A Labour Market Punishing to Women” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/business/economy/04leonhardt.html?_ r=2&src=me&ref=homepage) offered support to Mr. Welch’s comment, pointing out that “Women do almost as well as men today as long as they don’t have children.”   To support this point, the article highlighted the fact that none of the 3 women recently appointed to the US Supreme Court have children.  Justice Janet Bader Ginsburg does, but she appears to be the exception that proves the rule.

As a single mother working in the field of human rights this revelation by Mr. Welch is certainly not news to me.  The fact that women without children make better career progress than those who have children is simply that – a fact.   I realized this soon after I had my daughter and told my employer I could not jump on a plane in two hours because I was breastfeeding.  Even though the law required my employer to “accommodate” me on the basis of family status, a protected ground in human rights in Canada, I could see from his face that I had made that career limiting move.  Yes, there was a woman VP in the organization.  She did not have any children.   

It was no coincidence that within 6 months I quit to start my consulting business.  Women start 4 out of 5 new businesses in Canada.  We are all familiar with the explosion of Mompreneurs and Mommybloggers.  What is it about entrepreneurship that is so alluring to so many women these days?  The long hours?  The dearth of income?  Having to everything on your own?    I think not.  Rather it is a choice directly related to the fact that when one has one’s own business, one has control over one’s work schedule.  If you have to pick up or drop off your kids, if you want to be home when they get home, if you want to be able to participate in any sort of meaningful way in the all too short time they are children, working from home is a much better option than having a conventional job.

I say conventional because in spite of 40 plus years of feminism and the passage of anti-discrimination laws, most workplace cultures have not really changed.  Mr. Welch’s comments reflect the current reality.    Anyone that wants to get ahead, to become a CEO,  has to enter the win/lose, compete to win framework,  the bigger, better, faster atmosphere that underlies most North American corporate cultures.  

There is still one path to success, and that most often means long hours and putting work first.  Law firms are a prime example.  For years women have comprised over 50% of law graduates, and yet very few make partner.  The reason  – their choice  to have children.   And while it is true that men don’t have to make that same choice, they must also accept that putting work first is a requirement for corporate success.   It is not just women that are losing out.  It is everyone; women, men and our children.  

So I for one was very happy to learn that Mr. Welch stood up in front of 10,000 HR professionals, most of whom are women,  to  “tell it like it is”.    I am thrilled to see articles, blogs and discussion posts appearing highlighting the fact that in 2010, a decision to have children is still a career limiting move for most women. 

Author James Baldwin wrote “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”  

It is time we stop pretending that equality has been achieved.  It hasn’t. 

If we want the current reality as described by Mr. Welch to change we have only one option – we must embrace our collective power and speak up for change – real change in our corporate cultures.  We must demand respectful workplace cultures that allow for more than one path to success, cultures that reflect and support the  diversity in today’s workforce, and are structured  to ensure that everyone truly has an equal chance for success at work.

I am en route, flying home after delivering Speak Up: Speak Out – Personal Power and Respect in the Workplace, one of most popular presentations I developed after publishing Road to Respect last year. 

Speak Up: Speak out is intended to empower employees to speak up about disrespect at work.  I make the case in Road to Respect that disrespect is a non-issue when workplace leaders make a strategic decision to build a values based culture where respect is a core value, where respect simply becomes “the way it is around here”. However, I also know that it is going to take a long, long time for  respectful behavior to become a norm in most workplaces.  In the meantime, I want to do what I can to empower employees, to ensure  they realize that they have power, that they can make a choice to speak up rather than put up and shut up about disrespect at work. I challenge them at the end of the session to speak up, to take action to create a more respectful workplace for themselves and those they work with.    

One of the factors that stops us from speaking up is fear.  We are afraid of what might happen if we say something; things might get worse, we could have a confrontation, we might even jeopardize our job.  These are realistic fears.  The question is should we allow those fears to rule our behavior, to determine rule our choices?  Should we allow fear to justify giving up our power, a decision which inevitably leads down the path to victimization? 

Roman philosopher Seneca said  “Courage is not lack of fear, but rather it is taking action in the face of, and despite, fear.” This concept has taken on a whole new meaning for me since reading two books by Ayaan Hirsli Ali, Infidel and The Caged Virgin. 

Ms. Ali is a Somali born Muslim woman, who fled to the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage.  Her experiences there caused her to start questioning some of the cultural practices she had grown up with: female genital mutilation, the wearing of the hajib and abaya (cloak), the cult of virginity, the justification of gender inequity within some Muslim communities.  She started to speak up, to express herself.  She became involved in Dutch politics and made a film called Submission part 1 with Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh.  

One day in 2004 while riding his bicycle to work, Theo Van Gogh was murdered.  A note, addressed to Ms. Ali, was found stabbed into his chest.  It warned Ms. Ali that she would be next.  Death was promised for those who dared to speak up about the issues that Ms. Ali focuses on. 

The consequences of Ms. Ali continuing to speak up are much graver than any faced by my audience members in Speak Up Speak Out.  Ms. Ali’s decision to continue to speak up has meant she had to give up her seat as a Dutch politician, and relocate from Europe to the US.  She continues to receive death threats. 

In spite of all this she continues to speak up, to speak out. In 2007 she founded the AHA foundation to help protect and defend the rights of women in the West against militant Islam. (http://www.theahafoundation.org) 

After reading Ms. Ali’s books, I felt overwhelmed and engulfed with despair and a sense of hopelessness.  As an individual passionate about promoting respect and dignity for all, I was stunned to learn about the realities faced by millions of women on a daily basis.  I was saddened and depressed by her stories of bigotry, hatred, abuse of power and suffering.  It seemed almost pointless to continue to speak up to promote my vision of respect in light of this reality. 

Then it occurred to me that while I only read about Ms. Ali’s experiences, she has lived through them, and yet she still feels hopeful. She makes a choice each day, in spite of what she knows, in spite of the fear she must feel, to continue to speak up, to speak out.  In doing so she demonstrates true self respect, while working to promote respect for others.  

Ms. Ali truly is a courageous woman and an inspirational figure.  She embodies the idea of a hero as expressed by Lisa Hand.  “That’s what it takes to be a hero, a little gem of innocence inside you that makes you want to believe that there still exists a right and wrong, that decency will somehow triumph in the end”.  

If human rights, gender equality and respect are subjects that interest you, I urge you to read Ms. Ali’s books.  We must believe that decency will somehow triumph in the end, and work proactively to ensure that happens.

July 1 marked more than Canada Day for those Canadians living in Ontario and BC this year. It also heralded the imposition of the new HST – harmonized sales tax.

Here in BC the party line was that the HST would be good for us. It would create jobs, save money. We would barely notice it because it was really just a combination of two taxes we were already paying, the GST and PST. (For those of you in the lower 48, GST is a federal tax while PST is a provincial tax, like state taxes in the US.)

One sector that starting complaining as soon as the new tax was proposed was the restaurant industry. As PST was not charged on restaurant meals, the HST meant that restaurant customers would be paying an additional 7% every time they went out to eat. That in itself was a concern to me.

Former Provincial Premier Bill Vander Zalm started a campaign to challenge the government’s plan to adopt the HST, not because eating out was going to get more expensive, but because the Liberal government had promised not to adopt this tax during the last election. That fact in itself was enough to get me to sign one of the petitions aimed at ensuring that this initiative got the required 10% of all voters needed to launch an official challenge. While I was, of course, steamed that I was going to have to pay more every time I went out to eat, it was the duplicity, the blatant abuse of power by the Liberal government that really encouraged me to lend my support to the protest. There is a democratic principal here, as well as a moral issue, flowing from values like ethics, honesty, and respect for the electorate.

Ten days into this new tax and now I can really see the extent of the information that has not really been shared with those of us that foot the bill for the over indulgent spending habits of our governments. I am experiencing firsthand the harm that this tax will create.

While I knew that I was going to have to start charging my clients HST, I didn’t really understand how many other businesses like mine had been exempted from charging PST. Health professionals like chiropractors, massage therapists, physiotherapists now have to charge an additional 7%. I discovered that I now have to pay an additional 7% for my ballroom dance classes, and any other recreational pursuit I might undertake. All of my daughters sports activities, all of her summer camps cost 7% more. The soy milk I drink because I don’t tolerate dairy is now 7% more expensive, as are a whole host of other foods that are now classified as snacks and therefore subject to HST. How is soy milk a snack when regular milk isn’t?

House prices in BC, already the highest in the country have just gotten a whole lot higher. The average price for a home in Vancouver, and that is often a tear down, is a million dollars, now plus 7%. You do the math.

It won’t be big business that feels the effect of this tax. It won’t be the makers of snack foods. It will the solopreneur offering health services, arts or sports activities that will feel it, because those are precisely the kinds of things that people will be forced to cut down on. Proactive stuff that is good for our health, both physical and emotional.

Oh sure, everyone in Europe pays 15% tax, but they get a lot more in terms of social services. What concerns me is that we are paying more and getting less. This government has cut programs for workers, women and children and for persons with disabilities to name just a few – those in our province that most need the support of government and who have no voice or power with which to express themselves.

Overhauls to the employment standards legislation were designed to allow industry to self regulate. Hello? Who came up with that brilliant idea? What experience caused anyone to think that most businesses would treat employees properly, pay them overtime, make sure they got enough vacation, simply because they wanted to be fair? Every legal aid office outside of metro Vancouver has been closed. This means women and children that are subjected to domestic abuse and violence will just have to put up with it. To balance the budget public schools will be closed an additional ten days a year, so that working parents now have more to juggle. That should do a lot to help ever increasing stress levels. Oh wait – those parents can put their kids in some program for the day that they will have to pay 7% more for.

At this point I see a lot more harm than harmony resulting from the HST. I don’t really have a lot of faith in government doing anything to clean up inefficiencies and waste in their own backyard. Why bother when it is so easy to impose a tax that means that they can shift their responsibility and ensure that most of us will have less disposable income at the end of the day.

Whether or not the tax is revoked I am glad that I signed a petition that provided an opportunity for me as a citizen in a democratic society to exercise my right to say no. For me this is about sending a message. Just because you have power does not mean you can do anything you want.

Let’s hope that the harm in the Harmonized Sales Tax will allow enough people to appreciate whose interests this government really represents.

Aqsa Parvez wanted to be like every other Canadian teenager. She wanted to hang out with her friends, go to movies, get a part time job and wear stylish clothes. Beyond that she wanted a few things that most Canadians believe is our right – a door to her bedroom and the ability to choose who she married. Aqsa wanted privacy, independence and freedom.

Because she was willing to speak up and say this was what she wanted, she was murdered. She was murdered in cold blood by her father and one of her brothers. According to her Mother’s testimony such honour killings are “common “in Pakistan, their country of origin. And unless we in Canada are careful, we risk allowing such atrocities to become common here, hidden behind the veil of multiculturalism and tolerance.

On Wednesday, June 16, Aqsa’s father and brother, who pleaded guilty to second degree murder, received sentences of life imprisonment without parole for at least 18 years. Mr. Justice Bruce Durno said he hoped that this sentence would act to deter anyone else in Canada from believing that multiculturalism means the ability to hang onto cultural practices that promote murder in order to maintain community status.

For Aqsa’s father, his daughter’s interest in independence, her refusal to wear a hajib and to submit to his will was a sin worth killing her for. After he strangled her on her bed he told her Mother “ My community will say you have not been able to control your daughter. This is my insult. She is making me naked.”

Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney referred to this act as a barbaric cultural practice. Another one of these “cultural practices” is female genital mutilation which is spreading beyond the third world and happening to little girls on kitchen tables in Europe and North America. “We want to underscore that multiculturalism is not an excuse, or a moral or legal justification, for such barbaric practices. Multiculturalism does not equal cultural relativism.”

Respect and dignity for all is the foundation of human rights. We pride ourselves in Canada in being a multi-cultural country, founded on the values of tolerance, fairness, justice and mutual respect. But we must be clear that such tolerance does not include tolerance for practices that deny individuals their rights, in particular their most basic human right, their right to life. Nor does it include tolerance for the practices that deny individuals their right for equality as we define it in Canada. We have to be clear that for anyone coming to Canada, this is not negotiable.

Multiculturalism does not mean accepting any practice that a culture claims as its own. Tolerance does not mean that there is no longer right and wrong. Murder is wrong. Murdering your own child because she refuses to submit to feudal practices is beyond wrong. It is abhorrent. It is morally repugnant. There can simply be no justification for such a crime in a civilized society.

Asqu’s father said “In Canada women are able to open their mouths because they have rights, but if that same woman was in Pakistan, she don’t dare open her mouth”.

Ladies, take heed. This horrific case is a chilling reminder of why we need to keep opening our mouths and shout out loudly to protect and promote our rights to be treated with dignity and respect.

Eight years ago today I was working in my basement office when the palliative care nurse that was on shift called me upstairs. She wanted me to help her as she tended to my husband David. She asked me to hold his head, which I did, and to speak to him, just tell him whatever, which I also did.

As I looked down at his face, I saw that his breathing was slowing. Then I noticed that the pulse on his neck had stopped. I looked up and told the nurse. “ I know.“ she said. I realized then that she had called me up specifically so that I could be with David when he died.

You’d think that after eight years I’d be over this already. You’d think that after eight years I would have been through the stages of grief numerous times. But today I am sobbing as I write this. The pain of the grief and loss seems just as deep and fresh today as it did on that morning eight years ago.

I really want to “get over this”. People were asking me if I was “over it” mere months after David died. I will never forget a male friend asking me if I had started dating after David had been dead for two months. Death is so scary, so frightening, particularly when it is unexpected and the person who dies is young, we all want to believe that we can and will get over it.

On days like today however, I am once again painfully reminded that I have not gotten over it and will never get over it. I have learned to accept it. I have learned to live my life without David. I have learned how to cope with being a single parent running my own business. I have learned to foster an attitude of gratitude and to consciously promote a mind set that is positive and optimistic most of the time. I have also learned to respect the fact that grief, like so much else in life, is not a static process but an evolving one. Eight years on, this grief is part of who I am.

I hate feeling sad and unhappy. I hate thinking about that day David died. I remember so clearly getting into my car and driving to pick up my 5 year old from kindergarten right after he died, feeling so angry I wanted to kill someone. I hate thinking about all of the horrible, dark, bleak memories that I have of David’s illness, his death and the black hole of grief that swallowed me immediately afterwards. I still hate the fact that I am widowed and that I am without the person I chose to as my life partner.

The well of sadness I have inside me is not yet empty. On days like this it rises up and overflows. I used to try and ignore it, stuff it back down because I did not want to feel the pain. But I have learned that the pain does not go away. Rather, it appears as anger, frustration, physical pain or exhaustion.

I know David would not want me to be sad but I feel sad nonetheless. After eight years I have learned that I must respect the depth of my grief, I must acknowledge it when it manifests. It doesn’t indicate that anything is wrong. Grief is part of my life. I may not have chosen it, I may not want it, but it is, for the moment, my reality. It is just what is.

My hope is that one day this anniversary will not cause this overwhelming feeling of sadness and loss. My hope is that in respecting and acknowledging what I am feeling, I am facilitating my healing and recovery, that I am allowing myself to release let the pain and the sadness.

My hope is that one day the well of grief will run dry. I look forward to the day when on this date I will be filled with gratitude for having had the experience of knowing the strong, graceful, funny, loving, caring, joyous man that was, for a brief time in my life, my husband, my best friend, my David.

In 1984, just as our modern day human rights framework was emerging in Canada, a case called Caldwell vs. St. Thomas Aquinas high school was heard at the Supreme Court of Canada. The case involved the firing of a teacher as a result of her marrying a divorced man in a civil ceremony. The Court supported the high school’s actions and upheld the notion that a non-profit religious institution can give preference to the group that they are intended to serve.

That case paved the way for Catholic schools to in effect, dictate the morality of those they employ, even those that are not Catholic. Employees in Catholic institutions, including those like Little Flower Academy which receive public funding, sign contracts that oblige them to live the Church’s values. Music teacher Lisa Reimer signed such a document obliging her to “demonstrate a respectful and sympathetic sensitivity to the aims and nature of the school and to the Catholic beliefs and practices of the school.”

Apparently parents complained to the school when they learned that Ms. Reimer was taking time off to b e with her same sex partner during the birth of their child. This of course would not be an issue if Ms. Reimer was employed within the public school system or if Ms. Reimer was a man taking time off to be with his wife. The problem is that Ms. Reimer’s sexual orientation is allegedly at odds with Catholic morality and values.

Now, I don’t know about you, but these days one really has a right to ask, actually I would argue one has a moral obligation to ask whether or not the Catholic Church is in a position to dictate either values or morality to anyone. What particular beliefs and practices are they referring to? Where was respect or sympathetic sensitivity to the needs of the thousands of children we now know have been molested by those who hold power within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church? Where was the respect of sympathetic sensitivity to generations of First Nations children and their families who were both physically and psychologically abused by priests and nuns in residential schools?

I tell you who I feel really concerned for in this whole issue. It is not Ms. Reimer, who will be able to return to the public school system and enjoy the freedom from discrimination which is supposed to be ours by right as Canadian citizens. I feel for the young women who attend Little Flower Academy who might be thinking that Ms. Reimer’s lifestyle would suit them just fine. The message they are getting in all of this loud and clear. They are sinners. They are bad. They won’t be able to be true to themselves and be active members of the Catholic Church.

Where is the respect and sympathetic sensitivity for those girls? It does not appear to be blossoming at Little Flower Academy.

I have lived in Canada my whole life. I have lived in different cities and communities in three different provinces and eaten in a myriad of different environments. I must say that until recently I was not aware that there was a Canadian way of eating.

In 2006 seven year old Luc Cagadoc was eating lunch in the hallway of his school, breaking up his food with a fork and sliding it on to his spoon in the traditional Philippine way of eating. The hall monitor approached him and told him to stop eating that way, to use a knife and fork and eat like everyone else.

Luc went home and told his Mom what had happened. When she followed up the hall monitor is alleged to have told her that her son ate like a pig. The Principal is alleged to have said that Luc should eat like a Canadian.

I am wondering precisely when we developed a manner of eating that defines us as Canadians. I find it particularly intriguing that this case arose in Quebec, a province that has spent considerable time and money arguing that it is a distinct society. Apparently, that does not hold when it comes to table manners.

Happily for Luc, his mother was prepared to stand up for his rights as a Canadian. She filed a human rights complaint, alleging that her son had been discriminated against by the school board and the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal agreed with her.

In previous posts I have blogged about the importance of laws as a vehicle to empower us. If our Canadian charter values of tolerance, fairness, justice and respect are to be more than nice words on a paper, we must to have laws that enable us to speak up when those values are not being demonstrated, as was the case with Luc. We need laws to force those that do not want to be tolerant and respectful, particularly those in positions of power, to do so.

Although we do not yet have laws in place to deal with workplace bullying, we do currently have human rights laws in every jurisdiction in Canada which protect us from discrimination and discriminatory harassment. We should not become complacent however. While we are not yet going down the road of lawmakers in Arizona, we need to be vigilant to ensure we maintain and expand our laws that require respectful treatment. It is important to realize that these rights are easily undermined and could one day disappear. We should not take them for granted, particularly in the current political climate.

Human rights commissions and tribunals are under attack in this country. The Canadian Human Rights commission is closing 3 regional offices. The Government of Saskatchewan is considering closing down the Saskatchewan human rights tribunal and sending complaints instead to the provincial courts.

Why is this happening? Consider this statement, made in 1999 by our current Prime Minister when he was the head of the National Citizens Coalition. “Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society…It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff.”

I don’t know about you but that statement strikes me as scary, very scary in fact. What fundamental freedoms was Prime Minister Harper referring to? The freedom to impose our beliefs, our views and our perspectives on others? The freedom to mock and ridicule a 7 year old boy eating lunch at a public school?

From where I sit, that is the kind of rhetoric I would expect to hear from the “tea baggers” south of the border, not from an individual who has become our head of state, someone who is supposed to be upholding and modeling our charter values.

What about you?

Like many of you, I was shocked to hear about the passage of legislation in Arizona which empowers, and actually requires police to stop individuals to determine if they are in the US illegally.

The criteria the police are to use when deciding who to stop is reasonable suspicion. What will trigger that reasonable suspicion is a characteristic that is currently a protected ground in human and civil rights law – race. If someone looks like they might be an illegal immigrant, the police have to stop them and ask for their papers. Since most of these allegedly illegal immigrants are Latino, this means that Latino’s in Arizona are being subjected to racial profiling.

This law is a blatant expression of racism, bigotry and hatred, disguised as a mechanism to deal with the problem of illegal immigration in Arizona. This development highlights just how fragile and tenuous our recently adopted human and civil rights really are in society.

I say recently because let’s face it, nobody even started talking about human rights until after the atrocities and genocide of the second world war. A half century is a mere blink in the context of thousands of years of racism and discrimination in human history.

As we witness girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan being poisoned and terrorized to keep them from getting an education, this development in a country founded on freedom and liberty for all is particularly disheartening and alarming.

If the principals of liberty and equality are to be preserved and enhanced, we must stand with, and take action to empower those who traditionally have had no power.

We must all speak up loudly to preserve a society that enshrines and respects our fundamental human and civil rights. The alternative is simply too frightening to contemplate.

I spend a lot of my time talking and writing about the relationship between power and respect at work. Disrespectful behaviors like harassment and bullying are power based behaviors. The choice to engage in these behaviors and how we respond to them is very much connected to power – how much we have and how we choose to use it.

I once had a participant in a workshop approach me about how to deal with a bullying boss, who also happened to be the CEO. She had already tried to talk to him about his behavior, but he wasn’t interested in either listening or changing. She wanted to know what she should do.

Now I really am someone that likes to find the silver lining in the cloud, but my advice to her was “Look for another job”. The fact is that in most cases the CEO holds ultimate power. Unless there is a Board that can hold that CEO accountable, it is virtually impossible for an employee to get a CEO that bullies to stop. He/she has the power, and at work, power is often the trump card in relationships.

As I discuss in Road to Respect, the intention of human rights laws is to equalize a historical power imbalance. Human rights laws empower employees to stand up and speak out about workplace discrimination and harassment. Without such legislation, as is currently the case with respect to workplace bullying in BC, the balance of power will remain skewed The more power a “boss” has, the harder it will be for anyone to hold them accountable.

This fact was reinforced for me in a rather chilling manner recently during the April 9th episode of the CBC investigative series the Fifth Estate. “Larger than Life” profiled Canadian fashion icon Peter Nygard, (http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2009-2010/larger_than_life/). “He’s rich, he’s powerful. Larger than Life. But what kind of boss is Peter Nygard?” was the question posed in the broadcast.

According to former employees interviewed for the program, including the previous Director of Human Resources, Mr. Nygard is alleged to be the kind of boss that most of us would like to avoid – someone that allegedly engages in disrespectful behavior including sexual harassment and workplace bullying.

Whatever the truth with respect to these allegations, a fact that is undeniable is that when it comes to power, Peter Nygard has a gargantuan amount. He has positional power, economic power, power of knowledge, and power of association. To put it is Machiavellian terms, in his workplaces his power is absolute. If he wanted to bully and harass, it would be very hard for anyone to stop him, particularly any of his employees.

Unless, of course, they were able to file a complaint about it, as will soon be the case for Nygard employees working in Ontario. Bill 168 comes into effect this June making it “illegal” for employers to engage in, or ignore, workplace bullying, a fact that was noted by the CBC in the broadcast. They also mentioned that New York, where Nygard has just opened a new flagship store, has similar legislation pending.

April 14 was Pink Shirt day here in BC, intended to raise awareness about the prevalence and the cost, both human and economic, of bullying. It was also the official launch of BullyFreeBC a coalition of organizations, practitioners, and individuals who want to eradicate bullying in our society.

While legislation on its own won’t end workplace bullying, it will certainly do a lot to empower employees and force those in positions of power to examine and modify their own behavior and leadership styles.

While I don’t support the use of force, I must concur with another well known pacifist, Nelson Mandela, who said

“When those in power deny your freedom, the only path to freedom is power.”

Today, April 14th is Pink Shirt Day in BC. Started three years ago by Vancouver radio personality Christy Clark, Pink Shirt Day Serves to raise awareness about bullying in schools, workplaces, homes and over the internet.

Ms. Clark took her cue from the actions of two teenage students in Nova Scotia who took a stand against bullies in their school. When a Grade 8 student was called names and threatened for wearing pink, Grade 12 students David Shepherd and Travis Price, decided enough was enough. They went to a nearby discount store, bought 50 pink shirts, and spread the word online about their idea to wear pink in support of the student and to take a stand against the bullies.

The next day hundreds of students showed up in pink clothing. Not only did that put an end to the bullying in their school, but a movement, which now has worldwide momentum, was born.

Unfortunately that momentum has not been enough to put an end to bullying. We recently witnessed the tragic deaths of 15 year old Phoebe Prince, and 13 year old Jon Carmichael, two high school students in the US, both of whom committed suicide due to bullying at school.

Why hasn’t growing awareness led to real change? Well, change means someone needs to step up to the plate. Someone needs to be prepared to be accountable and hold other accountable. And that is not yet happening, either in our schools or our workplaces.

The administration at Phoebe Prince’s school knew what was going on. The bullying she suffered was witnessed by other students and by teachers. Even when those teachers told the administration, not enough was done.

Oh, they did the easy stuff. They called world renowned bullying expert Barbara Coloroso, who told them precisely what they needed to do. But hey, no one likes to stand up to bullies, whether they are in a school or at a workplace. And so, the bullying continued, resulting in Phoebe’s death, and now, criminal charges against the perpetrators.

As we have seen within the human rights framework, one of the ways we can begin to initiate real change in our society is by enacting legislation. That is the aim BullyFreeBC, a group which I am involved in. BullyFreeBC is a coalition of organizations, practitioners, and individuals who want to eradicate bullying in our society.

Legislation is often what is needed to get those in positions of power to do take action to create safe and respectful environments for those they lead. To get legislation passed here in BC, we need to have a groundswell of public support.

We have chosen today, Pink Shirt Day, as the official launch of our campaign to get BC to follow the lead of other provinces in Canada that have passed anti-bullying laws which empower employees so that they can stand up and say no to workplace bullying.

If we are going to make this vision a reality, we need your support. Why not make today the day you join the ranks of those that are standing up to end bullying? Join us as www.BullyFreeBC.ca. Together we can make BC Bully Free.