Tragedy in the Commons (10 page)

Merasty worked on the issue through the early months of 2007. The gist of the government’s position, Merasty felt, was that residential schools weren’t that bad; that they’d been intended for education. In April 2007, he wrote a letter to Jim Prentice, the Conservative Indian Affairs minister, raising the residential schools issue and pointing out that the abuse wasn’t just physical or sexual but also involved the government’s putting aboriginal children at increased risk of severe illness. The media began quoting him as a source on the issue. Working behind the scenes, Merasty won the support of his party for a motion calling on the House of Commons to apologize. The NDP also would support him, he learned. And then on the morning that he was to make the motion, on April 30, the Conservatives decided they’d also support it. Later that day, when he rose in the House to introduce the motion, Merasty painted a vivid portrait of the schools’ effects: “I stand here for numerous victims whose stories will never be told, whose remains are scattered across our land in unmarked graves, scars on the land and even larger scars on our nation’s psyche.” The motion passed unanimously, 257 to zero—a remarkable success for a rookie MP.

Meanwhile, however, the Liberal Party was in the midst of a transition period, attempting to rebound in the face of the Conservative Party’s rise. Leader Paul Martin stepped down, and in the resulting leadership race, Merasty backed Michael Ignatieff—who, in that round at least, would come in second to the eventual winner, Stéphane Dion.

In July 2007, only sixteen months after he was elected, Merasty announced his resignation from Parliament, effective that August. In the press release, Merasty insisted he supported Dion; he said family obligations to his wife and four children played the biggest role in his departure. Asked what made the job difficult, Gary Merasty responded promptly: “Family.” Then continued: “Because we had a seven-year-old and the older kids helped out, but it’s tough on family … it was a little worse than I thought. My wife was supportive to the end … but it was a family issue. And perhaps feeling guilty a bit through my six years as grand chief and my sixteen-year-old—well now she’s sixteen, when I was there she was about thirteen—but you missed a whole lot.… And then I went to be an MP and I thought, ‘Hmm, am I going to do this to my then five-year-old?’ ”

Health also was a factor, he said. But in his exit interview, he also cited a job offer from the private sector as a major factor in the resignation—a job that “was to have a more on-the-ground, immediate impact” in Merasty’s aboriginal community. The job was the vice-president of corporate and social responsibility for Cameco, a global uranium mining firm with a major presence in northern Saskatchewan. That a former Cree grand chief felt that he could do more for the First Nations population of northern Saskatchewan in the private
sector than in Parliament is a disturbing indictment of our country’s federal political system and its failure to take advantage of the gifts of a man who had been identified as “one of the top next-generation leaders in the party.”

Merasty’s resignation had more to do with party politics and considerations for his young family than it did with a poor parliamentary orientation process. Nevertheless, he was a detail-oriented, self-described “data geek” who professed to be baffled by an MP’s job. With the help of Paul Szabo, Ralph Goodale and others in his party, Merasty learned enough to help reverse the residential schools policy of a Conservative government of which he was not a part. That even Merasty felt unprepared in his early days suggests that we can improve on the way newly elected parliamentarians are prepared for their positions.

Several recent efforts have provided new or aspiring politicians with more education, including initiatives from Carleton University to welcome the rookie MPs after the 2011 election, enhancements to the Library of Parliament’s orientation and a “boot camp” run by the University of British Columbia for people considering a run for office. Efforts to provide training to parliamentarians have come and gone over the years. Let’s hope these ideas continue to gain currency among aspiring and serving politicians. Despite these recent efforts, it remains hard to disagree with Paul Szabo’s observations to Gary Merasty that “nobody will coach you” and “everyone is clawing up.” And with an average of a hundred MPs making their debut after each election, nearly a third of Parliament is still basically being thrown into the deep end.

In the House of Commons, where an atmosphere of mutual support and education would enable our MPs to do
their job better, it’s unfortunate that a collegial willingness by a veteran to help a freshman is so rare. Would it be possible for the experienced MPs to institute a regular, more substantive orientation for newly elected MPs? High-performing organizations in the private, non-profit and public sectors, or those that aspire to be, all invest heavily in orientation, executive education and ongoing coaching. That high level of support stands in direct contrast to the lack of support measures in Canadian politics. The cursory nature of the orientation process for MPs is a clear indication that they are undervalued and that political leaders regard them as little more than votes. That their veteran colleagues don’t want to help them do their jobs—and that their own parties don’t seem to care whether they are able to represent their constituents effectively or hold government to account—may be the starkest possible indication of the failure of our party politics, and of the troubled future of our democracy.

CHAPTER FOUR

What Job Is This Anyway?

O
nce they’ve faced down the challenges of their first weeks in Ottawa—where the office is, how to claim expenses, where to find staff, how to get to the bathroom—new MPs face a more long-term hurdle: managing the many demands on their attention and schedule. The former Liberal MP for Miramichi, New Brunswick, Charles Hubbard, for one, was astonished by the number of people who approached his office to seek help from one of the federal bureaucracies, such as Immigration Canada, Revenue Canada or Service Canada. “Your office is always facing calls where somebody is frustrated with trying to approach the government,” said Hubbard. “When you think of somebody having trouble with his income tax or with his EI or trying to access the Canada Pension or an old age pension, and they get the proverbial runaround, they wind up calling your office.”

In fact, Hubbard’s office dealt with this type of matter so frequently that he assigned the equivalent of two and a half full-time people to handle the calls (most MPs have only half a dozen staff between their two offices). The staffers, Hubbard said, averaged more than a hundred such calls per day; in the fifteen
years that he served as an MP, Hubbard figures his staffers handled more than a hundred thousand calls that involved constituents seeking help in their dealings with federal government bureaucracies.

A high school principal before entering politics, Hubbard shared a story about a former student in desperate need of help. By then about thirty-five years old, the man had a wife and three kids, and was dying of cancer—and yet Service Canada was denying him his disability payments. When Hubbard heard about the situation he called the man’s doctor, who subsequently wrote a statement to support the man’s claim, which Hubbard then made sure was read by the proper person at Service Canada. A month before the former student’s death, Service Canada approved the man for the disability pension. The money would make an enormous difference in the lives of the man’s family—his kids would get the payments until they came of age, and his wife would get payments as long as she needed them. “So, you know, as a Member of Parliament, you have people in need who call you, and who can benefit from a bit of effort you put into it,” Hubbard said.

Hubbard came to regard dealing with these appeals for help with the Canadian federal bureaucracy as an important aspect of the MP’s job. When we asked which part of his work as a parliamentarian he enjoyed most, Hubbard mentioned these cases. “You probably get more satisfaction from helping people than you did from trying to wade through legislation,” Hubbard said. “And the struggles in Ottawa, in terms of trying to put forward your ideas, or to get changes done, it’s a very frustrating experience. And when you look at somebody who is in need of Canada Pension, who’s been denied it … by
bureaucrats who’ve never seen them, and the person comes to [your] office and you see the condition he’s in, and he has five kids at home and is disabled and you can help that person, there’s probably more satisfaction from that.”

FEW WOULD EVER FAULT
Charles Hubbard for doing what he could to help any individual, let alone a former student, facing such tragic circumstances. But we were struck by the number of MPs who had similar stories. Is this what voters send MPs to Ottawa to do? In our interviews, we also asked the MPs to describe their jobs. We wanted to know how they spent their time once they got settled in Ottawa, and what they learned about how to succeed as an MP. When we reviewed their descriptions of the MP’s role and what they believed they’d been sent to Ottawa to do, we were taken aback by the variety of their answers.

These wide divergences pointed to an absence of any formal job description or definition of an MP’s responsibilities. And the lack of any direction from parties, which typically exercise far more control over their members, made us wonder whether the higher-ups in the parties
cared
what the MPs were doing, as long as the they showed up for votes in the House of Commons. As long as they didn’t cause trouble, the MPs were largely left to fend for themselves. Many of them began doing something we referred to as “freelancing”—developing an expertise in a topic that interests constituents or the MP but not necessarily the party leadership. Without direction from the party that controlled many other aspects of their conduct, the MPs drifted into tasks that fell well outside what we might ever have imagined their responsibilities to be.

ACCORDING TO
Canada’s Library of Parliament, an MP in the Westminster system of government has three traditional roles. The first is to consider, refine and pass legislation; in other words, to establish policy and pass laws. The second is to hold government accountable for its administration of the laws and to authorize the expenditure of required funds; that is, to ensure that the laws are being carried out properly, and that tax dollars are being spent responsibly. The third role is to determine the life of the government by providing or withholding support—voting for bills you favour and voting against those you don’t.

None of the MPs in our group described their jobs in terms consistent with the traditional Westminster definition, and only a few were even close. Gary Merasty was the only former MP to acknowledge that he had a problem defining an MP’s job responsibility. During his campaign in December 2005 and January 2006, First Nations voters on the Saskatchewan reserves asked him a question that others, more informed of federal politics, might not have thought to ask: “What does an MP
actually
do?” What is illuminating is that Merasty was a bit stumped. He knew the broad-strokes answer—in fact, he thought of the job as requiring three different hats. “Battle hard for your constituents; be available to respond and advocate for them as much as you can,” he says. “Two, you have a responsibility to this country as well; be involved in the national and international policy debates. And three, advocate for your party.”

But in detail, hour by hour? “As far as really knowing what an MP does, I’d go on the website and look at the committee work and see all that. [For] work in the riding, [I’d] look at different MP websites and try to figure out what a day
was like. I couldn’t understand all that,” Merasty recalls. “My experience leading to Ottawa was that you should have a clear understanding of what an MP does. But even when I explained it to people, I didn’t [entirely] know … and [when I asked others], I didn’t get a clear answer.”

University textbooks reflect this confusion. “The concept of political representation is misleadingly simple: everyone seems to know what it is, yet few can agree on any particular definition,” says Professor Suzanne Dovi in the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
. Despite divergences, however, when we asked MPs to describe how they conceived of their roles, two broad categories emerged.

Many of the MPs we interviewed described their roles in ways that corresponded to two classic but competing definitions of a political representative’s role: “trustees” and “delegates.” According to political theory, trustees are representatives who follow their own sense of the best action to pursue. A trustee believes she was elected by the public to use her own judgment to make a decision. Meanwhile, delegates are understood to be representatives who follow the expressed preferences of their constituents, regardless of their own personal opinion. On occasions when an MP’s judgment on a legislative matter differs from voter preference, assuming they can appropriately identify their constituents’ view, the trustee will vote according to her own judgment, while the delegate will allow voter preference to have the ultimate say.

Among parliamentarians from the Liberals, New Democrats or the Bloc Québécois, no clear preference for the role of trustee or delegate emerged. Each of those parties had MPs in both groups, and in fact, many MPs straddled the categories.

Describing a classic trustee’s conception of the job, NDP Bill Blaikie said: “My job as an MP was to do the thinking and the listening at the committee hearings and the meetings—albeit out of a certain perspective that I was up front about when I ran—and then to make judgments,” Blaikie said. “The people who voted for me don’t have the time to do all that. That is what I am paid to do.… [My constituents] will hold me accountable at elections and in between with their input with letters of criticism or support.” And Paddy Torsney, a former Liberal MP for Burlington, said, “I think my job was to provide leadership. Not just reflect the discussion, but also to lead the discussion. And I think that is where people get caught up in ‘No, my job is to do exactly what those people say.’ … No, you’re actually sending me there to think and bring more information back, too.”