Tragedy in the Commons (12 page)

The MPs were fond of comparing the job to other professions that often had little in common with an MP’s job, except
perhaps for a heavy interaction with people: professions such as administrator, doctor, priest, teacher, ambassador, social worker, messenger, spokesperson and lobbyist. Stéphane Bergeron, Bloc Québécois MP for Verchères, stressed his accountability function and equated the role to that of a “watchdog.” Several likened the job to their own pre-parliamentary careers. Toronto-area Liberal MP Roy Cullen, an accountant and forestry executive, described the MP’s role as akin to running a small business. “I used to say to my staff, you know, when a constituent comes in the door or calls, it’s like our customer, right? You know, they’re always right; I mean, they may not always be right, but they’re always right. And so we’ve got to look after them, just like we’d look after a customer.” Another, a lawyer and mediator, said the role was about encouraging collaboration among MPs to make things happen, regardless of party stripes. “The whole story of Parliament is human relationships at the level of the MP,” said Liberal MP Paul Macklin. “We do that in our daily life in our communities: we build relationships; we build networks.”

ALTOGETHER, THE EIGHTY
MPs we interviewed used an astonishing variety of terms and concepts to describe the position. No doubt like many Canadians, we hadn’t fully considered how MPs might define their roles, but we certainly expected greater agreement about why they were in Ottawa—and what they were there to do. If parliamentarians do not have a shared conception of an MP’s job description, how are Canadians to know what MPs are supposed to be doing in office? And if citizens don’t know what to expect from our elected officials, should we be surprised when they believe MPs don’t deliver?

Bloc MP Stéphane Bergeron understood the role in terms that closely corresponded to the traditional Westminster definition of the MPs’ position: “Collectively with colleagues, [an MP] must play a role as a watchdog of government activities, and ensure that the government [pursues] the public interests and spends money wisely.” Surprisingly, only a few MPs described their jobs in terms that corresponded as much as Bergeron’s with the Westminster standard: holding government accountable for its decisions and for the appropriate expenditure of tax dollars.

Some may argue that the wide variety in the MPs’ descriptions of their role is inevitable. Contemporary Canadian society is culturally, regionally, economically and politically diverse, and much more so then when Canadian parliaments were first developed. “It’s a question that will be answered, probably, in as many different ways as there are Members of Parliament and will probably change with the historic development of the country,” former Kelowna-area Conservative MP Werner Schmidt observed. A further complication in Canada is that some MPs belong to political parties—such as the New Democratic Party or the Bloc Québécois—that historically have been unlikely to win enough seats to form a government. These MPs
expect
to be members of the opposition benches, and that expectation undoubtedly influences their interpretation of an MP’s essential purpose.

Even still, the huge range of views was troubling. Surely we can do better than the current inconsistent, and even contradictory, understanding of what an MP is supposed to do. As reported in the previous chapter, MPs told us they received almost no orientation or training, and were forced to
devise their own means of preparing for the job. So, we have an unprepared and unsupported new contingent of Parliament whose members, freshly arrived or seasoned, display fundamental differences of opinion on the basic aspects of their job, and what they were elected to do.

This disparity creates several identifiable problems. First, a lack of clarity about a job description makes it more difficult to do that job. This is particularly the case when MPs must navigate the tensions among their own preferences, those of their constituents, their party platform and leaders’ priorities. A lack of clarity in one’s job description means that critical tasks will be overlooked. Efforts will be duplicated. Important work will be neglected, or left incomplete. In any large undertaking that requires the participation of many different people, roles and responsibilities need to be clearly defined. And governing Canada qualifies as a large undertaking. With a high degree of uncertainty about who is responsible to whom and for what, interpersonal tension is bound to arise. And such tensions tend to be amplified in times of conflict or uncertainty—times that especially demand clear-headed, well-reasoned responses from our elected leaders.

An additional problem is that this confusion among role definitions makes it difficult for the media who observe Parliament to report to Canadians how effectively the country is being governed. Organizations that operate without a shared sense of purpose or responsibility are more difficult to understand, explain and assess, and can create a lot of noise that causes people to turn away. As a corollary, whether through impressions formed by media coverage or through direct interaction with politicians, this lack of clarity about what MPs are supposed
to be doing is conveyed to the electorate, and can confuse voters. At the same time, if MPs themselves are unable to describe their own roles clearly and coherently, it is hard to blame the media or the public for not understanding the roles either.

Of course, with MPs’ divergent priorities and differing levels of power, it cannot be expected that every MP will do the job in exactly the same way. A system like ours, with little orientation or training, without any agreed-upon job description, in fact requires that new MPs find their own way. As so many MPs described it to us, they arrived in Ottawa and were forced to make do, to play a form of political “fake it ’til you make it.” The beneficial side to this is that it leaves a wide latitude for MPs to pursue their own or their constituents’ objectives—a strength of the system that can allow enterprising, entrepreneurial MPs to bring forward new ideas.

That said, the input of multiple interests can also cause, and most certainly exacerbate confusion, partisanship and a blinkered focus on the short term and, in particular, on the next election. Without an agreed-upon sense of purpose, an evaluation of success will be equally unclear and difficult to accomplish. What is the simplest and most immediate indication of politicians’ success? Getting reelected. As far as indicators of parliamentarians’ success go in public life, being given another crack at the job is hardly satisfactory.

BUT HOW DOES A
person actually excel at the job? How does a new MP get ahead? When asked to proffer advice to their incoming colleagues, by far the most common imperative suggested by our interviewed former Members of Parliament was: become an expert in something. Ideally, the advice went,
that expertise is shared by few other colleagues and by no bigwigs in the party; nor is it necessarily something they care about. That apathy from above allows you to become the go-to figure in your party. Learn everything you can about that topic, and then identify what you can do to improve it. If, as some of our MPs have suggested, politicians exhibit a pack mentality, this advice would boil down to the following: Find your own bone, and chew on that.

Such “freelancing”—beginning with sniffing out a needed area of expertise that is of interest—requires an entrepreneur’s creativity and initiative. And drive and discipline are needed for poring over policy briefs and the minutiae of the legislative history in such areas as Canada’s food regulations, immigration policies or bankruptcy law.

Former prime minister Paul Martin honed the description the freelancing imperative: “For God’s sake, develop a couple of areas [of expertise],” he said. “Don’t develop fifty.… Don’t just pick an area that everybody is doing. Think of some of the areas in which you could really be called on … if that happens then the odds are better that you’re going to get into Cabinet. But even if [that doesn’t happen], then you establish yourself as a parliamentarian of great worth.”

Calling this imperative “advice” is perhaps putting it too mildly. Our MPs didn’t just suggest it. They said: You
have
to freelance. Unless you are a member of the inner circle, say, a Cabinet member who has the PM’s ear, or on an important committee, then your opinion doesn’t much affect major legislation. So, if you want to make a difference, if you want to feel as though you are adding value to Parliament, if you want to actually see your fingerprints on something that improves
Canada, then you have to go off and find something that hasn’t yet entered the radar field of the leadership.

Sometimes an MP of lesser stature can make great change that way. One of the most illustrative stories about freelancing that we heard involved David Anderson, the former Liberal minister of the environment, who was elected for the first time in the B.C. riding of Esquimalt–Saanich at the age of thirty-one, eight years after he’d won a silver medal in rowing in the 1960 Rome Summer Games.

In the late ’60s Anderson was developing one of these outlying specialties in a topic about which few of his fellow federal politicians cared: oil transport, specifically tanker safety and pipeline failsafe mechanisms. Through his work on increasing the safety of transporting that natural resource, he had been frustrated by the fact that a given issue could require him to approach the natural resources committee, or perhaps the fisheries committee, or sometimes the agriculture committee. Anderson proposed a new single committee that would focus exclusively on environmental matters. But the nascent environmental movement had yet to gain any traction in political circles, and his senior colleagues in the Liberal Party disagreed—particularly Government House Leader Donald Macdonald, who wished to decrease the number of committees on the Hill.

Anderson pressed on. He began studying the rules of the House, and he realized that he might, if he caught a few breaks, be able to do something that would sneak an environmental committee into existence. “You know,” he recalls, “there are very, very, very few MPs who know anything about the rules of the House … but if anyone wants to quickly get extra chips for
the poker game they’re playing, learning the rules is the fastest way of getting yourself in a very good position.”

According to Anderson’s account, the execution of his plan began during his attendance in the legislature on House Duty on a Friday afternoon, when only a few dozen MPs were present. Anderson submitted a motion to create the Special Committee on Environmental Pollution, which provided him with the chance to address the rest of the House. Only the chance, however. Anderson’s name was put into a hat along with the names of other MPs who had introduced motions. He’d been selected and allocated time for his matter to be discussed in the House. Normally that was a snoozefest. The MP who had introduced the motion stood up, gave a spiel, and then an opposition MP would get up and respond, after which the time was up and the Speaker would say, “Well, we’ll take this up in the next session of the House.” By the next session, everyone had usually lost interest. Or the inconvenience of going through the process again, from the start, usually acted to dissuade another attempt.

But Anderson had something unconventional up his sleeve. The next part of the plan involved a fine point he had learned from studying the rules—something he’d earlier buttonholed the Speaker about, just to clarify that Anderson’s understanding of the rules was correct. “You can do that?” Anderson said to the Speaker, Lucien Lamoureux, a one-time Liberal MP who’d successfully run in Stormont–Dundas as an Independent in the ’68 election that had also brought Anderson to the Hill. “It’s
really
like that?” And Lamoureux confirmed that it was—an archaic little convention left over from Parliament’s early days.

On the Friday when he was lucky enough for his turn to come up, David Anderson simply nodded at the Speaker. And the Speaker recognized Anderson, meaning the bill proceeded to the floor. All told, there were only about thirty people in the House. And no one was paying any attention to the young backbench MP. They were writing letters. They were talking to each other. Maybe there was an MP here or there besides the Speaker who noticed. But the unusual thing was, Anderson didn’t get up to speak. Nobody else got up to speak, either, because they expected Anderson to be the first. But Anderson didn’t move. He just sat there. The Speaker waited, and waited, and then he did what the rules required him to do if a motion went to the floor and no one stood up to speak.
The Speaker called the vote
. He asked the MPs to decide on Anderson’s legislation. This was the final part of Anderson’s plan. The young MP knew that no one was really paying attention—no one expected anything of importance to come up at such a sparsely attended House on a Friday. “So everybody heard, ‘all in favour,’ and they all said ‘aye,’ thinking this was the vote to put my motion on the floor to be discussed. It wasn’t. It was a motion at that point—my motion. They passed it by accident.”

So the Special Committee on Environmental Pollution was born—much to the annoyance of Donald Macdonald. “He made reference to the fact that I needed a good walk across the Ottawa River in cement shoes,” Anderson recalled. “It was a good example of [how] a little knowledge of the rules meant a lot.”

HOW DOES FREELANCING
begin? Usually by chance, and as a response to circumstances in an MP’s riding. That’s what
happened with Conservative MP Randy White’s work in the penal system. “In Fraser Valley there are seven prisons,” White said. “There’s lots of crime there. It seemed like every third, fourth or fifth person came through my door with a terrible story about being a victim. So the more I worked on that the more I got involved in it.… Anywhere that victims needed help, normally I would show up if I could.” I became such an expert in issues related to crime and the penal system, he continued, “that when I stood up in the House of Commons and said something, people would say, ‘Don’t challenge this guy. He knows what he’s talking about.’ ”