Tragedy in the Commons (19 page)

So, what happens when an MP disagrees with the party?

That’s the question Joe Comuzzi was forced to confront one Wednesday in January 2005, after he left a Liberal Party caucus meeting in Fredericton, New Brunswick. He returned to his hotel room, lay down on the bed, stared at the ceiling and thought.

He spent an hour in that position, thinking about his career as an MP, and about the constituency that sent him to Ottawa. For seventeen years Comuzzi had been a good soldier in the Liberal Party. First elected in 1988, the MP for Thunder Bay–Superior North, a lifelong Catholic, a former car salesman known on Parliament Hill for his impeccable dress and his 6’ 4”
stature, voted consistently with his party even when he didn’t want to. Take federal minister of health Allan Rock’s controversial tainted-blood policy. Rock’s policy would only compensate people who had been infected by hepatitis C between 1986 and 1990, leaving uncompensated anyone who had been infected by tainted blood earlier. In April 1998 the opposition Reform Party tried to extend the coverage, and the Liberals closed ranks to support Rock’s original policy.

Comuzzi recalled the “pounding in caucus” that required Liberal MPs to vote against the Reform Party’s resolution. Privately, Comuzzi figured that the opposition was right. And he knew other Liberals felt the same way. He saw them gritting their teeth as they stood up to vote against the motion, sticking with the party line. Comuzzi also voted against Reform’s motion. “I shouldn’t have,” Comuzzi said. Even though Ontario premier Mike Harris eventually passed legislation to compensate that province’s victims who were infected earlier than 1986, Comuzzi would later say that he wished he could take back his vote.

But the toughest decision Comuzzi ever faced was the one he was mulling over in his Fredericton hotel room. The big topic at the caucus retreat was the impending legislation over gay marriage. Prime Minister Paul Martin told his Liberal caucus that he would allow backbench MPs to vote according to their conscience. The only members of the Liberal caucus required to support gay marriage were those in Cabinet.

Hence Comuzzi’s bind: he was a Cabinet member. Like any politician, he’d always wanted a spot in Cabinet. He’d been a loyal Liberal MP for sixteen years when, less than a year earlier, the prime minister handed him his first Cabinet
position. The title was a mouthful: the minister of state for the federal economic development initiative for northern Ontario. The position was an endorsement of Comuzzi’s career, a sign of his respect in the party, an indication of his stature as an elder statesman.

Comuzzi had quit smoking that December. Then stress over the impending gay marriage vote prompted him to return to the habit. Gay marriage was not popular in his comparatively conservative riding of Thunder Bay. It certainly was not popular with the Catholic Church—and Comuzzi, educated in a Catholic boarding school, was an ardent adherent to the religion. During the 2004 campaign for his most recent election win, Comuzzi had promised his constituents that he would vote to uphold the traditional definition of marriage. So Comuzzi could vote the way he promised, the way his conscience and his constituents wanted him to—or he could keep his Cabinet position. “Is it worth giving up a Cabinet post over?” he mused to the
Globe and Mail
at the time.

Justice Minister Irwin Cotler introduced the gay marriage legislation, Bill C-38, on February 1, 2005. To decide how he’d vote on it, Comuzzi spent six weeks travelling around his mostly rural riding. Towns like McKenna, Geraldton, Longlac, Nipigon, Red Rock—Comuzzi visited them all, holding open forums in each place and taking notes as he gauged how his constituents wanted him to vote. “I wanted to know what they thought about it,” Comuzzi said. “It’s a private affair and I’ve always considered it that. But when it came to making that decision, I voted in my mind that it was a consensus of the people that I represented, that wanted me to vote that way.”

On the basis of what he heard from his constituents, Comuzzi decided he had to vote against the bill. He wasn’t the only one. (MP Pat O’Brien also left the Liberal caucus over same-sex marriage and opted to sit as an Independent.) So on the morning of Tuesday, June 28, 2005, Comuzzi had a conversation with the prime minister. Comuzzi told Martin he was resigning from Cabinet in order to vote against gay marriage, as his constituents wished. The prime minister told him that he was disappointed. “I very much regret the decision,” Martin told the
Globe and Mail
. “But I understand it, and accept it.” Martin said he was delighted, however, that Comuzzi would continue to serve as a Liberal Member of Parliament and a strong advocate for northern Ontario.

That afternoon, Comuzzi voted against Bill C-38’s third reading. The legislation passed, 158–133. It also passed in the Senate, and became law on July 20, 2005, making Canada the third country in the world at that time to legalize gay marriage, behind only Belgium and the Netherlands, and the first in the Americas. “I promised faithfully to the people of Thunder Bay–Superior North that I would defend the traditional definition of marriage,” Comuzzi said. Once he realized what his constituents wanted him to do, he did it. “It was an easy decision.”

The press lauded Comuzzi. “Quietly, without fanfare or negotiation, he resigned his junior ministry and voted against same-sex [marriage] through personal conviction and a commitment he had made to the people who elected him—an act almost without parallel in this grasping generation of career politicians,” wrote Bruce Garvey in the
National Post
. “He not only said what he would do and then did it; he put
public interest ahead of his own when the moment came to decide,” said the
Toronto Star
’s James Travers. “By stepping aside, by giving up something cherished for an even more precious principle, Comuzzi accepted the uncompromising discipline of public service.”

COMUZZI
’
S DILEMMA INVOLVED
one of the key tensions in the life of a Canadian MP—the triangular relationship between constituency wishes, personal opinion and party loyalty. It’s hard enough to figure out what constituents want, particularly since they’re unlikely to all have the same perspectives or demands. But under the pressure of one of Ottawa’s unwritten rules, that tension is even more difficult to manage. Adhere to the party line, goes the unspoken edict from the leader’s office, particularly on the decisions for which we need you, and we’ll pay you back. We’ll help you in your riding. Whether it’s working to arrange funding for a new jobs program, or a technology office park, a new manufacturing facility or federal infrastructure funding—the governing party can and will assist the good soldiers. By voting against his party on Bill C-38, a vote his constituents requested, Comuzzi did something that harmed his standing within his party and likely weakened his ability to direct federal money to the riding of Thunder Bay–Superior North.

“It’s a trade-off,” Comuzzi said in his exit interview, “and that’s something I never see anything written about.… It’s always a trade-off and you’re making a judgment call. And I’ll be frank with you, you don’t feel very comfortable. But you gotta do it.”

PARLIAMENTARY VOTING RECORDS
reveal that most MPs side with their parties on nearly every vote; but, in recalling their time in Ottawa, the MPs we interviewed wanted to make it clear that they had often felt heavily constrained. And most made a point of telling us about times when they didn’t agree with their party, or had sought a concession such as permission to miss a vote in order to help manage their discomfort with the party line. In fact, almost all the recollections they volunteered were concerned with what it was like to be a member of a political party. And they weren’t good. Time and time again, MPs told us how decisions made by party leadership seemed opaque, arbitrary and even juvenile, and how party demands inhibited their ability to serve their constituents.

The MPs’ complaints raise an issue: Why join a political party? The difficulty, at least if one wants to be a successful parliamentarian, is that virtually every Canadian MP arrives under the banner of a political party. In the last thirty years, only two freshmen MPs have been elected as independents—Quebec City’s André Arthur in the riding of Portneuf–Jacques-Cartier in 2006, and in 1984, Tony Roman in Toronto’s York North. Even if there is little choice but to sign on with a party in order to get elected or to be effective in Parliament, belonging to a political party requires sacrifices from the MP. Part of that sacrifice is identity. Once an MP decides to run under a party banner, his or her identity becomes closely tied to the organization’s brand and leader.

The inherent dichotomy in the role of an MP in a parliamentary democracy is clear—autonomy in the home riding; loyalty on Parliament Hill. “There may be some exceptions in those African dictatorships that are part of the Commonwealth
and so on,” said Leslie Seidle, research director of the Institute for Research on Public Policy, in an interview with the
Globe and Mail
. “But in the advanced parliamentary democracies, there is nowhere that has heavier, tighter party discipline than the Canadian House of Commons.”

Later in the same article, University of Toronto professor Richard Simeon said much the same thing. “We are worse than the Australians, and much worse than the British, in terms of giving MPs the ability to act and to somehow make a difference,” said Simeon. And of course, unlike our closest neighbour, the United States, Canada’s tight party control has another aspect: the leaders of the party that controls the House of Commons also form the executive arm of government, thus furthering their power.

Dictating which way MPs vote is already imperious, but Canadian parties have long gone past that. These days, discipline is so tight that members must restrict their public comments to speaking points the party has provided. Party leaders enforce this discipline in order to be as certain as possible that legislation will pass. Dissent within a party could lead the media to criticize the party for poor organization. Such tight discipline also contributes to the public’s ability to hold parties accountable at election time: if all members of a party vote in a particular way, then the party’s positions are ostensibly clearer to the electorate.

The MPs we spoke with chafed against the party strictures, which all too often left them feeling uncomfortable and even hypocritical. As Liberal MP Sue Barnes put it, “I didn’t leave my family and my city and a life to let somebody else tell me what to do, or to roll along with the flow.” Conservative MP
Carol Skelton also vowed to speak up: “Going through the stage that I did in my life, in my thirties and forties and then when I reached my fifties, I really decided that if there’s something that goes on that I don’t want, I’m going to stand up and talk.”

Conservative MP John Cummins responded to the advice of a friend in such situations. The friend reminded Cummins that one day he would no longer be an MP, and when that day came, he would have to look back and assess whether he had remained true to his own principles or the principles of his party: “At some point you are no longer going to be elected. You may be defeated or you may decide not to run again,” Cummins said, summing up the friend’s advice. “The only thing that is going to matter at that point is, how did I do the business when I was there? How did I conduct the people’s business?” Cummins didn’t want any regrets. “You want to have peace of mind when you’re no longer there—you want to be able to look back and say, I stood up for the folks back home.… My view is, you represent the people first, the party second.”

New Democrat MP Bill Blaikie’s decision matrix on whether to vote with the party was less clearly defined. “Well,” he said, “it’s kind of a three-way thing between your constituents, your party and your conscience or your own judgment. But judgment and conscience aren’t always the same thing, because not everything is a matter of conscience—because in order to operate within a political party, if everything is a matter of conscience, well then you are not going to be in a political party for long.… Not everything is a matter of conscience in the sense of, ‘I have to resign,’ or, ‘I have to cast the dissenting vote,’ in that sense of conscience. You express those differences of opinion and judgment within the caucus,
and then one of the other principles of parliamentary life is that you abide by the majority decision unless you find it so troubling to your conscience … [or to your] sense of survival. [If] their party was asking them to take a position that was going to send them over the cliff, people have been known to cast the dissenting vote for that reason.”

Discomfort with the extent of party discipline was expressed even by some Cabinet ministers. “I remember that there were bills when I was thinking, ‘Why the heck am I standing up on that?’ because I didn’t necessarily believe [in the party’s position]. But you’re in the government, and you vote with your government,” said former Liberal Cabinet minister Pierre Pettigrew.

The tension between party and politician is a natural and long-entrenched part of the parliamentary system. What we didn’t expect to hear from the MPs during the exit interviews, however, was how poorly they felt the parties managed this tension, relying heavily on whipped votes, and punitive measures for those who did not fall in line.

Take the situation that faced the Progressive Conservative-turned-Liberal MP Bill Matthews in 2008, as the House of Commons considered extending Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan. Matthews represented Random–Burin–St. George’s in Newfoundland, and he displays the independent and pugnacious spirit that reflects the province’s reputation. He also values consistency in his own voting record. He voted against renewing Canada’s commitment to the Afghanistan mission when it came up in the legislature in 2006, as did sixty-six of his fellow Liberals. The matter came up again in the House two years later. This time, the debate concerned
whether to extend the mission. “I was not in favour of the mission,” Matthews said. “So why would I be in favour of extending it? That’s the way I am, you see? … If I was against the mission two years ago, I am certainly against extending the mission now.”