Tragedy in the Commons (2 page)

Tragedy in the Commons
is also a snapshot of a specific time and place. The men and women we interviewed had served in Parliament on average for ten and a half years, just when the Bloc Québécois, Reform Party and, later, Canadian Alliance and Conservative Party of Canada were rising to the status of important players on the national stage. Interviews with former Liberal members reflect their party’s transition out of a long period of forming governments. Similarly, the new Conservative Party was undergoing its own transition, from outsider mavericks to prototypical insiders, from a party bent on reforming government to one that was
forming
government. Each of the participating MPs had served in at least one minority Parliament, and many of our early interviewees had the sense that the House of Commons had entered a period of perpetual minorities. (Obviously, they weren’t clairvoyant.)

We approached this project as documentarians, reporting MPs’ accounts of their feelings and beliefs. In some cases, their memories were no doubt coloured by the passage of time and affected by the lens through which they chose to interpret their own lives and experiences. Regardless, the ways in which they chose to remember themselves and the moments they chose to share with us often brought forward the most candid portrayals of how Canadian democracy really works.

These interviews also reflect views and problems that
are common to all parties and as old as the House of Commons itself. What one MP said about the Liberals or the Bloc in the past will likely also be true of the Conservatives or the NDP today. The same complaints about the Liberals after their long reign could also apply to Brian Mulroney’s Tories in 1993, or probably to any long-serving governments in the future.

The problems illuminated in our exit interviews can seem intractable. One need only glance at Queen’s University professor C.E.S. Franks’s book
The Parliament of Canada
to grasp how long some of these problems have been around: “The themes of reform have not changed,” Franks notes. “The same complaints of excessive partisanship, government domination, lack of influence of the private member and the need for improved committees and accountability, for a greater role for Parliament in policy-making, and for reform of the Senate continue despite the passage of time and the many changes that have been made.” Franks’s book sounds current; it was published in 1987.

AFTER REVIEWING MORE THAN
four thousand pages of transcripts from our eighty interviews with MPs from across the political spectrum and every province, we were struck by the themes that prevailed throughout the interviews. Politicians frequently try to define themselves as opposites—Liberals versus Conservatives, men versus women, and Easterners versus Westerners. But what stood out for us was how much these MPs agreed with one another, particularly on points that together indicated a desperate need for solutions.

One of those common themes? The MPs liked to say they were not politicians. They told us they’d never planned to
run for federal office. In fact, many articulated opposition to the political establishment as an important reason why they entered politics in the first place.

At the start of this introduction, we quoted an MP who professed that he never planned to run. That MP was the Right Honourable Paul Martin, Canada’s minister of finance for nearly nine years and its prime minister for a little more than two. He was the son of an MP, himself a Cabinet minister and a leadership candidate. The younger Martin grew up travelling with his father to Ottawa, the UN and countless constituency events. Though he acknowledged his early and uncommon exposure to politics, even the former prime minister claimed he didn’t think about being a politician until he was in his mid-forties, and even then only with the urging of others.

Once in office, many MPs continue to identify themselves as outsiders. When fellow MPs behave badly in the House of Commons or in the media, most say they never engage in
that sort
of behaviour themselves. And they’re outsiders when they blame their parties, organizations of which they are actively a part, for forcing them to vote against their wishes—or against the desires of their constituents. And they’re outsiders when imparting their most oft-stated advice, that to survive as an MP, one must stay true to oneself and not get caught up in the “Ottawa bubble” in which they were elected to serve. The persistence of the outsider narrative suggests an antipathy to political ambition so deeply ingrained in our society that even our politicians can’t admit to having wanted to be in Parliament, and shun the moniker of politician.

A second theme that runs throughout the interviews is the extent to which each MP is managed by his or her political
party. Most of these individuals came to Ottawa with experience as leaders in their communities. They had served on school boards, volunteered with community agencies, Rotary Clubs or Chambers of Commerce. They’d coached sports teams, coordinated local events and solved local problems. These are individuals with tremendous energy, persuasive power and abilities to get things done. They endured election campaigns and convinced thousands of voters to elect them. But even before they arrived in Ottawa—usually in the nomination process—they began to feel the controlling influence of their chosen party. After they left politics, this constricting influence nagged at them still. Although we didn’t originally ask about party influence in the exit interviews, once we saw how much the MPs wished to discuss it, we had to ask.

These two themes are intertwined: MPs were reluctant to stand up for their profession as politicians, and opted instead to distance themselves from their “typical” peers. Simultaneously, many MPs professed to feeling discomfort when wearing their party sweaters; that is, when having to adhere fully to party discipline. Many chose to tell us about times they disagreed with their leaders, or when they were able to act in a way we don’t often associate with Canadian MPs: free of partisan demands and eager to advance the interests of their constituents.

Was this anti-politician shtick the way MPs demonstrate solidarity with their constituents’ distaste for political ambition? Taking an outsider stance allows MPs to distance themselves from the poor state of our politics, but this mindset can also offer a way to avoid taking responsibility and invariably diminishes the quality of politics for everyone.

“How would you describe the job of an MP?

“Well, I can give you the canned thing of why they tell us we’re there, and I can share with you what I believe is the truth. So, in a nutshell, we’re there to adopt national policy for the betterment of all in the country. The truth is: you’re there to develop policy that is self-serving and beneficial to your party in order to keep you in power and get you reelected.… There is politics involved in everything, so you kind of look at ‘Okay, how many are we going to gain from this?’ ‘How does it fit with the principles of the party?’ … That was the challenge of me deciding to become an MP: I’ve always been an independent thinker and the fact [is] that the majority of life was governed by someone else, and you had to adhere to the policy or [endure] the wrath of the whip.”

Russ Powers
,
Liberal MP for Ancaster–Dundas–Flamborough–Westdale, 2004–06
.

Is this what Powers set out to do when he ran for office? Exist in a system where the majority of his life “was governed by someone else”? Of course not. Nor did his fellow MPs aim to work in similar conditions. But change is not so easily accomplished.

In 1968, the American biologist Garret Hardin published an essay in the journal
Science
called “The Tragedy of the Commons.” In it, Hardin discusses the challenge of managing common resources. In his most famous example, Hardin describes the situation of a group of farmers who can freely graze their animals on a shared pasture. Facing no extra costs
if they do so, each individual farmer has the incentive to add an extra cow or two to the herd. Over time, however, an excess of cows will nibble the pasture bare, rendering the commons useless to all involved. How to begin conserving the grass? Everyone has an incentive to conserve in the long run, but no one has the incentive, in the short term, to go first. In order to preserve the land, the farmers must all agree upon an appropriate way to share the commons. They might agree to divide the land among themselves, impose quotas on herd sizes or allocate blocks of grazing time. While no individual farmer wants to initiate working toward a solution, the group must agree to some remedy if they wish to preserve the utility of the commons over time.

Hardin neatly describes the age-old conundrum that occurs when individual short-term interests run up against the long-term interests of a group. In such cases, finding a solution demands that someone go first, despite the likelihood that they’ll pay dearly for doing so. In Hardin’s essay we saw an analogy to another tragedy in another Commons, facilitated, often unwittingly, by the very people elected to uphold and preserve it.

We hope the MPs’ recollections both frustrate and inspire you, and above all that they revive in you a desire to generate ideas of what we all can do to improve Canada’s democracy for those who are still to come.

CHAPTER ONE

The Best Intentions

I
n 1967 future Bloc Québécois MP Jean-Yves Roy was a CEGEP student in his home town of Rimouski when Quebec premier Daniel Johnson Sr. was visiting to open a new library. As Roy was coming out of the old library on a Saturday morning, bed-headed, he bumped into the premier and his entourage. Johnson struck up a conversation with Roy, who already happened to know quite a bit about politics at that point—enough, apparently, to impress the premier. Johnson invited the young man to the ribbon-cutting ceremony and later sent him a copy of his recently published book,
Égalité ou indépendance
, which Roy still has, along with Johnson’s accompanying note, to this day. In 1969, the year after the premier’s death, the next Union Nationale premier, Jean-Jacques Bertrand, introduced Bill 63, which was intended to promote the French language. But Roy didn’t think it went far enough. He joined the Parti Québécois to fight against Bill 63. “I didn’t have a career plan,” Roy recalled. “I never did. I didn’t have a specific career plan; I didn’t tell myself when I was sixteen or seventeen that I would get into politics—I wasn’t like that.”

In his professional life, Roy became a teacher, then a journalist and editor. In 1981 came the first of a series of requests from the political world that had him spending the ensuing decades bouncing back and forth between public and private life. He was living in Pointe-au-Père, a small town near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River that has since been amalgamated with Rimouski, and the mayor invited him to become involved in municipal politics. He started out leading a recreation commission, became a municipal counsellor and then ended up as mayor himself. Next, in 1984, Roy began working in Ottawa as a departmental assistant for Monique Vézina, a federal Progressive Conservative MP who’d recently been named to Cabinet as minister of supply and services by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. He returned to Ottawa in 1993, this time to work as a departmental assistant for René Canuel, the Bloc MP who had recently been elected in the neighbouring riding of Matane–Matapédia.

One day, Roy visited a part of the riding that had no cell phone coverage. When he got home his wife gave him a message to call François Leblanc, Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe’s chief of staff, as soon as possible.

“Your member resigned today after caucus,” said Leblanc. “An election is going to be called on Sunday—and you have to run.”

“Are you serious?” Roy replied. “There’s no one else?”

“You have to run,” Leblanc repeated, and gave him until six o’clock the next morning to think about it. Roy didn’t want to run; the riding of Matane–Matapédia was enormous, encompassing the whole eastern half of the Gaspé Peninsula. Although Roy was well known in Rimouski, in
other parts of the riding people didn’t know him from Adam. He figured he wasn’t likely to win; the Liberal candidate had a lot more name recognition than he did. So, he told us, “I called up all the people I thought might be interested in running, because I didn’t want to run.” None of them wanted to enter the race either. In fact, every one of them suggested that Roy would make the best candidate. After a sleepless night, he agreed, reluctantly, to stand as the nominee. The election took place on November 27, 2000, and Roy won by 276 votes. “My god,” he exclaimed that night. “I have been elected! How can that be?” Even a man who’d served as mayor of a Quebec city and spent fourteen years working as an assistant for two different MPs on Parliament Hill, including a Cabinet minister, insisted: “I never in my entire life thought of going into politics.”

Like Jean-Yves Roy, many of the eighty MPs we met went out of their way to suggest to us that they didn’t
pursue
political office. From our first interviews, one salient feature about their initial forays into politics became evident. They had to be asked to run, and when they
were
asked, they said they’d been reluctant to accept. Some, like Roy, even claimed to have taken great pains to
avoid
running.

In time, we learned to take these avowals of reluctance with a grain of salt. In Roy’s case, for example, we found it hard to fully credit that such a political insider, with his years of experience working on Parliament Hill, had never harboured at least a grain of ambition to serve as a Member of Parliament, or hadn’t at least considered the notion at some point. Like many creation myths, this common narrative features elements that are difficult to take literally.

In politics, the narrative features a self-styled political outsider being asked by some party insider to pursue political office. At first the candidate is reluctant. Then external forces intervene—a convincing friend, or, as in Roy’s case, an absence of other candidates. As the MP recounts it, he or she is
forced
to run. Holding his or her nose, no less! And then, against all probability, the reluctant candidate somehow ends up getting elected.