Tragedy in the Commons (20 page)

As the vote approached, staff from the whip’s office approached Matthews to find out how he would vote. “Listen,” Matthews said. “I voted against the mission. I’m not voting to extend the mission, so you know how I’m going to vote.” He said he told them “a dozen times.” And then, when it came time for him to actually vote in the House, he felt the eyes of the whip and the leader on him. “I stand up to vote against extending the mission,” Matthews recounts. “And they’re all looking at [me] like, ‘What’s wrong with him?’ ”

Matthews felt unjustly maligned by Liberal leader Stéphane Dion and his whip, Karen Redman. Several dozen other Liberals reversed their positions, but Matthews stood firm. “And
I’m
the bad guy?” Matthews said. “I am consistent. Those forty or so who are inconsistent, that’s not me. Don’t expect me to follow after the forty or so inconsistent ones. I’m not like that.… I’ve been against this from day one and I still am.… I’m not changing.”

As with classroom seats in grade school, certain seating positions in the House of Commons are jealously coveted. The closer a seat is to the leader’s seat at the front, the greater the status of the occupant. Soon after the Afghanistan vote, the party moved Matthews to a seat back by the rearmost curtain. “Punishment,” Matthews observed. “They’d thought they’d penalize me by putting me back by the curtain.… That’s Ottawa. That’s some of the frustrating stuff about Ottawa—that’s been
frustrating over the years, in Ottawa—the dominance from the centre of whatever party it is that thinks it should control your everyday life.”

Matthews found party control counterproductive to effective politics. “Because there’s so many people—I’ve got to be careful what I say here—who are ambitious and eager to please and to do what they think is going to help them get ahead. And they put that before—and I’ve seen so much of that in both jurisdictions of public life—that people would sell their souls to have their chauffeur. And that’s just … human nature, I suppose. Not
my
human nature, but for a lot of people it is: ‘Whatever pleases the centre.’ I could never be like that.”

It’s to be expected that the dozens of MPs elected to a single party will not agree on every issue; many of the former MPs we met with described episodes like Joe Comuzzi’s. What we found surprising from the exit interviews was not only how often the MPs emphasized these disagreements, particularly since they voted nearly all the time with their parties, but also how their parties lacked a transparent and openly agreed-upon mechanism, beyond the confines of the committee or the caucus, for them to voice that dissent.

Ottawa convention has created what one could call a “ladder of dissent”: a continuum of methods in which an MP may disagree with party policy, ranging from least public dissent to most. At the very least, an MP is able to disagree in private debate, in caucus, as long as he or she votes for the resultant legislation in the Commons. A second, and slightly more noticeable option, is to disagree privately and then
abstain
from the vote—an equivocal tactic that may allow one to save face with constituents while avoiding a loss of standing
in the party. Finally, an MP can disagree by voting against the legislation in the House of Commons. This most public form of dissent is likely to summon some form of retribution from the party, as in the case of Bill Matthews.

The Reform Party featured some of the most hands-off approaches to party discipline in Canadian history, thanks to the fact that, according to its populist bent, it encouraged MPs to vote the way their constituents wished. Several MPs initially elected as members of the Reform Party also told us they were given guidelines on how to prioritize the factors informing their decisions about which way to vote. “The policy was loud and clear,” said Reform-turned-Conservative MP Myron Thompson. “When it comes to vote, you vote the wishes of the people. If you can’t determine what the wishes of the people are, then it was support the position of the party. And if the party didn’t have a position on that, then and only then could you vote your own will, providing you could show that the will of the people [was] at loggerheads—50-50 type.”

Thompson described the way Reform’s policy toward dissent had changed once it transitioned into the Canadian Alliance and then the Conservative Party. “Caucus has agreed on this; this is the direction we are going to go. Maybe … 10 percent of you don’t like this idea but you don’t have a free vote on this. So we lost the free vote. You must follow the party policy—and I refused to.

“If I didn’t like what we were doing, I would—and I talked to Preston Manning and even before I left I talked to Stephen Harper, and I said, ‘I am going in there and I am not supporting your position. I am voting the will of my constituents. If I have to prove it to you, I can do that—but that’s what
I am going to do.’ ” When the party asked, “Well, could you just not show up?” Thompson responded, “No. I
am
showing up. I am going in there and I am voting ‘no.’ ”

Reform-turned-Conservative MP Paul Forseth, who left Parliament in 2006, described a similar shift in the party’s receptivity to MP policy input, from the early days of Reform to the current iteration of the Conservative Party under Stephen Harper. Reform, Forseth said, encouraged a bottom-up policy that saw leader Preston Manning taking guidance from his MPs on how their constituents felt about an issue. In his experience, Forseth said, that approach fell by the wayside. “I don’t think, even in our Conservative caucus [under Stephen Harper], that there is quite that emphasis anymore. It’s more top-down driven. [In Reform] there was that emphasis on the fact that your membership in the caucus really made a difference, your voice was counted, and we would spend exhaustive times having individual members of the caucus come to the microphone to argue and debate.”

Former NDP leader Ed Broadbent says he allowed the MPs under him to vote against the party in what he termed “exceptional cases.” To qualify, the MP made the case for disagreement with the whole of the caucus—“if he could show it was not simply self-interest in preserving his or her seat but had good grounds for a policy difference from the party that was coherent with the interests in his or her community.” After all, Broadbent points out, “We are all elected basically as members of parties.”

Some conflict did happen under Broadbent—and when it did, he exerted himself to find a compromise. Take his experience with the one-time Saskatoon NDP MP Bob Ogle.
Like all NDPers, Ogle had been elected on a platform that was pro-choice. Problem was, Ogle was a Catholic priest who was strongly opposed to abortion. “So this was a matter of life or death philosophically,” Broadbent said, speaking of the seriousness that Ogle felt about the issue. So when a vote came up in Parliament that hinged on personal principles about abortion, Broadbent lifted party discipline for Ogle, and Ogle alone. “I accepted his decision,” Broadbent says, “even though he was elected by a program or party that accepted a woman’s right to choose. It would be total hypocrisy on his part to vote, so he did not vote with the party on that instance—as I recall he abstained.”

Chrétien-era Liberal whip Marlene Catterall downplayed concerns about the bonds of party discipline, at least as they existed in Jean Chrétien’s government. Prior to her time in federal politics, she had been a municipal politician with the capacity to vote freely; she didn’t have a party whip watching over her shoulder each time she cast a ballot. So before she made the decision to pursue a federal political office, she considered whether she wanted to subject herself to the behavioural restrictions required by party membership. “One of the things I really had to think about was, am I prepared to be part of a team and to have my freedom to speak out on issues … limited by being a representative of a party in the House of Commons?”

The way she reasoned, the party was a lot more important to voters than her individual name. “By a huge majority, people vote not for the Member of Parliament,” Catterall said, mentioning the much-cited statistic that the candidate’s name accounts for only 5 percent of the votes, with the party and leader accounting for the rest. “They vote for the
party and the leader that they want governing the country.… How can a leader in the party … deliver on the commitments they made during the campaign unless people feel bound to defend those policies? You can’t say I run for a party, I get elected because I am a representative of that party, but then once I get in Parliament I don’t feel any obligations to what I said I was going to do once I went for election.”

To enforce party discipline as whip, Catterall relied on informal processes. “If people really didn’t want to go and vote,” she said, “and I absolutely knew that it was something that was crucial to their constituency and that they weren’t bullshitting me—if it really was something extremely important; they wanted to support the party but they just didn’t feel they could vote for this, or they would be betraying the constituents—I would say, ‘What do you want to do? Do you want to be sick? Do you want to go to a committee meeting somewhere out of town or to a conference out of the country?’ ”

After Chrétien resigned, Paul Martin brought in his own version of the ladder of dissent. The “three-line whip” was a discipline system that categorized bills in one of three ways. Liberal MP Roy Cullen contrasted Martin’s comparatively lax party discipline with Chrétien’s. “Under Mr. Chrétien everything seemed to be like a confidence vote,” said Cullen. But Martin allowed more flexibility with his three-tier voting. “Tier one was like a confidence matter, such as a budget or Throne Speech [where MPs were expected to support the party]. Tier two would be policy matters that are very important and that MPs would be encouraged to support. Tier three was free votes. And if we thought that [an issue] was a category one instead of a category two, we could thrash that out beforehand,” Cullen said.

Free votes, such as private members’ business, were controversial, too. Even in this ostensibly independent arena, the MPs reported heavy party intervention. Bloc MP Odina Desrochers said that even when facing a free vote, his party still pressured MPs. “There are no real free votes. The political parties will say that it’s a free vote to seem democratic, but if the leader has an opinion on it, he’s going to put pressure on the membership so that you think like him,” he said.

Bill Blaikie expressed frustration that the governing parties rarely adhered to allowing free votes once in power. “All these guys who said they were for free votes end up voting against private members’ business because their government does not want it to happen,” he said. MPs also expressed anxiety over potential reprisals from their peers over free votes. As Liberal-turned-Independent MP Pat O’Brien described it: “There are consequences for however you vote. There are free votes where you know that, while you’re not going to get kicked out of the party, your name’s now on somebody’s hit list, or their ‘do not promote’ list.”

If an MP did decide not to vote with his or her party, how could that dissent best be expressed? Was abstaining from a vote, for example, an honourable or cowardly form of dissent? On this question in particular there was much disagreement among our interviewed MPs. In 2002, when Liberal MP Stephen Owen held dual Cabinet roles of secretary of state for both Western economic diversification and for Indian affairs and northern development, he faced a vote about whether committee chairs should be elected or appointed. An enthusiastic adherent of all aspects of democracy, Owen believed committee chairs should be elected. The
rest of the Cabinet disagreed. “I basically closed my briefing book and said to the prime minister, ‘It’s been an honour being in your Cabinet and I understand you need solidarity and so I have to resign.’ So I left and I was caught up with two floors down at the front door by someone who ran after me and said, ‘No, you have to come back.’ ”

Owen did go back. He and several close friends, also ministers, conferred in an anteroom to the Cabinet chamber, and they came up with a solution: Owen could abstain from the vote. “It was accepted that I wouldn’t vote against the government, but I wouldn’t vote at all,” Owen said. “It allowed us to sort of say, okay, I accept the principle of Cabinet solidarity but the prime minister accepted that I could miss the vote.” He synthesized what other MPs had also described: “There is a whole range of ways you can [signal] dissent and sometimes you can do it tactfully, strategically, and sometimes you can just make a fool of yourself or seem disloyal and disrespectful. So I think you have to be very careful. There is an expectation. You join the party because you believe in the full package and on so many issues it is necessary to act collectively—so you can’t just be a maverick—but there are going to be [times] too that you have to be willing to debate your point within caucus, or Cabinet, as strenuously as you can and then accept the will of the majority, the consensus, or step aside.… But then there will be lines that you won’t cross.”

Others felt that, as a mechanism for disagreement, abstention was cowardly. “You’re sent here to do a job,” said Liberal MP Paul DeVillers. “Do it. Don’t hide in the washroom when it’s time to take that stand.” DeVillers was among the former MPs who expressed frustration with members who
voted against their party. He—and many others—framed party discipline in terms of being a “team player.” Said DeVillers, “It annoyed me when people would vote against the party with no consequence. As a team player, that annoyed me. If I was only in it for myself, I’d be voting here and voting there.”

Perhaps Russ Powers was one of the MPs who annoyed DeVillers. They were in the Liberal caucus at the same time, yet Powers was at the other end of the spectrum in considering how to signal dissent. Powers acknowledged that, while he and his colleagues were there to pass legislation in the best interests of the country, they were also required to develop policy that benefited the party’s prospects for re-election. “You had to adhere to the policy or [face] the wrath of the whip,” Powers explained: “Now, I can tell you that over the nineteen months I was there I probably voted against my party six times, but I was able to explain the rationale and I was never castigated or hung out.… I supported pieces of legislation the Conservatives introduced. The perfect [example] is the gun legislation: I come from an urban riding that is part of an old city, which has mafia connections and gang crime, and their proposal for punishment for the use of handguns made sense from a political standpoint and it made sense from a practical standpoint.… Some nice pieces of legislation came out of the NDP and some nice pieces of legislation came out of the Bloc Québécois—as long as the Bloc was not self-serving from the standpoint of [being] Quebec-centric; a lot of their stuff was really beneficial.”