Tragedy in the Commons (4 page)

Others found a connection to politics in response to a particular local, regional or global event. Constitutional debates, the Charlottetown Accord and the Quebec referendums of 1980 and 1995 were lightning rods for several. Eleni Bakapanos, a Montreal-area Liberal MP, came of age during the first Quebec referendum. She sided firmly with Ottawa. “Definitely the 1980 referendum was the platform to launch my political career.… They can package it up any way they want to, but the fact is that [the separatists] want to divide the country. The country would not be the same, no matter how you slice it,” she said. “I was very much motivated in terms of wanting to make a difference. I know it sounds so corny, but I did want to make a difference.”

Some were more forthright contenders. “I am up for a challenge. I love when people wave a [matador’s] big red cape in front of me because, of course, I want to charge at it,” said Penny Priddy, a former NDP MP for Surrey North in British Columbia. And a few, like Colleen Beaumier, Liberal MP for Brampton from 1993 to 2008, admitted to both Bakapanos’s purpose and Priddy’s ambition: “I was a forty-six-year-old child who still thought she could save the world.”

IN
2009,
The Economist
conducted an international survey of five thousand politicians by examining their entries in the
International Who’s Who
. They noticed some idiosyncratic relationships between people in government and the countries they led. American political elites demonstrated a prevalence of lawyers; China tended to be ruled by engineers—at the time,
its nine-member politburo comprised eight engineers, including President Hu Jintao, whose engineering specialty is hydraulics. Indonesia and much of Africa favour military men. Egypt (until recently) liked academics. In South Korea, it’s civil servants, and in Brazil, it’s doctors. “Different countries—because of their history, or cultural preferences, or stage of development—seem to like particular qualities, and these qualities are provided disproportionately by only a few professions,”
The Economist
opines.

Canada didn’t feature in
The Economist
’s report. But in our research, we found no such correlation between MPs and their previous occupations. That diversity is encouraging: it suggests we don’t have an established and difficult-to-penetrate “political class.” You don’t need to have attended certain schools or be a millionaire. There is no direct path to entering politics in this country, no clearly identified and understood “farm team.” In other countries the profession of politics may be reserved for those with economic or social means, but in Canada the political field is relatively accessible, and open as well to people born outside the country. Although most MPs have some form of post-secondary education and more credentials than the average Canadian, their pre-political occupational diversity reflects the diversity of Canadians’ employment more closely than we likely realize.

Few examples make this point as well as that of former NDP MP Catherine Bell of Vancouver Island North, who worked in a kitchen before rising up through the union ranks into contention for a seat in Parliament. She knew things were heating up during her 2006 campaign when a reporter from the
National Post
called her one day and asked, “What is a
cook going to bring to Ottawa? And how do you think you’re qualified for this position?” Her response? “Well, maybe that’s what we need is some more diversity.… It’s called the House of Commons for a reason. It’s for Canadians of all walks of life, having a say and their views represented. I don’t think that only lawyers and accountants have the ability to do that.”

No matter what our MPs’ varied backgrounds, their transitions from ordinary citizen to political leader were marked by what they described as a series of random occurrences. A political career was something they claimed not to have planned for or worked toward. Few admitted to ever considering politics as a career goal, let alone aspiring to work as an MP, a member of Cabinet or prime minister. Nearly all said they had been asked to run, usually by an acquaintance involved in a political party or someone from a community group. Many claimed they had not expected to be asked, and that they had responded initially with reluctance. While some reluctance is understandable—politics is far from a secure business, and there are usually family or career considerations—the persistence of this narrative among so many divergent candidates was surprising. Even those who acknowledged that they’d considered making a run for office at some point in their lives still claimed to be surprised when that moment arrived.

Former Liberal MP Anne McLellan, who represented her Edmonton riding from 1993 until 2006, is one example. She grew up on a dairy farm in Nova Scotia. Her parents were political: her dad was in the Liberal party; her mom was a municipal councillor who would eventually become the county’s deputy reeve. McLellan herself was involved with the Liberal
Party as a student at Dalhousie University in Halifax. She remained involved as a law professor at the University of New Brunswick, and later, as a professor at the University of Alberta’s law school, at least in part because it offered her ways of meeting people in a province where she was a newcomer.

“I really just wasn’t thinking about running,” she said. Then in the summer of 1992 a critical care nurse named Claire Laskin, whom McLellan had met at various Liberal functions, came up and broached the topic of McLellan running as a candidate. “I’ve heard you speak a number of times,” Laskin said. “There is a group of us who would work with you. We’ll work to get the nomination. We know that a Liberal hasn’t been elected in Alberta in twenty-five years.”

McLellan was reluctant, and said so. Laskin asked her to take the summer vacation to think about it. In the course of the summer, McLellan decided to give it a whirl. But she underscores that the possibility wouldn’t have occurred to her, had Laskin not approached her out of the blue. “I would not have run for political office if this woman had not shown up at my door and said, ‘Anne, we’d like you to try and do this.’ ”

A SURVEY OF
170 Liberal and 168 NDP candidates from the 2008 election, initiated by political scientists William Cross and Lisa Young, asked a number of questions about what had motivated those candidates, both successful and otherwise, to run for office. Of the 186 respondents, 66 percent indicated that encouragement by family, friends and support from others in community groups to which the candidate belonged were important factors. This finding supports the picture of our typical Member of Parliament so far. But Cross
and Young made another finding that leads us to another compelling force in these MPs’ decision to seek office. For 75 percent of these respondents, party recruitment—usually involving the local riding association, although sometimes involving only the party’s national leadership—had also played a role in their decision.

Candidates recruited by local party associations were much more likely to have been involved in the community in which they lived. According to Cross and Young’s study, 76 percent of locally recruited candidates were involved in more than five civil society organizations, while only 44 percent of those recruited by the national party, and 21 percent of those who self-nominated, claimed the same. Locally chosen candidates were also more likely than others to have given significant volunteer time to the associations to which they belonged. They were more often female and much more likely to be members of ethnic associations than those who put themselves forward as candidates. As it turns out, they were also much more likely to win.

So, when we heard many MPs describe themselves as political outsiders, it struck us as strange. Their self-description seemed at odds with the extent of their involvement in their own communities. Notwithstanding their wide variety of backgrounds and perspectives, many future parliamentarians had worked or volunteered in some capacity in the proverbial “public square,” as journalists, teachers or social workers. Others had served as provincial politicians, or supplemented their day jobs with positions on a school board or municipal council. Many volunteered in community associations, some in unions. So, whether through their profession, their volunteer
commitments, or a combination of both, they had the opportunity to interact with a cross-section of their community.

Through this work in the public sphere, they had discovered they had the power to successfully create change, however minuscule or substantial its form, even if they didn’t see that community work as necessarily “political.” They either liked the taste of their accomplishments, or they saw a great potential for change. One MP recalled serving as the president of the local Chamber of Commerce when his town’s major employer announced widespread cuts. “It was a really difficult time for the community,” said former Liberal MP Andy Mitchell, who served in the riding of Parry Sound–Muskoka from 1993 to 2006. “You had young men who were mostly hard-rock miners in their twenties and thirties [whose well-paying jobs] just disappeared overnight.” The future MP became heavily involved with the community’s response and realized that the work he was doing with his fellow citizens could lead to positive change. It was also a lesson in how government mattered. “The policy the provincial and federal governments were going to pursue in response was going to make a difference in individual people’s lives. That rekindled an earlier interest and my involvement in politics has been pretty consistent since then.”

Others, seeing a system that excluded people, a community that was struggling or an institution that was out of touch, were motivated to do something about it. Carol Skelton, a Conservative MP from Saskatchewan, had a job that involved visiting women in rural communities. This work provided a unique insight into poverty on the prairies. “I don’t know how many women I saw there that were trying to get enough money
just to survive,” Skelton said. “The social infrastructure in agricultural communities at that time was a problem.”

Former Liberal MP Claudette Bradshaw had worked with abused children in her home province of New Brunswick. She was spurred toward politics by the news that one of her now-grown-up “kids” had murdered someone. “The child was really abused. We tried to get him out of the area he was in,” she recalled. “Government wouldn’t listen and we couldn’t get anything done for this child. When he went into the school system he became very aggressive. His mother, when he was six, said, ‘Is he going to have to kill somebody to get help?’ Well, at the age of twenty-one he did. So [my spouse said], ‘You have to go to Ottawa. Somebody’s got to go. They’ve got to understand.’ ”

In other words, those who were asked to run for office were very much a part of the communities in which they lived. “In the end, I guess it was the community members that came to me when there was going to be an opening to run … they saw me as a person who had been engaged in public life in the sense of being an advocate in our local community,” said Paul Macklin, the Liberal MP for the Ontario riding of Northumberland–Quinte West from 2000 to 2006.

A few MPs—and they were the exceptions—said they actively pursued their candidacy. Take John Godfrey, a former academic then editor of the
Financial Post
, who’d always thought he’d like to give politics a shot. “It was on the bucket list,” he said. By 1993 Godfrey was so enthusiastic about pursuing public office that he ignored the Liberal Party’s wishes and jumped ridings from Markham, north-east of Toronto, where he’d been working to build some presence, to
Don Valley West, a riding closer to downtown, where he would go on to win six consecutive elections.

Why is it that so few of our federal politicians claimed to want to be federal politicians? One might say it’s simply an aspect of our unpredictable world; few of us work at the jobs we had imagined when we were young. But would we be embarrassed by the jobs we do? We were startled that, even after the fact, our MPs consistently were so reluctant to identify themselves as politicians. They explained away any political ambition, or were apologetic about it.

The evidence of our MP interviews, together with the research of Cross and Young, suggests that actively pursuing public office, or at least admitting to actively pursuing public office, is rare in Canadian political culture. Cross and Young’s study indicates that those who intentionally pursue a political career, at least in the two parties they surveyed, suffer at the ballot box. Those who self-nominate, who also tended to be male and to have revealed careerist or policy-related motives for running, are much less likely to become MPs.

Do our system and our national sensibilities resist those who self-select for public office? Do Canadians prefer a form of community endorsement and a candidacy unsullied by ambition? Or does the reluctance to admit to political ambition speak of something more pernicious: that a belief that politics, unlike most other demanding professions, is something for which one cannot admit ambition? No doubt it’s a reflection of the bad odour in which candidates realize Canadians hold their elected leaders. Canadian society seems not only to frown on political ambition—it frowns on politicians themselves. Statistics and surveys bear this out. EKOS Research data show
that the proportion of Canadians who trust their government to do the right thing has decreased from nearly 60 percent in 1968 to 28 percent in 2012. “The mistrust in government is much more focused on politicians and political parties, not officials,” wrote EKOS president Frank Graves. “The paucity of trust in politicians is almost cartoonishly low.” A different EKOS survey rated Canadian trust in various professions. Nurses and doctors rated high, with about 80 percent professing a high level of trust for these well-known clinical professions. Politicians were at the bottom of the pack, with only 10 percent professing a high degree of trust. The only profession that ranked below politicians? Internet bloggers. A similar poll, the 2013 Trust Poll of 2,020 people conducted by Leger Marketing for Reader’s Digest Canada, ranked politicians as the second-least trusted profession. Who ranked lower in
this
survey? Psychics.