Tragedy in the Commons (5 page)

Our politicians’ attitudes reflect the data. In other words, even our politicians have a negative view of their own kind—such a negative view, apparently, that they are reluctant to admit interest or ambition in their own line of work. So perhaps our ballot boxes suggest that Canadians like a little reluctance—genuine or otherwise—in the people we choose as our leaders.

TIME AND TIME AGAIN
, we encountered MPs taking pains to portray themselves as outsiders looking to fix a flawed political system. Few used the exact word “outsider,” but certainly many made a point of underscoring how different they were from regular politicians. In other words, they were eager to secure their credibility as ordinary, concerned Canadians.

“It couldn’t have happened to a guy who fit the role less. Since when is the busboy supposed to become an MP?” asked Liberal Don Boudria, whose first job in Parliament was clearing tables in the parliamentary dining room, and who styled his political career as an
Upstairs, Downstairs
story. “Somehow, with lots of luck and some elbow grease, it worked out. But still, it leaves a few people scratching their heads.”

In some instances, this outsiderism was geographical (and, arguably, realistic). The size and regional nature of Canada alone can give citizens a sense of feeling a world apart from the capital. MPs from distant communities wanted to put their constituency on the map. “I wanted Ottawa to know where Vancouver Island North was,” said Catherine Bell. “It was about as far away from Ottawa as you can get.”

For others, the outsider stance was rooted in ideology or the need for policy change. Ideologically oriented MPs articulated how their outlook on life, political philosophy or perspective on a policy issue wasn’t adequately acknowledged by the system. “I’m an accountant by profession, and was acutely aware of what the damage was to our next generation of our deficits accumulating at $40 billion per year,” said Randy White. Anne McLellan, describing what initially made her accept the invitation to run, cited her own strong “views on the future of the country, national unity and the role of the government in Canada.”

And sometimes it was a matter of personal identity. Most women were aware that, despite advances in some fields, politics remains a male-dominated profession. “I had no role models. There was no black woman who was in the Parliament of Canada, and no black woman was at Queen’s
Park or any other place I could look at,” said Jean Augustine. One aboriginal MP was conscious of past exclusion. “My mom, she’s seventy-five and she remembers when she wasn’t allowed to leave the reserve. She needed a pass. So you are battling that history,” said Gary Merasty, the former Liberal MP for Saskatchewan’s Desnethé–Missinippi–Churchill River riding.

For immigrants, moving to a new country is often such an integral part of their experience that it plays into the dynamics of their self-identification. “The majority can’t [appreciate] the struggle that a minority feels,” said Saudi Arabian–born Omar Alghabra, a Liberal MP from Mississauga–Erindale. And Marlene Catterall, the daughter of a German immigrant, recalls approaching Parliament right after her election as a Liberal MP from Ottawa, still thinking of her family as relative newcomers: “I remember walking up the steps to go into the Centre Block and thinking, ‘Okay, Daddy, so what’s the daughter of a lousy immigrant tailor doing here?’ My dad had just died about six months before and you know, he would have loved to see this.”

And even some new MPs with prior, more local, political experience expressed a sense of feeling out of place in the wider political arena. “I’ve always been driven by trying to represent the people who elect me. That’s what motivated me: to represent them as best I could in Ottawa and be the voice for the small guy. I always put my riding and my province first, sometimes to my own peril,” said Bill Matthews, a Newfoundland MP from 1997 until 2004, who had earlier served fourteen years as a provincial politician.

THE TWO NARRATIVE
components of our interviews—reluctance to pursue a political career, and the maverick “anti-political” sensibility once in office—seem to be caused by, and perpetuate, the same negative perception of politics and the people who work inside the system. The cynical public does not believe it, and it discourages high-calibre candidates from pursuing public office. “Once politicians start pretending they’re not politicians, but their opponents are, it has the effect, not just of driving voters away from their opponents, but of driving them away from the political system itself,” said former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff in a 2012 speech at Stanford University on partisanship. “If politicians don’t start sticking up for their own profession voters certainly won’t.”

Would the calibre of our politicians improve, and would politicians become perceived as more trustworthy, if our elected representatives chose
other
narratives about themselves? Andrew Potter’s 2010 book,
The Authenticity Hoax
, observes that contemporary politicians and the parties that back them are marketed just like consumer goods, a phenomenon he refers to as “the Big Macification of civil discourse.” The trouble, however, is in the tactics that Canadian politicians often employ to market their brands. The advertising world features many cases where two or more brands compete for a limited market share—a situation analagous to the competition for electoral votes. But we don’t see advertisements from Coca-Cola or Pepsi criticizing the soft-drink industry. Nor do we see McDonald’s and Burger King criticizing fast food. “Why doesn’t Kenneth Cole go after Ralph Lauren?” Potter asks in his book. “Because it would run the risk of turning the public off the entire category and shrinking sales for all concerned.”
Unfortunately, Canadian politics, with its outsider-identifying, maverick candidates, has not yet shared this insight.

Our common cultural history seems to include a period when politics was perceived as an esteemed calling, a respected profession, a time when fine and upstanding men and women enthusiastically pursued the honour of party candidacy and political office. Our interviews with former Canadian MPs reflect that those romantic notions are long gone, if they ever actually existed. (The exact moment when the tide turned is open to discussion.) Today, politics is considered such an unsavoury pursuit, the MPs tell us, that people must be harangued, corralled—sometimes conscripted—into pursuing public office. Even if being elected is a private dream, the most palatable way to market one’s candidacy involves at least a tacit separation from, and criticism of, politics, perpetuating the negative stereotypes. With outlooks like that, it would seem that we’re lucky anyone chooses to run at all.

CHAPTER TWO

Out of the Frying Pan …

A
fter the decision to run for federal politics, the next waypoint toward a seat as a Member of Parliament is the nomination—the contest every political party is meant to hold when numerous citizens compete to become its official candidate in a particular riding. If ever a political party mandated clean nomination contests for itself, it was the Reform Party. Founded by Preston Manning and supporters in 1987, Reform was established on the principle of participatory democracy, the belief that citizens should have a greater say in the way their governments run their country. “If we wanted the operations of the federal government and Canadian constitutional relationships to reflect such principles, we had to be consistent in applying them to ourselves,” Manning wrote in a memoir. “We were to be an open, transparent organization in which every member was treated equally and fairly.”

Hence the focus on clean nomination battles. One of the Reform Party’s early classics happened in the riding of Medicine Hat, Alberta, on April 11, 1992. Candidate Monte Solberg can remember stepping off the bus and into the city’s Cypress Centre that evening and being astonished at the number of people at
the convention. Maybe 10,000, all told. Medicine Hat, with a population of about 60,000, is the largest city in southeastern Alberta, and Solberg’s seven fellow nominees included some of the city’s best-known citizens. The president of the Medicine Hat Chamber of Commerce was going for the nomination, as well as the owner of the local VW dealership. The night’s favourite was Kathy Mandeville, a Medicine Hat alderman.

If he was a long shot, Solberg had hustle on his side. None of his competitors, he felt, had such a hardworking group of supporters. Solberg was the manager of the local radio station in Brooks, a town of about 10,000 people located an hour away from Medicine Hat. Solberg’s camp realized the nomination venue of Medicine Hat put them at a disadvantage. A big fish in Medicine Hat would attract more support than a big fish from the small pond of Brooks. So Solberg’s camp did their best to bring Brooks to Medicine Hat: they chartered school buses and packed them full of supporters—150 in all.

In his nomination speech, Solberg did his best to reflect the concerns of the people who’d attended the town hall meetings he’d held in the lead-up to the nomination. “The most important aspect of it was, we want you to represent our views to Ottawa, not the other way around,” Solberg recalled later. “People had just had it. They were really frustrated. So I did my best to channel that … My goal was to make sure
they
understood
I
understood what they were saying, and to convince them I would listen to them.”

Sometime around ten o’clock, the returning officer, Elwin Hermanson, took the microphone to give the results. Solberg 403 votes, Mandeville 400, and a local business executive, David Humphries, a distant third with 97. Solberg was
in the lead, but without the majority required to win. There’d have to be another vote.

Before that happened, one candidate withdrew, then another, leaving the three leaders and three other candidates on the ballot for the second round. Balloons waved. Supporters thrust placards skyward. Outbursts of enthusiasm broke out spontaneously and then faded, and then erupted again elsewhere in the convention centre. Within the hour, Hermanson took the stage a second time to announce the results. Solberg and Mandeville were tied at 456 votes apiece.

Third ballot, two candidates. Now Solberg could see that people were leaving. The rumour went around that they were the distant folks, the folks who had long car rides out of town—or Brooks? Were Solberg’s supporters going home? By the time the third round of voting started, Solberg was exhausted. The ballots disappeared to be counted by Hermanson and his crew, and the place waited. So much was at stake. Solberg thought about his friends, and how much work everyone had put into getting him the nomination. He wanted to win for their sake.

For the third time, Hermanson came out to announce the results. By this time it was almost midnight. Hermanson leaned into the microphone. What did he say, exactly? Solberg couldn’t remember. He remembered only the results—Mandeville 485, Solberg 487.

Solberg 487
. Pandemonium! People pushed Solberg onstage amid a thousand handshakes. “It was utter relief, and joy at the same time,” Solberg said. He gave a mostly incoherent acceptance speech. He was stunned. To win by two votes! He congratulated the other candidates—he could remember doing that.

The buses had made the difference. Yes, some delegates had left before the third ballot, but those turned out to be the Medicine Hat people, people who had their own cars, who could drive home at will. Solberg hadn’t planned it this way, but the Brooks contingent was trapped in the Cypress Centre Auditorium that evening because the buses they’d arrived on weren’t leaving until the ballots yielded a winner.

Solberg went on to take Medicine Hat in the upcoming federal election with 54 percent of the votes, a margin of 14,000. He would run again, and again, winning five consecutive federal elections; in his last run for office, he took 80 percent of the vote. He spent fifteen years as an MP, and three of those as a Cabinet minister for Stephen Harper, before retiring from politics in 2008. And in the years after his victory, when he was in his riding, strangers would come up to him and say: “I was at that nomination meeting. I was there, and I voted for you. It was
my
vote that helped put you over.”

They
remembered
the exciting night in 1992 when Monte Solberg became the Reform Party candidate for Medicine Hat, Alberta. “People would tell me it was the most exciting thing they’d ever been a part of,” Solberg would say later. “It really was a chance to participate in democracy. Those opportunities don’t come along very often. In a lot of parties, nominations are protected, and it’s hard to unseat the incumbent, and there’s lots of things that work against real democracy breaking out. It was all about the excitement of being able to choose a new candidate—and to be a part of the democratic process.”

OPEN AND TRANSPARENT
nominations really can engage people in the democratic process, as the story of Solberg’s nomination
shows. In fact, they exemplify the way many Canadians believe nomination battles work—ideally, an open call for candidates, who then compete for support among the riding’s party members in an election that is overseen by a leadership that takes pains to minimize any bias or perception of favouritism. Idealistic politicos envision the process as being coordinated by the local riding association, which is both the local representation of a political party and the organization charged with identifying, selecting and supporting candidates.

Unfortunately, few nominations take place as Monte Solberg’s did. Time and again during the exit interviews we conducted, without prompting, MPs complained about the nomination processes. We’d initially asked how they got into politics merely to break the ice, and to give them an opportunity to talk about their early lives. Nevertheless, the MPs spent a great deal of time describing how painful and mystifying they found this particular aspect of their entry into politics. They said the nomination process was wild and unpredictable. Nasty. Unclean, and sometimes corrupt. They also said it was opaque—it was difficult for them to discern the rules, and how an ideal nomination process should go. The impression formed from the MPs’ accounts? A political party often regards the nomination process as an inconvenient detour on the way to installing its preferred candidate as the party nominee, rather than as an important process that gives the party’s riding supporters a mechanism to select the candidate they favour. It’s here, in the nomination process, that our MPs first encountered the bullying and controlling behaviour of their parties.