Tragedy in the Commons (7 page)

Such strategies can limit political office to those with time and energy to persuade people to sign up, or to those with financial means; for example, many candidates need to take time off to run.

When asked to comment on the nomination process, one MP volunteered that the process can cost a lot of money—for a different reason. “Personally?” we asked. “Oh, absolutely,” the MP replied. “Who do you think pays for these memberships? Please, give me a break. You know politicians, when they get caught [buying memberships], say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know.’ Well if they didn’t know then they’re bloody stupid. And this will continue to happen all the time with this system.”

Our MPs drew attention to discrepancies between federal election rules and party nomination rules. In federal elections, voters must be eighteen years of age, but in some nomination races, younger teenagers had memberships and cast ballots. The younger demographic may have played a role in the
nomination win of former high school principal Charles Hubbard, the Liberal MP for Miramichi from 1993 to 2008. His nomination meeting attracted four thousand people and lasted ten or eleven hours. He won on the fourth ballot. “We had thousands of so-called Liberal members,” Hubbard said. “In fact, for this constituency, it was in excess of twenty thousand people who could have come. Memberships were free and just about everybody over fourteen years of age was signed up.”

MPs also wondered about how nomination battles were affected by exploitation of identity and category politics, including the power wielded by religious institutions, ethnic groups and single-issue lobbies. Several felt that citizens were subject to manipulation by figures of influence within the party association. In some cases there were stories of groups of people being bussed in from other ridings on the day of the convention, solely to vote for a specific candidate. Citizens were often simply corralled for the event and asked only to sign up for a party membership, show up and vote for their candidate. They were not asked to contribute to the party’s discussions in any meaningful way. “The part I found troubling was creating instant supporters,” said Pat O’Brien, a former Liberal and independent MP for the riding of London–Fanshawe. “There were people who would come for one night to a party function, support the candidate of their choice, and not come again.”

This, together with the way ethnic communities are engaged in politics in some parts of the country, left MPs feeling very uncomfortable. Bonnie Brown, the Oakville-area Liberal MP, described how it worked. “It’s easier to raise money if you have an ethnic group,” she said. “You’re in a competition … and that Greek guy … when it comes time to raise money or to
sell memberships, he goes around to all the Greek restaurants and Greek businesses and he gives—he just hands the owner say twenty-five membership forms,” she said. He doesn’t need to give any instruction—the business owners just know they want their guy in Parliament to represent their views, she said.

Brown described how candidates used fundraisers to curry favour with party leaders. She described one young man, an aspiring MP whose father raised the money his son needed and sent it to the party leader. “Oh, he won a nomination, oh, surprise! And now [he] can raise money so easily because his dad is a big wheel in [his] community,” Brown said.

It’s true that in some cases the party didn’t meddle, or wasn’t present at all. And some individuals opted to disregard direct orders from federal party headquarters and got away with it. We’ve already mentioned Liberal John Godfrey, for instance, who had in the months leading up to the 1993 election been campaigning in Markham–Whitchurch-Stouffville and not really getting anywhere. When he heard that the Liberal candidate in Don Valley West was stepping down, he called a party advisor and asked whether he could transfer his candidacy to Don Valley West. The advisor told him to wait until the leader returned from holiday. “I said, uh uh, I am not going to wait. I am just going to do this,” Godfrey said. “I will ask your permission afterwards.… We got the hell out of Markham–Whitchurch-Stouffville, jumped over [to Don Valley West] and started signing up members,” he said. So while the other potential candidates poked around, exploring the potential of a candidacy, Godfrey and his wife were selling memberships. Enough, eventually, to deter any competition.

“We started setting up memberships while the party was
still exploring possible candidates,” said Godfrey. “I sold enough memberships to scare off others.… I didn’t ask permission of Mr. Chrétien to run. I just said I am doing it.” Godfrey ended up getting himself elected as the MP for Don Valley West, which he represented for the next fifteen years until his retirement from politics in 2010.

CRITICISM OF THE
nomination process was strikingly common among participants in the Samara exit interviews—and they were the people who had navigated it successfully. We cringe to imagine what those who were less successful might say. When it’s the winner of a race who complains about the rules of the competition, that competition itself could certainly benefit from greater scrutiny.

The nomination process should be a chance to closely explore and debate issues that are important to the community that the candidates hope to serve in Ottawa. A few MPs mentioned positive aspects of the nomination process: it was a practice round for the actual election, and it helped challenge and polish the contenders’ views. A few others pointed out that nomination races, which by their nature tend to be contested among people with similar values, allowed candidates to explore finer details of community issues and policies, exchanging ideas with each other and with local party members.

But at its worst, the nomination process is a manifestation of the negative perceptions that people tend to have of politics—an opaque, manipulative and even cruel game that turns both citizens and candidates away from the democratic process. The process can be confusing, mysterious and inconsistent. As many Canadians suspect, the inner workings are
subject to manipulation by riding associations, the national leadership of a party and local groups.

So what measures could improve things? A greater respect for the nomination process on the part of political parties, for one. More opportunities for genuine input from party local members. Fewer parachuted-in candidates. More transparency from the central party and local associations on how nominations run, and how citizens can participate. More advance notice of the contests, with clear processes, preferably outlined online for anyone to see, explaining how to become a candidate. More opportunities for new members to engage with the concerns of the party they’ve just joined. More nomination battles that are truly contested at the riding level, and fewer that are controlled by the parties’ interests. In sum, more nomination battles that resemble Monte Solberg’s, and fewer that resemble Omar Alghabra’s. Respecting the democratic component of the nomination process means recognizing that the process itself is a valuable and important way to engage citizens in the business of running their country.

A good nomination has the power to inspire. It provides a sense of investment in the successful candidate and ownership of the position he or she occupies, as Monte Solberg’s constituents were proud to have experienced. A well-run nomination battle is excellent marketing for politics itself. Few processes in politics provide such an opportunity to attract newcomers. The parties need to recognize that the opposite also holds true: nothing repels newcomers to the arena more than a nomination process that feels murky or shady, a poignant acknowledgment that even in Canada’s democracy, politics can be little more than a backroom game.

CHAPTER THREE

… Into the Fire

T
he idiosyncratic nomination process is only the first of several difficult rites of passage in a prospective MP’s journey to Parliament Hill. Especially for the first-time candidate, the campaign can be gruelling. And the learning curve facing every rookie MP presents its own set of challenges. Among the many MPs who offered us insight into both passages was Gary Merasty, from the Pelican Narrows Indian Reserve in northeastern Saskatchewan. Merasty belonged to the reserve’s first generation for whom post-secondary education was considered an option. Born in 1964, the stocky and spectacled full-status member of the Cree Nation played hockey for a year after high school, took an industrial mechanics course and then worked for three years at a mine in Flin Flon, just over the Manitoba border. Then he went to the University of Saskatchewan for a Bachelor of Education degree, and returned home to teach in Pelican Narrows. He taught for seven years, and then turned his attention to politics, becoming a well-regarded two-term grand chief of the Prince Albert Grand Council.

Federal politics beckoned in 2005. The federal Liberal party had been cultivating Merasty as a potential candidate for
some time. They even took the extraordinary step of bringing to Ottawa all the chiefs Merasty represented as grand chief so that Prime Minister Paul Martin could reassure them of the good that Merasty could do in the federal government. The measure won the chiefs’ support, and on December 2, Merasty was acclaimed as his riding’s Liberal nominee. Election day was less than two months away, on January 23, 2006.

Merasty’s riding of Desnethé–Missinippi–Churchill River is almost as large as Germany. It encompasses the whole of Saskatchewan’s northern half. To campaign, Merasty drove through early winter’s blowing snow and over black ice, cruising across the arrow-straight rural roads in a Toyota 4Runner with his wife, Brenda, and his campaign manager, Bonnie Leask. And then he set out on his strategy: he thought of his riding as 70 percent aboriginal and 30 percent non-aboriginal. He was battling a Conservative incumbent. Not an aboriginal. Thanks to the goodwill Merasty had built up as a grand chief, he had the advantage. If, that is, everyone who was eligible to cast a ballot turned out to vote.

The problem, as Merasty knew, was that First Nations tended not to vote in federal and provincial elections. “The 30 percent non-aboriginal show up to vote in high numbers, typically, and the aborginals don’t,” he explained. His challenge? Mobilize the 70 percent.

Merasty knew that the tribal council elections on the province’s reserves could attract voter participation rates of 95 percent. They
participated
in the democratic process. They just didn’t participate in federal democracy. “It’s not that they’re not political,” said Merasty. “It’s just the relevance—they didn’t feel the federal government was relevant to them.”
Nor did they feel the federal government was particularly sympathetic to their problems. And there were others, like Merasty’s own mother, who could remember needing the federal government’s permission to leave the reserve; it was 1960 before the federal government had even granted Status Indians the unconditional right to vote.

So how to make federal politics matter to the aboriginals of northern Saskatchewan? Merasty started with Pelican Narrows, where typically only a couple of hundred voted out of the fifteen hundred who were eligible. “Your vote matters,” he told them. “Only 15–20 percent of you are voting. But First Nations could decide the outcome.”

The populace was too sparsely distributed for Merasty to reach everyone. He relied on contacting the movers and shakers on each reserve, then trusted them to distribute his message to everyone else. One typical visit happened at Cumberland House in northeastern Saskatchewan, where Merasty sat down with Chief Lorne Stewart and his tribal council.

“You try and convince them that the role of an MP and MLA is important and it helps shape the future and their participation in the future,” he said. At community gatherings in school gyms, Merasty took questions from the audience. “Why should we worry about voting,” one man asked, “when we don’t have jobs?” Another said, “Who cares about voting—get us some more housing. Our houses are too crowded.” The gist of what Merasty heard was that voting is a waste of time.

“I agree—government has not been helpful,” Merasty responded. “You see the evidence of that when you see twenty people living in a three-bedroom house. And when the educational spending on a First Nations child is one-third less than
what it is elsewhere in the province.” But if the First Nations turned out to vote, Merasty said, they could elect one of their own to represent them. And if Merasty made it to Ottawa, then he’d work
inside
the system to try to fix those problems. “I don’t dispute the problems you’re mentioning,” Merasty said at Cumberland House. “But the power of your vote is loud.”

In reserve community centres, in school gyms, huddled into tiny kitchens, Merasty repeated his message. What he remembers most about that period is the darkness. It would start to get dark around four in the afternoon, and once he finished delivering his message it was back into the 4Runner for another long drive through the dark and the cold to the next reservation town, where he’d do it all again. He campaigned in places where no one had ever campaigned before—places the other candidates thought too small, places everyone else dismissed because the Indians didn’t vote anyway. During the eight-week campaign he and his wife and campaign manager put 30,000 kilometres on their SUV.

That last week Merasty reminded his supporters: Get out. Vote. Bring government-issued photo ID, and if you don’t have that, then bring three pieces of mail. The week before the election, it was minus 38 degrees Celsius, but luckily election day was positively balmy—the mercury actually topped zero. That evening, when the polls closed, Merasty was in Creighton, just down the road from Flin Flon, watching the television at RJ’s Motel. The numbers were close. Merasty led, he trailed, he led, and when the tally finally came in, he had won by 10,225 to 10,119, a margin of just 106 votes. The Conservative incumbent, Jeremy Harrison, challenged the result, alleging, among other things, that the Ahtahkakoop First Nation had
staged a raffle for a television on election night, in a gambit designed to get out the vote. Another alleged irregularity involved a box of ballots that had somehow ended up being used as insulation for the grill of a pick-up truck. After a judge-ordered recount, Merasty held on to his victory, albeit with the margin narrowed to sixty-seven votes.