Tragedy in the Commons (8 page)

According to Merasty, the First Nations vote went up by 25 percent over previous elections. Merasty was the first full-status aboriginal person from the province of Saskatchewan to make it to the House of Commons. It had been a bumpy ride (literally!): a last-minute nomination, a gruelling election campaign, a contested result. He’d survived one roller coaster, only to find that another lay ahead.

AFTER ANY FEDERAL ELECTION
, roughly a third of our Members of Parliament arrive on the steps of Parliament’s Centre Block as rookies. They emerge victorious from an often-difficult nomination battle and general election campaign. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds, and bring with them a diverse set of experiences and motives, but unlike Merasty, they often arrive with little—if any—experience in elected office or in the context of national public life.

How did these self-described accidental politicians feel once they first arrived in Ottawa? And how did they navigate those initial weeks and months in office? We hadn’t expected our MPs’ vivid recollections of nomination battles so long ago fought, and we were just as surprised by their tales of the rude awakening that greeted them in Ottawa.

Virtually all the MPs we interviewed remembered feeling, immediately, two powerful emotions. First, they were
filled with awe for the institution of Parliament and its history, and for the opportunity to serve, believing that they were part of something important and ready for the challenge. And then there was a double take at being left to fend for themselves.

Take Marlene Catterall, a teacher and former Ottawa city councillor who became a Liberal MP in 1988, representing the riding of Ottawa West. When Catterall walked into the House of Commons for the first time, she looked around at the oak panelling, the ceiling painted with the provincial emblems, the stained glass windows at which so many other federal politicians had also gazed, and she thought, “What a great country they’ve given us.” What a great country—and she felt what others had felt: the call to continue that greatness, to make sure it was a better country once she left the House of Commons. “To be one of only 308 people chosen from the entire population of this country,” she thought. “How much more of an honour could you possibly have?”

“It’s awe-inspiring,” recalled Art Hanger, a former Calgary policeman turned Reform MP who first went to the House of Commons in 1993. “This is no frivolous position that you have.… It’s ultra-important, you’re representing the people of this nation and you have a responsibility, a substantial responsibility, and you’d better do it right.”

Many MPs shared similar sentiments. “All I can say is, very exciting,” recalled Victoria Liberal David Anderson, first elected in 1968. “We were all ushered in, and there was Trudeau. It was tremendous. It’s a beautiful room. The carving, the velvet drapery, it’s a beautiful room.”

While the sense of responsibility and history inspired them, the MPs were startled to find how little help there was for
them after they arrived. It felt a little duplicitous, this aspect of the political career. The party that, in many cases, had pleaded with the candidates to run in the election, approved their nominations and whose logos adorned their lawn signs, now was proving itself anything but supportive. In fact, with the MPs now firmly positioned in their political careers, and almost trapped in Ottawa, the parties (no matter which one) repeatedly showed themselves to be apathetic about how the newcomers fared in nearly all aspects of their jobs. Except for one: how they vote. During the first few days in Ottawa, MPs experience their first inkling that the party doesn’t value them as much as they’d thought. It’s at this point that new MPs realize they’re on their own—and sometimes painfully so.

Following the 1993 election, over 72 percent of the MPs were rookies, the largest class of freshman MPs in modern Canadian history. Audiences tuning in to the evening news were treated to an indelible symbol of their bewilderment, as a CTV camera crew followed Reform MP Myron Thompson through his first day of the parliamentary session. Born in the United States, Thompson had tried out for the New York Yankees and served in the U.S. Army before moving to Canada in 1968. He had been a teacher, a school principal and the mayor of his town before becoming the MP for the Wild Rose riding in southwestern Alberta. At one point that first day on Parliament Hill he set down his briefcase in the House of Commons, removed some papers and then became distracted. A bit later, as he was about to leave the Chamber, he picked up the same briefcase and all his papers went flying—he’d forgotten to close the clasp. The same day, with the camera crew still tagging along, Thompson was heading from one
parliamentary building to another when a shuttle bus drove up alongside him and the driver leaned out to offer him a ride. “I was looking at [the driver] and I stepped off the curb and didn’t see what was there, and I stumbled and nearly broke my neck,” Thompson recalls. “Of course I was the main feature on the news that night.”

Thompson’s pratfalls publicly illustrated how many other MPs felt. “I was so frightened when I won,” recalls Colleen Beaumier, a Liberal MP who, like Thompson, also went to the House for the first time in 1993. “When I got there we had our orientation and I sat on the steps of the Peace Tower, and Paul Szabo [also newly elected] came out and said, ‘Colleen, what are you crying for? We’ve been wanting this for years.’ And I said, ‘No, this isn’t something I always wanted. Such beautiful people supported me and I’m going to disappoint them.’ ”

Fear of failure and lack of confidence are typical for freshmen MPs in Canada, as they apparently are in Britain, where the Parliamentary Library’s most-borrowed book is the instructional manual for new politicians:
How To Be an MP
. The fact that some Canadian MPs had never even visited Parliament before intensified their initial insecurity. “The learning curve was steep,” recalls Blair Wilson, who began sitting in 2006 as a Liberal MP, and who, after allegations of omissions on his nomination application, finished his time in Parliament as a member of the Green Party. “I learned quickly but I have to say that I knew very little about how the actual mechanism of Ottawa worked. I had never been there.… The very first time I walked up to the door of the House of Commons was after I was elected as a Member of Parliament.”

Rick Casson, the former MP for Lethbridge, Alberta, a safe Conservative seat, remembers talking to his wife about what he’d just gotten them into as they drove home from his nomination victory. “Jeanene and I had a couple of conversations after we won the nomination.… I said: ‘What the hell are we doing now?’ And she said: ‘Well, I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out.’ So the night after we got elected for the general election, [we] said the same thing … we had no idea,” he recalled. He’d been involved in politics municipally, so knew how things worked in southern Alberta. But Ottawa? Not so much. “We didn’t have anything to do with the federal government,” he said. “Our MLA would come and see us once or twice a year. But the MP? Never.”

Fredericton Liberal and Cabinet member Andy Scott admitted to feeling “overwhelmed” when he first sat in the House of Commons, and “naïve.” He connected the feeling to another attitude we mentioned earlier, saying, “I grew up modestly and never aspired to any of this stuff. I wasn’t one of those people who was thinking about this when I was twelve.” (Andy Scott died in June 2013 at the age of 58.)

The new parliamentarians’ adjustment to public life was made more difficult by the dearth of structured orientation to help them acclimatize to their new roles. At an orientation day conducted by parliamentary staff after the election and before the first day the House sits, the bare necessities, such as how to file expenses, are explained. But most of the MPs we interviewed felt the orientation was nowhere near sufficient. “You get there, they take you in the House, they give you a book [on] constituency rights and responsibilities, the former Speaker talks about being in the House, and that’s it,” said the
late Reg Alcock, a Winnipeg-area Liberal MP first elected in 1993. “There’s no orientation. There is no training. There is nothing on how to be effective.”

The political parties certainly didn’t offer much by way of support. Rick Casson, an Alberta MP first elected in 1997 in the second wave of Reform MPs, found his initial days jolting. “The biggest surprise that I had when I went down there after being elected through the Reform Party was the total … I had some ideas about this big, well-greased machine [but] it was chaos. It was crazy,” he said. “I don’t know what it would have been like in ’93, when they all went down there. I went there in ’97, and at least they had a few years under the belt. But, as far as being new and thinking that somehow, there’s going to be some leadership or that someone is going to take you by the hand or whatever, there was none of that.… You are on your own.”

Whatever preparation the new parliamentarians did manage was largely ad hoc and really began only once they arrived in Ottawa. “You learn by the seat of your pants,” observed Claudette Bradshaw, a Liberal from New Brunswick. “I was always amazed at how people go into it without having done any kind of homework,” said the NDP’s Penny Priddy. And Myron Thompson argued that by the time MPs arrived in Ottawa, it was already too late. “[Orientation] should take place long before the election.… Find out what the heck you’re getting into before you ever decide to run,” he said.

Marlene Catterall observed that there was no opportunity to set goals or develop a plan. “It would be very wise to have someone encourage you to sit down at the beginning and say, ‘Okay, what is it you want to accomplish?’ It is such a busy life, you just tend to jump in and keep swimming. You should
almost have to go on a retreat to think through what it is you want to accomplish,” she said.

Many MPs sought informal advice and mentorship, but found that even that wasn’t always helpful. “You’re getting tugged in every which way by different advice, so it was pretty confusing when we were first there,” said Toronto Liberal MP Bill Graham. Even more experienced parliamentarians weren’t always able to provide direction. Catherine Bell recalled asking for advice from a colleague. “He said, ‘I don’t know; I’ve been here for three years and I really don’t know.’ And I thought, ‘Gosh.… It takes a long time to learn things.’ ”

Some found their fellow MPs less than supportive. “Guys are really protective of their knowledge because of the ladder climbers; they won’t share and … they don’t want you to become as smart as they think they are. Even in the same party. If I have a little more information than you, then I got a better chance,” Casson said.

One exception to this overall lack of guidance was that of the new Bloc Québécois MPs to whom we spoke, most of whom were assigned a party mentor upon their arrival. They were grateful for the help. “I had a good MP as a mentor,” said Alain Boire, a Bloc MP for Beauharnois–Salaberry. “He had been there for a long time.… I asked for his advice often. I didn’t even know that when the bell rang I was supposed to enter the Chamber. I didn’t know that; I didn’t know anything.” However, the Bloc’s mentoring program seemed not to be universal, since other Bloc MPs explicitly mentioned that they would have benefited from mentorship.

Only a few MPs said they spent time learning parliamentary rules and procedure. “Robert’s Rules of Order, all those
books were there, I read them, I learned them, I sat and watched other people, and I didn’t participate much in the beginning. I really just absorbed,” said Liberal MP Sue Barnes. Meanwhile, her fellow MP, David Anderson, pointed out that it was rare for his colleagues to engage in that kind of preparation. “Next to nobody knows the rules of the House,” Anderson said.

Even apart from the rules, many newcomers claimed to have had little or no knowledge of the methods, traditions or culture of Parliament. This was particularly the case for those elected as members of the Reform Party. “Fifty-one of us went and didn’t know a damned thing about the House of Commons.… [We were like] deer in the headlights,” admitted Randy White, a member of the initial group of Reform MPs.

Many soon realized they had no sense of the complex rules and processes—both written and unwritten—of Parliament Hill, or how to navigate a place where so many divergent personalities and issues come together. It was difficult to see the pattern. For some, the challenge came from the realization that they lacked a broad knowledge of the country and its regional idiosyncrasies. “I was naïve, thinking this place has three hundred people and that they can all work together on global problems.… That wasn’t the case at all,” said White.

Many had moments not unlike that described by Barry Campbell, a backbench MP who sat as a rookie in the 35th Parliament of 1993. “We were First Nations, new Canadians, Ph.D.s, historians, teachers, store clerks, former CEOs, lawyers, yes, but also a convicted criminal, and, I would soon discover, the mentally certifiable,” Campbell wrote in an adroit series for the
Walrus
about his experience as an MP in 2008. “For some, this was the best job they’d ever had; for others,
it would be the worst. For some, the parliamentary salary was the most money they had ever earned; for others, the least. There were single mothers and divorced fathers.… It was a community gathering, a microcosm of Canada.”

Said Liberal MP Andy Mitchell, “You tend to understand where you come from really well, and you think of reality through that prism. All of a sudden you are in Parliament. You are working with men and women from right across the country, who all come from a different prism.” Others mentioned being overwhelmed by the volume of work and the range of policy files they had to understand, usually very quickly. “Despite all the people that advised me, I had no clue as to what I was getting myself into … the biggest surprises were the demands placed upon you. There weren’t enough hours in a day. There never would be,” said Liberal MP Paul Macklin.

The extent of this pressure should not be a surprise; following an election, federal politicians begin work almost immediately after the ballots are counted and little time remains for orientation or acclimatization. On top of it all, there are the logistical challenges. For many parliamentarians, Ottawa is an unfamiliar city, often a long flight away from friends and family, and they need to find a place to live and sort out family arrangements.