Tragedy in the Commons (9 page)

MPs also must immediately set up and staff at least two offices—one in Ottawa and one or more in the riding—and orient themselves to the labyrinth of Parliament Hill and the federal government writ large. A number of MPs mentioned that they had little or no experience hiring staff and managing an office, and found little support in doing so.
“There are a few areas in which MPs bring very little experience to the Hill [including] how to run an office, how to hire people and how to look for [particular] skills,” observed Marlene Catterall.

Even MPs with prior experience in provincial or municipal government found the initial weeks and months difficult. Penny Priddy, for instance, who’d previously served as a municipal councillor and a provincial Cabinet minister in B.C., said it was “incredibly difficult” to get started operationally. “There was just so much that I didn’t know. I was very frustrated at not being up and running as quickly as I thought I should be, which of course is always yesterday,” she said.

In the end, many MPs simply accepted that there was just no way to be prepared for day one as a Member of Parliament. “Well, I think we all did rather well. But were we prepared?” asked an NDP MP from Winnipeg, Bill Blaikie. “No, I don’t think there is any school for preparation for being a Member of Parliament.” Muskoka Liberal Andy Mitchell agreed: “If you could arrive at Parliament knowing the way it works and all of those things, then you [would] be more productive from day one. But that’s theoretical; it’s never going to happen that way.”

Instead, the MPs acknowledged that the learning curve was daunting, and that the only way forward was to learn by doing. “In the first days of Reform, the big class of ’93, our learning curve was vertical,” recalls B.C. MP Jim Gouk. “Literally, we had nobody to tell us anything. Plus, [even from] the little that people could tell us—we were down there to try it differently. So we made lots of mistakes.” Likewise, Liberal MP Roger Galloway said: “It takes time to figure out
how it works … and [to figure out] what I want to do here. What can I do here? You don’t do that in a month, or a year. It’s an evolution over time.”

THE FAMILIES OF
MPs are of course tossed into the fray as well. Galloway left behind a wife and four young children in the Sarnia area when he first went to Ottawa as an MP in 1993, and he made the weekly commute to Ottawa and back for the five-or-so months a year that Parliament is in session. “It’s not the big events you miss at home, being away,” Galloway said. “It’s the day-to-day rhythm that’s affected.”

The challenge for the families of commuting MPs is even greater than missing out on that daily rhythm of family life. What came through in our interviews was the personal sacrifice that serving as a federal politician also entails, particularly when considering the strains on relationships with spouses, children and other loved ones. Galloway noted that his four children occasionally bore the brunt of his public profile in snide comments from others, including their teachers. “It’s tough for the kids,” Galloway said. “Because old people make comments about your father.… All of a sudden you are in the public eye.”

The personal cost of political life was a subject that recurred again and again in the interviews, unbidden. And it was through such references to the strains that political life brought to MPs’ families and friends that we began to appreciate what a sacrifice MPs were making—the grinding commutes, the missed birthdays, abbreviated family vacations and declined social invitations, the inevitable tension in personal relationships.

A paper about MPs’ difficulty in achieving a work-life balance, co-authored by Alison Loat and political scientists Royce Koop and James Farney, mentions the high toll of political life on family life. It cites the consideration, chronicled in Steve Paikin’s
The Dark Side
and much discussed elsewhere, that many MPs will either be divorced or will have done serious damage to their marriages by the end of their political careers.

“The time away from your family is a lot,” said Blair Wilson, an MP from B.C. “I look at some of these people who just got elected and have young families and you don’t realize what you are missing. So that is why we should give them even more support because that’s what they’re giving up to represent us.”

“It’s very hard for a woman,” said the Conservative MP for Saskatoon–Rosetown–Biggar, Carol Skelton. “I find that I don’t know how people with young children do it. I really don’t. When I was down there, I was worried about my kids, and they’re all older.” Skelton had three grown children and credits the tolerance and support of her husband, Noel, a farmer, with allowing her to pursue the job as she did. “He was very understanding and put up with a lot, because you’re gone all the time,” Skelton said. “He was the full-time farmer, and we had livestock, so he didn’t come to Ottawa. When I did come home, it was also very busy. I really missed those years with my family because of the distance between Ottawa and Saskatchewan.”

Parliamentarians who had to commute to Newfoundland or B.C., or northern ridings, described gruelling schedules. And whether an MP had grown or young children, or any children at all, tended to affect the extent of the personal sacrifice. “I always considered myself fortunate,” said Liberal MP
for Etobicoke North, Roy Cullen. “My house was close to the airport, so I could be on a six o’clock flight out of Ottawa and I’d actually be in my home at quarter to eight. Where some of these people have to travel, I don’t know how they do it … If you have a young family and the wife’s not working and you’re living in B.C., I mean, frankly I don’t know how they cope.”

And even though air travel made it possible to come home most weekends and the weeks were busy, downtime in Ottawa could sometimes be hard to fill. Rick Casson from Lethbridge made a few notes before his interview to remind himself of what he wanted to say. “I wrote down ‘important.’ Because I do feel that being a Member of Parliament is very important … but one other word I wrote down is ‘lonely,’ because it can be pretty damn lonely down there.… There are a lot of nights when you are alone in the apartment and that’s it. The first year I stayed in a hotel, it was absolutely horrific.… Getting an apartment was the best thing to do, and then Jeanene retired after about five years, so that made a hell of a lot of difference. Having her come down was great, it would give you something to look forward to, to go home. But other than that, you leave the office at 7 p.m. to go home; what the hell do you do? That’s where guys get in trouble, if they don’t go home. That’s when they get in trouble.”

SO HOW DID
Gary Merasty fare in a workplace that provides little orientation and less work-life balance? Although a newcomer to Parliament, recall that Merasty was an experienced political operator, previously serving as a two-term grand chief of the Indian peoples of central and northern Saskatchewan, 34,000 in all, who points to his having
expanded the programs offered by the band he governed from $28 million to $52 million in the six years he served as chief. He also recalled his response while a grand chief to a statistic used by the federal government that indicated it would take twenty-eight years for testing results of First Nations kids to catch up to the Canadian average. His band government began collecting its own statistics. For example, Merasty directed his staff to begin tracking graduation rates at the fifteen high schools under the Grand Council’s purview. In 1998 they discovered that only 34 percent of the students graduated from grade 12. As a former teacher himself, Merasty made it his mission to raise the rate, and six years later, the graduation rate had risen to 92 percent. Merasty was a savvy operator, an adept politician accustomed to succeeding at problems other people found intractable.

And yet in Ottawa, even he found it difficult to hit the ground running. Even he felt overwhelmed. Like many new MPs, Merasty scheduled his first visit to Ottawa after the election to coincide with the Liberal Party’s first caucus meeting. He arrived and received his office assignment from the party whip—room 714 in the Confederation Building. He slowly found his way there, passing many other people wearing similarly lost expressions.

The work began immediately and the workdays proved intense—day-long House sessions, committee meetings with fellow MPs, meetings with constituents and associations, fulfilling party duties and trying to stay on top of correspondence. Though their workdays are full, most MPs generally attend fewer sessions in the House of Commons than many citizens realize: typically, they’re in the House only for
Question Period, votes and a few hours of weekly House Duty, as assigned to them by their party whips.

And for Merasty, a change of priorities was in order. He’d gone in expecting the Liberals to form the government. But Paul Martin’s party won only 103 seats to the 124 taken by Stephen Harper’s Conservatives; the Liberals were relegated to the other side of the house. That forced Merasty to reconsider his goals. “Our goal in opposition was to take the government to task on aboriginal issues and I knew them inside and out,” Merasty recalls. “Two was to educate my own party about the aboriginal issues and three was, what can we do to increase the aboriginal vote?”

Even then, when he arrived, he found he was absorbed less by grand strategies than by the nitty-gritty details that consume many people when they start a new job. What support would he need to succeed? Whom would he hire to staff his office? How many? And how much should he pay them? The questions seemed insurmountable. “I didn’t have a clear idea of what type of person I should hire to run my office. What are their day-to-day tasks?” Merasty recalled wondering.

What saved him was a thirteen-page letter circulated by Paul Szabo, by then a veteran Liberal MP. The thirteen pages were chock full of advice expressly intended as a public service to assist freshmen MPs like Merasty. Did he wonder about staffing offices? Szabo had thought of that: “Most MPs have four or five staff split between Ottawa and their constituency office,” his letter explains. “I personally have only one office assistant in Ottawa and three persons in the riding to do constituency work at a total cost of less than $170,000 [.…] There are no votes for you in Ottawa and therefore your best staff should be in the
riding to take care of the needs of your constituents.… The best thing you can do is make sure you have at least two solid people in the riding and a comfortable, spacious, well-equipped office.”

Szabo’s advice was detailed, pragmatic and succinct. He also gave Merasty some advice in person. As Merasty recalled it: “Nobody will coach you because they are all competing to be in Cabinet at some point or have this appointment later on and so everyone is clawing up. So you have to trust your team—but be aware of that dynamic.… be aware of the partisanship, and just be true to yourself.”

The guidance was just what Merasty needed. Also helpful was the fact that the only other Liberal MP from Saskatchewan was a high-ranking party member, the former finance minister and Liberal House leader Ralph Goodale.

On Merasty’s first day as a sitting parliamentarian—April 3, 2006—the first substantive order of business saw the most veteran sitting member of the House, the NDP MP from the riding of Elmwood–Transcona, Bill Blaikie, presiding over the election of the Speaker of the House—Liberal MP Peter Milliken. And as Merasty watched the proceedings, he was awed.

He still sounds awestruck as he recalls the first time he rose as an MP and addressed the House. “It was really one of those moments in life that you always remember—at least for me it certainly was—the chance to be able to rise in Canada’s Parliament and to speak directly to my constituents and to Canadians and of course, you take the opportunity to thank the folks that helped you arrive there; whether they be your campaign team, whether it be your family, it’s important to recognize nobody arrives in Parliament by themselves. They arrive as a part of a team. They arrive as a result of the efforts of
others. They are there because their family is supporting them to be there. So it was an important thing to do that as well. It was an exciting moment.… When you say something in the House it’s there forever. It’s in Hansard forever. A hundred years from now, not that anybody will, but if somebody so chose—my great-great-great-grandchild might decide, ‘Hey, I didn’t know my great-great-great-grandfather was in Parliament. Let me just look something up here.’ And it’s there.”

Merasty received committee assignments for aboriginal affairs and agriculture. He became the Liberal Party’s associate critic on Indian Affairs. He attacked the Conservative government’s apparent apathy concerning the Kelowna Accord, the 2005 agreement between Paul Martin’s federal government, provincial and territorial premiers, and First Nations leaders.

But Merasty said his biggest success on the First Nations front concerned residential schools, the educational institutions that from 1874 until the mid-1970s had forcibly separated aboriginal children from their families and communities and placed them in the care of religious institutions, where many of them were sexually and physically abused; many more were subject to overcrowded conditions, substandard sanitation and poor health care that made them susceptible to such diseases as tuberculosis. A legal settlement that provided funds to approximately 86,000 residential school survivors was in the process of being approved by provincial and territorial courts throughout 2006 and into 2007. The compensation was monetary; it didn’t involve any government apology. This irked Merasty, whose mother was a residential school survivor, as were relatives and friends. “I know the history,” Merasty told us. “I know that hundreds,
if not thousands, of kids died in these residential schools, buried in snowbanks until the ground thawed in the summer until they could be buried in unmarked graves that we still don’t know where they are.” Merasty referred to his relatives the first time he stood up in the House to ask the government for an apology, on November 7, 2006. “On behalf of my mother, my aunts, my uncles and my community, when will the prime minister offer a simple human apology to the survivors of the residential school?” he asked.