Tragedy in the Commons (18 page)

“[Caucus] was probably the most stimulating part of my career,” said Liberal MP Roy Cullen. “When I got to Ottawa, I went to my first caucus meeting and the debate was so intense I turned to a colleague and said, ‘Is it always like this?’ ”

Despite the intensity of the exchanges, however, some MPs were dissatisfied by the little control they had over the process that turned the “variance of opinion” voiced during caucus meetings into the official party line. “You discuss and discuss and discuss, but there’s no consensus. But the leader has to leave for the media scrum … and so he would say, ‘We’re going to make a consensus on this, this and this. All agreed?’ We didn’t have time to discuss it. And that’s ‘consensus,’ ” said Bloc MP Odina Desrochers.

“I have often compared it to a family,” said former Liberal MP Marlene Catterall of a party’s caucus. In 2001
Catterall became Ottawa’s first female chief whip, and played that role for more than two years in the Chrétien government, in addition to serving six years as deputy whip. “We could have all the discussions we want about where we are going on holidays this year. But once the family makes a decision, the family is going together on a holiday.”

To Catterall, the good functioning of the whip is integral to the operation of a healthy caucus. “You try, and let people know that you are trying to make sure that they have a role they can play that is important to them, and they can make a real contribution through their committee work,” Catterall said. “That is for starters. Secondly you listen to them when they have a concern about something coming to the House, and you see if there is any way of accommodating what they are concerned about.

“I happen to feel I have had the experience of working in a very democratic caucus,” Catterall added. “When we were in government, there was something I wanted to accomplish, something I wanted to get done. And the first question from the senior policy advisor was, do you have caucus onside? Because if you can have caucus onside you can have just about anything, and if you don’t, it’s a tough sell. And that says to me a lot about the importance of caucus to [Prime Minister Chrétien].

“From then on, any time I wanted to do something, any time I wanted the minister to change his or her mind about something, that’s what I did, whether it was the local Eastern Ontario caucus, Ontario caucus, the women’s caucus, the particular policy committee of caucus. I worked it because I knew that was what would get the minister and the prime
minister onside.” Or as Liberal MP Ken Boshcoff put it, “The route to change is through the internal caucus system.”

“Some of it is quite formal,” recalled Conservative MP Chuck Strahl. “When you have major initiatives you actually have a group that you talk to before you mention a big important initiative. So if you are agriculture minister, you will have a group of agriculture-invested caucus members, maybe a dozen of them or twenty of them even, and you are expected to meet with them once a month. You talk to them and then move ahead on changes—to the Wheat Board, for example. ‘Are you guys okay with that?’ ‘Does anybody see a problem with that?’ So actually it’s quite formal. You are expected to do that [consult]—and if you don’t do it, often you won’t be allowed to bring [a proposal] to Cabinet. You are expected to tell people at Cabinet level what the caucus thinks about it. [The process is] quite formal, and actually to the point where, if you can’t check that box, if you can’t say, ‘I have talked to my support group or my internal group,’ if you say, ‘Oh, I just forgot to do that this time,’—they will say, ‘Well, bring it back next month—you are off the agenda.’ So in our party, at least, it was quite formal and quite strict. You either could display caucus support or you could not bring it forward.”

Backbench MPs could affect policy in informal ways, Strahl added. “At every moment of every caucus meeting, Question Period—[even] time when you’re sitting alone in your thoughts—caucus members are not shy about buttonholing you as a minister to tell you what you should be doing.… There is a lot of ongoing consultation. Some of it is formal letters and stuff, but backbench MPs on the government side have many opportunities every week to bend the ear of ministers on
whatever they want, and so you just have to be available.… You are just there and they have complete access to you, there is no running away and if they want a meeting, a more formal meeting—you are expected to do that as well. [Because] no minister wants to be in the room when somebody gets up to a microphone, and says to the prime minister, ‘I just can’t seem to get a meeting with that agriculture minister.’ I mean, that is a bad moment; you just do not want that, because that is a career-limiting move. That is how serious that is. If your reputation is you are not approachable, and the prime minister hears about it a few times …? You can have walking papers.”

One case study that reflects the organic but no less effective nature of caucus fomentation and action is the story of the late ’90s post-secondary education caucus that existed within the Chrétien government. By 1997–98, Paul Martin’s cuts in federal government spending had helped turned the feds’ budget deficit into a $3 billion surplus. But the cuts came with a cost—a 24 percent cut to what provincial transfers had been two years earlier. Ontario was particularly hard hit, as Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris followed the decreases in federal-provincial transfers with $1 billion in provincial education spending cuts, including a 14.3 percent decrease in funding to Ontario universities.

Within the federal Liberal caucus there was a lot of concern about the effects the spending cuts would have on the nation’s universities—particularly among the MPs who represented electoral districts that contained institutions for higher education. An entity called the “post-secondary education caucus” had already been founded by three Liberal MPs, of whom two also happened to be professors—Peter Adams of
Peterborough, which included Trent University where Adams had been a geography professor, and John English of Kitchener, a history professor at the University of Waterloo, whose riding included Wilfrid Laurier University. The third founder was Andrew Telegdi, who also represented a Kitchener-Waterloo riding from 1993 until 2008.

As Telegdi recalls it, the impetus for the post-secondary education caucus was Jean Chrétien’s first Throne Speech, on January 19, 1994—in which the new prime minister had neglected to make a single mention of universities. “We essentially said that we [were] going to make sure that this doesn’t happen again, [and] we put higher education right in front and centre,” Telegdi recalled.

“There were upwards of thirty of us in it,” recalled Peter Adams in his exit interview. Members joined, he said, “either from background interest or because of their ridings, particularly the small Maritime ridings where they’ve got a tiny university … and the people locally see them as economic drivers. So we set up this thing while the cuts were going through and we began work almost immediately.”

“To me the best investment you can ever make is higher education and supporting research and development,” says Telegdi. “Basically, we set up an organization that would have all the Members of Parliament that had universities in their ridings. We started with that group and we actually expanded from that so even people who didn’t have a post-secondary institution in their constituency, but lived close to it, would end up joining. So it became probably one of the largest caucuses.… And then we had the Cabinet ministers added [to] our meetings, and we always made sure that the issues
were front and centre, and we would always meet with them before budget time to remind them that we don’t want to go back to the old days.”

In Canada, education is the responsibility of the provincial governments. But thanks to the attention the federal Liberal caucus drew to the issue, the Chrétien government moved to create mechanisms that allowed it to inject funding into the nation’s universities. The additional funding created such organizations as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Canada Research Chair program, designed to help the nation’s universities attract research talent from around the world. Another initiative from the period was the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation, which was established in 1998 and ran for ten years with a federal government contribution of $2.5 billion to improve access to post-secondary education.

Despite that first Throne Speech, post-secondary education became one of Jean Chrétien’s most important legacies, thanks in part to the efforts of the post-secondary education caucus. “The most far-sighted policy of the Chrétien years benefited the university sector, an ironic legacy for a prime minister not known for his cerebral interests,” observed Jeffrey Simpson in a feature-length assessment of the Chrétien legacy in 2003, the year he resigned. “These programs better equipped Canada for competing in the world of knowledge.”

“We [helped] the higher education and research community on how to cope with the cuts,” said Peter Adams, looking back. “Some terrific changes came through. You know, the huge research foundations, grants for the indirect costs of research, these are obscure [but] very, very important things.
They all had to do with productivity in the country, and the strength of the influence of the federal government.… By the time we finished, we had representatives from the professors’ unions, the student unions, the presidents and directors of the universities coming to us.” Adams believes that the caucus drove at least $16 billion in funding to universities and university research, and possibly as much as $20 billion—not a bad result for Telegdi, Adams and English, each of whom was a backbench MP when they founded the caucus.

PAUL MARTIN
’
S ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
of the influence of Jim Peterson’s 1994–95 finance committee stands as one of the few examples of an established political leader giving credit to a relatively under-recognized aspect of the legislative process, the committee, for its major and beneficial impact on important Canadian policy. The same credit could be extended to Adams, Telegdi and English’s post-secondary education caucus. (We recognize that both these examples come from Liberal MPs; for whatever reason, the Liberals proved to be far more effusive about committees and caucuses than their political peers.)

We don’t hear enough about committees, and we certainly don’t hear enough about caucuses. The sense of satisfaction the MPs described with their work on committees and in caucus stood in marked contrast to their frustration with other parts of their jobs. But even then, MPs reported having their appointments and efforts thwarted by the party’s hand, and seeing committee memberships and proceedings manipulated or truncated to fit party agendas. This is troubling in itself: again, why should Parliament dedicate so many hours
and resources to a process if it isn’t designed to work? Shouldn’t we be troubled that the most effective work the MPs described had to be carried out almost entirely away from public notice, in rarely watched committees or the closed-door spaces of caucus?

PERHAPS WE SHOULD
expect that parliamentary productivity should increase in proportion to the venue’s privacy. After all, few workplaces see their proceedings on the public record, allowing public examination of on-the-job mistakes. In order for productive work to take place, it is perhaps natural for MPs to seek out spaces where they are not constantly required to perform. On the other hand, few workplaces feature as wide-ranging an effect on citizens’ day-to-day lives as Parliament, and it’s unfortunate that so much of what Canadians see or have explained to them is often facile debate and finger-pointing on the floor of the House.

Former MPs told us that they liked caucus and believed, in general, that private party forums represented productive places for backbench MPs to voice their opinions and influence party policy. Caucuses are tricky to criticize or praise in a general manner. So many are idiosyncratic to their own particular leader; if the leader is good at creating consensus out of many disparate viewpoints then individual MPs will feel they’re contributing in caucus and are valued by the party and leadership. We couldn’t help noticing how many MPs professed that their own particular leader was excellent at building consensus in caucus; but any residual partisanship aside, it certainly appears that caucuses form an under-appreciated component to our democracy and the role MPs play in it.

The benefits of committees to the healthy functioning of Canada’s democracy are a little less clear. MPs said they conducted good, multi-partisan work in committee. However, many of them said this good work failed to have any substantial effect on legislation or policy, and that party control often thwarted members’ best efforts.

Most organizations try to take advantage of their teams’ strengths; in contrast, it’s troubling to hear about political parties’ apparent disregard for placing individual MPs on appropriate committees—seemingly blind to the obvious value of having a chartered accountant on the public accounts committee, for instance. Why would a party clear out committee members when the MPs begin to develop expertise in a subject and start to develop policy opinions of their own? Such practices suggest that MPs aren’t placed on a committee to work with MPs from other parties to create the best legislation for Canada. They aren’t there to exert their expertise. The MPs are there to further the interests of party leadership. It’s yet another example of leadership treating individual MPs as little more than expensive voting machines, on Parliament Hill to simply do as the leader’s office tells them.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Living in the Franchise

F
rom the thoughts shared by the MPs we interviewed, a picture emerged of the extent of party domination in Ottawa. In managing the nomination process for prospective MPs, in providing direction to MPs, and in committees and in caucuses we’ve seen that political parties and their leaders prefer members who demonstrate loyalty and adhere to party lines, above all other values. This expectation allows parties to appear organized and cohesive to the electorate.