Tragedy in the Commons (21 page)

Bloc MP Stéphane Bergeron described how he handled a situation in which a high-profile economic announcement ran counter to the interests of his riding. “I was torn between the
need to work for the well-being of my constituents, and my personal values that led me to want to defend the position of my colleagues. I discussed my dilemma with my party leader, who accepted that I could deviate from the party line by not taking part in the debate or the vote.” He left the discussion, he said, satisfied that he could take the values of his party into account without working against his constituents’ interests.

Among our interview subjects, the MPs who had been in leadership roles tended to be more sanguine about subsuming individual opinion under the party umbrella. It’s no surprise that people closer to power or who exert direct control over many of the decisions prefer the system as it is, even if those further from the top are less satisfied. Consider NDP leader Ed Broadbent, who led his party for fourteen years: “Ultimately, the MP has to decide what is the right thing to do, and to some real extent it should be to the party he’s campaigned on because … overwhelmingly the evidence is [that people] vote for you because you are a member of a certain party. So they expect when they’re voting that, when you get to the House of Commons, you’re going to promote that [party’s] agenda and whether it’s a Conservative, Liberal or NDP agenda, I think that’s a primary obligation of an MP.”

Or take Bill Graham, the Liberal MP who acted as interim leader for his party after Paul Martin stepped down following the 2006 election. Adhering to party discipline, Graham said, “is the nature of the bargain we made when we ran as Liberal[s].… I was not elected to be Bill Graham—it’s not the U.S. Congress; I was elected under Mr. Chrétien on a Liberal Party platform.… In order to deliver I have to vote with my party. My constituents would come in to me and say, ‘We don’t
want you to vote for that’—even though it’s party policy. I would say, ‘I am sorry. The nature of the democratic government in which we live requires me to support my government.’ ”

Paul Martin also accepted that there was no way around this occasional discomfort: “You have just got to make it work. I mean, there are going to be areas where you disagree with your party, and you disagree; but there are going to be areas where the disagreement that you have is not crucial and if that’s the case then go on with your party, because fundamentally the party got you elected, not you. Unless you put a little bit of water in your wine and your colleagues do the same thing, then you may win minor victories but you will lose the big battle and you don’t want to do that.”

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
an MP and his or her political party is much like that between the local owner of a national restaurant franchise and its corporate management—an observation captured by UBC professor R. Kenneth Carty in describing the “franchise bargain” of Canadian politics. Prospective franchisees acquire the benefits of affiliation with the larger brand and are given an opportunity to bring ideas forward that, if accepted and rolled out, can benefit the wider company. Yet the local entrepreneurs must meet the conditions the central franchise office sets in order to be allowed to operate a new location—pay a flat fee up front, plus a percentage of royalties on sales, for instance. Then, while actually operating, the franchisee must follow a set of stringent regulations mandated by head office, including the appearance and content of posted menus, branding, interior design and employee processes. These regulations can cause friction
between a franchisee and the parent company—but typically, franchisees submit to the regulations because their business is so much more valuable when it carries the national brand.

Consider the business of poutine, the popular Québécois fast-food dish that traditionally involves slathering french fries with layers of cheese curds and steaming hot gravy. In 2010 Canadians consumed about 78.4 million servings of the stuff. Although its exact origin is disputed, consensus holds that it was invented in a small town east of Montreal in the mid-1950s. Its popularity spread throughout the region and eventually the province, and today poutine is typically served by burger outlets or the sort of all-night diners frequented by study-weary and party-famished students. In 1989, at the suggestion of an Ottawa franchisee, the Canadian-owned french fry company New York Fries experimented with the dish. Like many franchise businesses, New York Fries is organized with centralized management and a network of locally owned businesses that follow a set of corporate operating principles. Based on the success of his company’s initial foray into poutine, owner Jay Gould has made the menu item a staple at all its one hundred and twenty Canadian locations. Poutine is big business for New York Fries; by 2008 it accounted for more than half the company’s revenue.

Just as New York Fries’ head office defines and circumscribes much of the daily life of a local franchisee, MPs—whether on the backbench or in a leadership position—understand that their relationship with their party defines their lives as parliamentarians. New York Fries’ foray into poutine shows what can happen when a national office listens to its local members, and how an individual in a large, rigid organization can actively contribute ideas that lead to wider growth. In theory,
little prevents similar outcomes from happening in politics, but many of the MPs we interviewed did not describe their experiences this way. A major difference, of course, between political parties and MPs, and New York Fries and its franchisees, is that the poutine merchants have established business practices and management tactics to facilitate such brainstorming and to mitigate the tensions that invariably occur when balancing local and companywide objectives. Judging from what former MPs said during our interviews, few political parties have even heard of management theory—let alone learned how they can exploit the front-line insight of the franchisee to strengthen the brand as a whole.

For example, the ex-MPs we met with routinely expressed frustration with their party’s inscrutable manipulation of what, in a business, would be called human resources. Parties made seemingly arbitrary decisions about advancement and discipline within their ranks. What sort of performance was valued? What actions would be punished? We’ve already noted the absence of any formal job description for an MP. Nor did we come across any sort of systematic method that party leadership used to evaluate MPs’ work. With the exception of the occasional—albeit important—mandate letters delivered to Cabinet ministers outlining the prime minister’s expectations, Canadian federal political parties set few goals for their MPs beyond winning elections. Nor do they deliver constructive feedback in any systematic way between elections.

As a result, the only guidelines for performance—at least as the MPs often described them—came in the form of ad hoc and seemingly arbitrary decisions about advancement and demotion. The MPs to whom we spoke expressed confusion as
to how they were evaluated by their party leadership, and how promotions or discipline were allocated. They had a general sense: making it into Cabinet meant they were doing something right; being banished to the back row of the House of Commons meant they were doing something wrong. But reasons for these decisions were seldom given.

Cabinet posts were particularly controversial. Most MPs acknowledged the importance of balance in gender, region and ethnicity in promotion decisions. But several said that too many appointments were undeserved—or allotted for inscrutable or unknown reasons. Several MPs suggested that a promotion was more often tied to their demographic profile or the riding they represented—or to their ability to fundraise for the party—rather than to how well they’d done their job.

Even those who were promoted sometimes expressed surprise at their promotions, particularly when the appointments had little to do with their pre-parliamentary knowledge or interests. Eleni Bakapanos recounted receiving a call from the PMO, informing her that she’d received an appointment in the justice ministry. She thought there’d been a mistake. “I said, ‘Tell the prime minister to call me back—I didn’t finish law school.’ ”

“When I was appointed to Cabinet [as the secretary of state for physical activity and sport], sports came as a complete surprise. I didn’t see it coming,” said Liberal MP Paul DeVillers, adding that he had no background in the area, save for running in his spare time.

“What was the most frustrating was to see people recognized and rewarded that you know are less competent than other people, because of political debts,” said Liberal MP
Marlene Catterall. “You like to think that when you work hard and make an important contribution it’s going to be recognized and appreciated, and that doesn’t always happen. That’s one of the most disappointing things about politics.”

The MPs told us that other rewards were also distributed in an equally confusing manner, and at the party’s whim. For example, permission to travel for parliamentary business—an important aspect of committee work—is granted by the party whip. But as Bill Matthews described it, if you weren’t “playing the game,” your travel request would be denied. “You can see who was going where. All you had to do was reflect on a six-month period and see who was rewarded and penalized,” Matthews said.

FEW PEOPLE TODAY
recognize how haphazard the evolution of political parties in Canada has been. As informal gatherings of federal politicians, they date back to Confederation; Canada’s first federal election saw Sir John A. Macdonald’s Liberal-Conservative Party beat the Liberal Party. But parties themselves were only recognized in limited ways and weren’t even mentioned on the ballot until a 1970 change to the Canada Elections Act. In addition to providing voters with greater clarity, this change was designed to ensure clearer accountability for the ways in which political parties spent public monies.

Increasingly, laws were established to clarify parties’ financial obligations. The 1974 Elections Expenses Act, for instance, required parties to conform to spending limits and public disclosure regulations in order to receive federal funding. And some of that funding came in the form of tax credits designed to encourage individuals rather than corporations or
unions to contribute to parties—a measure later stepped up to create an outright ban on corporate and union donations.

Legislation in 2004 further institutionalized the place of parties by instituting government subsidies to parties through a quarterly allowance tied to the number of votes the party received in the previous election. (This is the subsidy that the Harper government tried to eliminate during one of its minority governments, and eventually did phase out later when it had a majority. It will be gone by 2015.) Finally, another significant public subsidy comes in the form of election rebates, in which the government reimburses half of the national campaign expense to any registered party that receives at least 2 percent of the national popular vote.

Through tax subsidies, donations and the quarterly allowance, parties are government-funded to the tune of almost two-thirds of their annual budgets. In exchange, parties are required to report certain aspects of their operations: the number of campaign contributions, their size and, if the contribution is over $200, the name of the contributor. They are required to submit a statement of assets and liabilities to the government, and they must be audited.

However, the reporting that parties are required to do, and the overall extent of their regulation, is less than what is required of Canadian charities, and far less than what is required of publicly traded Canadian corporations. This, in spite of the fact that parties receive proportionally more public subsidies than either charities or corporations. Parties also have remarkable power over the lives of ordinary Canadians; certainly more power than most charities or corporations. Given this, why are we hearing descriptions of management
and human resources practices that appear, to those involved, as disorganized as something out of a university student club? Today’s parties concentrate their power in the office of the party leader and its unelected professional staff, many of whom are themselves not long out of university. The MPs described the nomination process as a perplexing and bewildering process with little consistency across ridings and noted the absence of an orientation process for rookie MPs, either from Parliament or their parties. They dictate what the MPs say in the House and increasingly in committees. They draw on Canadians to join and contribute to their coffers, with little opportunities for meaningful contributions beyond that. What do MPs and citizens get in return?

At the dawn of the millennium, political scientists William Cross and Lisa Young conducted a survey of members from each of Canada’s major political parties—3,872 members who, because the survey occurred between elections, tended to be long-term, active party stalwarts. Their survey found that party members “were not satisfied with their ability to shape party policy and … particularly resentful of the extent to which political professionals have usurped the role of the party member.”

Although parties do not regularly report official membership numbers, Cross and Young estimated that between 1 and 2 percent of Canadians belong to a political party at any one time—a statistic, they said, that ranks us at the bottom of Western democracies. Why are so few Canadians joining parties? Cross and Young believe it’s because “voters do not see membership in political parties as a way of influencing the country’s politics.” “Even the parties’ core group of consistent
members,” they say, “are largely dissatisfied with the role they play in ongoing party decision-making.… The evidence is clear that voters do not see participation in parties as an effective way of influencing public policy. Rather, they prefer activism in interest and advocacy groups, leaving the parties with an aging and often dispirited membership.” There is no indication that anything has changed in the ensuing dozen years. If anything, the problem has grown worse.

Political parties are critical parts of Canada’s democratic infrastructure and serve at least four important functions: engaging citizens in politics, selecting candidates for elected office, developing and aggregating policy perspectives and contesting elections. But as the MPs tell it, except for contesting elections the parties do few of these things very well. If Canada’s political parties were corporations, they’d collapse under the weight of their own mismanagement. In fact, parties amplified these frustrations by providing their MPs with little guidance or structure, and by intervening arbitrarily—often without explanation—in the MPs’ work. The end effect? Even MPs felt alienated from their parties.