Tragedy in the Commons (25 page)

IT HAS BECOME A FACT
of business school case studies that technology tends to render irrelevant the middlemen who stand between suppliers and consumers. The process is called “disintermediation,” and it’s been bad for publishers and retailers in the book industry, and the record companies and retailers in the music industry. The same thing may well be under way now in politics, with MPs the ones to be disintermediated.

Early Canadian politics needed MPs. Sir John A. Macdonald needed members of his caucus—the likes of George-Étienne Cartier and Alexander Tilloch Galt—to assist with message dispersion and distribution, principally through speech making. But today, thanks to technological innovation, the MP’s role as messenger is a far less important part of the
job. Easy air travel means the leader can hop, skip and jump across this enormous country to personally rally the base and woo the electorate. Polling, communications technologies and mass media give the leader opportunities to listen to people’s concerns—and convey back to them how the party is responding. Cementing the direct voter-to-leader relationships at MPs’ expense is the reality of city newspapers, where most stories from Ottawa are syndicated nationally, with little local context or perspective. When it comes to national news, it’s easier and cheaper to just follow the leader than to chase down the local MP. Social networks make it easier for the leader to communicate with Canadians directly via a Twitter feed. MPs’ relationships with constituents have suffered as a result, and pale next to citizens’ sense of relationship with the party leader.

Strong organizations understand that these trends can translate into an empowerment of ground-level staffers. Think of how movements against drinking and driving, or climate change—even U.S. president Barack Obama—used these techniques to mobilize people. But not so in Canada—at least not yet. From what our MPs have told us, party leadership has too often responded to these trends by
disempowering
the intermediary, by treating individual MPs like potted plants, trained seals, or bobbleheads, to say nothing of the dearth of opportunities for individual citizens to participate apart from the voting booth. Judging from the way they get treated, it would seem that MPs are regarded by their leaders as potential competitors for voters’ attention. The clampdown on individual MPs ostensibly helps the leadership control the message and the party brand. Take the Harper government, whose individual MPs are required to submit their press
releases for “vetting” through the PMO, according to Inky Mark. Whether you cite as evidence the Mark Warawa or Brent Rathgeber episodes, it seems clear that the Conservative political machinery frowns on anyone speaking out in any way that might be perceived to contradict the party platform—regardless of how their constituents may feel about the issue. The agency of the individual MP has diminished to a point where little remains at all.

This trend virtually extinguishes meaningful roles for MPs. It disengages voters from the MPs, the people best situated to represent their views to government in a meaningful way. And it discourages regular citizens from engaging in the political process: if they don’t see an opportunity to have their voice heard by someone who understands and cares about the issues and attitudes where they live, why bother?

Reviewing the MPs’ interviews, we feel our own mounting sense of frustration and regret. Why couldn’t the MPs who complained in their exit interviews have pushed harder while in office to fix the problems they were complaining about now? Is it that the problems were only clear in hindsight? Perhaps the MPs hadn’t been sure how to deal with them, or were consumed by more immediate priorities. Perhaps—and most likely—they too were victims of the tragedy of the commons—facing too many reasons not to speak up as they sat in Parliament and watched the slow degradation of our democracy.

An op-ed by former parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page in the
Toronto Star
drew attention to the book
Why Nations Fail
and its argument that nation-states tend to decline in proportion to the consolidation of political power in the
country’s leadership. In contrast, the book argues, nation-states tend to succeed in proportion to the dispersion of political power—in societies where a legislature holds government accountable. “Canada’s Parliament is losing its capacity to hold the government to account,” Page argues. “There are negative implications for prosperity and democracy. I am sorry if I sound brash, but we need to wake up. There is a lot at stake.”

So: The result? Successive parliamentarians, over many decades, allowed the diminishment of their roles in favour of greater control by the party leadership. Now, for all parties, virtually every word an MP says in the House is scripted by the party leadership. Same with Question Period. Same with Members’ Statements. Private members’ business, where individual MPs were once free to vote as they wished, is now increasingly used by all parties to test prospective legislation. Any vote is regarded as a high-stakes test of party discipline—with the media pointing to differing opinions as leadership failures.

The silencing of debate and diversity of opinion described by the former MPs affects us all. It weakens our democratic institutions by making them less responsive to citizens and their representatives. It makes it more difficult to attract good people to public service. And it erodes Canadians’ faith in their government.

Political journalist Andrew Coyne decries party leaders’ accrual of power at the expense of individual MPs. “People like me are inclined to look for structural causes in cases like these,” Coyne wrote in the
National Post
, referring to the Warawa affair but using language that could apply to any number of cases that saw the majority of MPs doing nothing while the leadership grasped for more power. “But it is as much about
the character of the individuals involved. Because whatever the wishes of those in power, in fact everybody has a choice in these situations. The members of the committee who voted to throw out Warawa’s motion knew they were doing a grubby, sordid thing. They did it anyway. The same choice awaited every other MP. They could, as few have done, stand up for what was right: they could protest against the leader’s abuse of power and the steady erosion of MPs’ prerogatives that made it possible. Or they could choose to pile on, and collude in their own servitude.”

We’ll conclude this chapter with a thought from the MP whose open dissent helped inspire other MPs to stand up against a leader they thought was moving their party in the wrong direction: Art Hanger, a principal actor in the Canadian Alliance coup against party leader Stockwell Day. Throughout his discussion with us, Hanger continually advocated for a measure that harkened back to his Reform Party days: greater freedom for MPs to debate issues as they saw fit, regardless of whether their opinions reflected the party’s position, regardless of whether the opinions the MPs espoused were politically correct, regardless of whether the opinions were endorsed by the leadership. “I think that there should be more openness than what exists right now,” Hanger said. “One of the frustrating issues for me, I think we should have a sound debate on a lot of things.… Why can’t we have a debate on things that matter to our nation? Why not?”

Why not, indeed?

CONCLUSION

Toward a Better Politics

I
n 2009 we began our exit interviews in Samara’s Toronto offices, out of concern for citizens’ wavering interest in public life. Voting rates have been in decline for well over a generation, citizens see little value in public institutions and the gulf between politicians and those they represent grows ever wider. Perhaps optimistically, we anticipated that the people who had participated most directly in our nation’s political life might have the best ideas about how to fix it.

The first MP we interviewed was the former Liberal member for Burlington, Paddy Torsney, who was first elected in 1993 at the age of thirty. Torsney told us the heartbreaking story of Christian Taylor, a seventeen-year-old boy in her riding who had died of anaphylactic shock after eating an apple turnover at a fast-food restaurant. The pastry contained hazelnut flavouring and Christian was allergic to nuts. After his death his mother, Betty Lou Taylor, began campaigning for a law that would require restaurants to post the ingredients used in their food. Torsney saw an opportunity to address a serious deficiency in food safety regulations and tried to present Betty Lou Taylor’s proposed law as a private member’s bill. Since the Liberal Party
didn’t pick up the cause and champion it (though several members defended it in the House), Torsney turned to others for support, but without the backing of her party, her bill ultimately died, as do so many other private member’s bills.

Torsney’s was the first of many stories we heard in which MPs stressed the value of working beyond their own party’s stated agenda to advance issues important to them and their constituents. It was also the first indication our interviews gave us of the passion and determination that MPs bring to their work. Torsney remained in office for many years after her failed private member’s bill, serving thirteen years in all, and she remains enthusiastic about this demanding and important work. “I think that it’s just such an honour and privilege to be a Member of Parliament,” she told us at the conclusion of her interview. “It’s an amazing job and you can really affect people in big ways and in small ways if you use it for all the good things.”

Again and again, in our exit interviews, we heard about former MPs’ respect for the office itself. And yet, as the interviews progressed, despite ideological and geographical differences—whether the MP was from Toronto or Calgary, an urban or a rural riding, Conservative, Liberal, Bloquiste, NDP, Green or independent—they all were concerned about how the MP’s job was practised and perceived. Notwithstanding the pride they took in their service and what they were able to accomplish during their time on the Hill, they were deeply concerned about how Parliament functions, and especially the way party politics had come to dominate their lives.

At the end of every interview, we asked the former MPs how they thought Canada’s democracy could be improved. What sort of advice would they give to parliamentarians who
came after them? What might they change about the practice of politics to better serve Canadians? Their recommendations varied as much as their descriptions of their job. Only a few ideas were mentioned by more than five or six MPs, such as better MP orientation and training, improved civics education or eliminating Friday proceedings in the House of Commons (usually so they could get out of Ottawa and back to their ridings more easily).

Many of their recommendations amounted to mere tweaks in response to the broad concerns they had been describing to us—the bureaucratic failures that had forced them to intervene on behalf of constituents facing personal disaster; the challenges associated with simply engaging their constituents or building consensus on contentious issues. Proposed changes such as adopting electronic mechanisms to speed up House votes or giving greater authority to committee chairs are unlikely to put much of a dent in citizens’ disaffection with their country’s democratic process. Other recommendations bore little resemblance to those frequently debated in the media or in academic circles, or even to democratic reform proposals raised in various party platforms. Only a few MPs recommended institutional changes, such as Senate or party financing reform, for instance, and save for two former NDP MPs, no one recommended electoral reform or proportional representation.

As well as discussing changes to Parliament, the MPs were eager to discuss changes to the entity they felt created the real problems in Ottawa: their own political parties. The MPs wanted to see the centre of power move from the political party leadership back toward the MPs themselves. They wanted parties to exert less control over parliamentary functions
such as Question Period and committees. It was telling that even the party leaders we interviewed proposed that this would be a good idea.

“Take a look at what the Brits do, where the first question is written and you get it ahead of time, so you are expected to give an intelligent answer,” suggested former Liberal leader Paul Martin when describing how Question Period could be improved. Similarly, Martin thought committees should be made more effective: “Do not send substitute members who are on the committee to simply get your vote through. It’s almost better that you just cancel the bloody committee. Respect that you’re on a committee because you have developed an expertise, and let the committee function,” he stressed.

But the suggestions were most often less specific, relating more to improving the conduct of public officials and their behaviour in the House. Recall Conservative MP Ken Epp’s advice: “It’s going to come from the leadership on top. I really would like to see party leaders from all parties engage in sober debate, and not throwing the malicious barbs back and forth.”

Most of MPs’ advice, however, centred more on survival as a Member of Parliament than on procedure or citizen engagement. Most commonly heard was the suggestion that incoming MPs “stay true” to their initial motivations, and not fall victim to the many small ways the political culture in Ottawa can force them to sacrifice their values. “Sometimes you get Ottawa-ized, and the next thing you’re bringing your community the reasons why things can’t be done as opposed to the reasons why things must be done.… Don’t get Ottawa-ized. Stay true to what you believe in,” said Conservative MP Randy White. In other words: don’t become an insider.

Several descried the “Ottawa bubble,” suggesting that the core work of the federal government was out of touch with the reality they, as outsiders, truly understood. “Don’t lose sight of why you got into politics … public service.…. Don’t get caught up in the Ottawa bubble, in the partisanship and the rhetoric,” advised Gary Merasty, and “Be real.… Don’t lose yourself in that infested water.” Added Andrew Telegdi: “Don’t sacrifice your principles in chasing after what [the party] can give you. Be true to yourself.”