Repairing the House

Most posts so far have been on the Senate. Here's one on the House.

In the fall of 2009, Samara, a Toronto think tank that monitors the state of Canadian democracy, began a series of exit interviews with several dozen former Members of Parliament on their experiences of public life. Summarized in four reports, they make for depressing reading. The interviewees said they were “embarrassed” by the public displays of jackassery that fill so much of the parliamentary day. They were “frustrated” with the control their party exerted over them, the arbitrary demands of their leaders, and the constant pressure to engage in partisan combat. Yet the report found that, for all the experiences they had in common, the former MPs “held often-conflicting ideas regarding the role and purpose of a Member of Parliament.”


They had served, on average, more than ten years in the House of Commons, yet they could not agree on the basic question of “what they were elected to accomplish or what the essential purpose of their role was intended to be.” Some said it was to represent the views of the people in their ridings. For others, it was to advance the interests of their party. A third group insisted it was to provide services to their constituents. Very few, the report noted, thought it was to hold the government to account, one of the traditional first responsibilities of the legislature in a parliamentary system. Perhaps that is unsurprising. These days, the notion that Members of Parliament do any such thing is an acknowledged fiction. A more realistic definition of what an MP’s role has become, at least on the government benches, was offered by Joan Crockatt, MP for Calgary Centre, shortly before the by-election that sent her to Ottawa. “To me,” she said, “the job is to support the prime minister in whatever way that he thinks.”