Tragedy in the Commons (13 page)

In another example, Bloc Québécois MP Roger Clavet encountered a problem involving a foreign student who lived in Clavet’s riding of Louis-Hébert. The man was from the African country of Togo and was studying at Laval University. He was frustrated by labour regulations that prevented him from working anywhere but an on-campus business at a time when the local Chamber of Commerce wanted to hire graduate students. The student appealed to Clavet for help, and Clavet in turn appealed to Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Joe Volpe, a Liberal—but nothing could be done in time. Clavet had to break it to the Togolese student that he couldn’t work, and the man left the country. But Clavet kept at it. He developed an expertise in this aspect of immigration law, and worked with Volpe until the minister took steps to change the regulations to allow foreign students to work off-campus while pursuing their studies.

Conservative MP Jim Gouk freelanced a change in the rules regarding Employment Insurance after a furniture factory went bankrupt in one of his constituency’s towns in the south
Okanagan. “The workers thought, ‘Oh my God, you know, all of a sudden we’re out of a job and all we’re going to have is EI,’ ” Gouk said, recounting the story. But then the workers discovered they weren’t even entitled to EI. The problem? They were entitled to severance pay—and according to the regulations, anyone due severance pay couldn’t get EI. Never mind that they weren’t going to get any severance pay in any case, because the furniture factory was bankrupt. But the rules were blind to the difference. “The rules as they read at the time were that if you were entitled to severance pay, then you don’t get EI until you’ve used up severance—you’re entitled to six weeks’ severance and you can’t apply for EI until the six weeks are up and then you’ve got a waiting period,” Gouk explained. So Gouk got on the phones. He sat down with the minister responsible and told him the problem and, according to Gouk, the minister was astonished. Gouk’s work obtained EI money for the factory employees, but more significantly, he also successfully pushed to have the rule changed, so that similarly out-of-work labourers wouldn’t face the same situation.

All of this is great work, on the face of it. However, something about the freelancing imperative seems like a symptom of a deeper problem: the struggle of backbench MPs to find an active role in the governing of the country by being involved in crafting policy proposals or major pieces of legislation. Interpreted one way, the act of freelancing is a surrender. Conceding any role in the things the party cares about, the freelancing MP heads off to find an area
no one
in Parliament cares about, and vows to make a mark there. The positive spin lauds the entrepreneurial spirit that freelancing requires, and enables MPs like David Anderson, when the winds blow in the right
direction, to tilt the sails, lean in and be part of creating national change. But we wonder whether the imperative to freelance would be more accurately described as pushing MPs’ work into the realm of mere chance.

WHEN WE ASKED
former MPs to identify their greatest achievements in office, freelancing played significantly into their responses. We noticed that few mentioned things that happened because they held power, or because they had a hand in the government agenda. Perhaps echoing their earlier outsider sentiment, they were most proud of the things they’d achieved by working entrepreneurially, outside the traditional lines of power.

Given the centrality of the political party to the MPs’ existence, we’d expected that a few of our interview subjects might have mentioned their successes in furthering their parties’ priorities for the country. But very few mentioned being a good party soldier, or anything remotely related. Through the very stories they chose to highlight, they again tried to tell us that they weren’t politicians like Canadians expect politicians to be. They were not among those partisan operatives we see on TV, hollering in Question Period, their concerns far removed from the daily realities of most Canadians. That was someone else.
They
were different.

MPs’ proudest moments often involved bringing a constituency’s concerns to the federal level, like Randy White’s work on victims’ rights. Or they’d include stories of cooperation with fellow MPs or with political opponents, like Roger Clavet’s work with the Liberal minister on immigration reform. Or their successes involved helping constituents
navigate federal bureaucracies, which occasionally led to legislative changes—as happened with Jim Gouk and the EI regulations. But such cases of advocacy leading to legislative change were exceptional.

Take Paul Forseth’s advocacy for an African refugee struggling with an immigration problem. The man had been accepted into Canada as a political refugee, but then faced difficulties with Immigration when he applied to bring over his wife and children. Citizenship and Immigration Canada didn’t recognize the marriage because the couple didn’t have the proper documentation—they couldn’t produce a marriage certificate. “The government said, ‘No, you don’t have a wife. You are just committing a fraud. These kids aren’t really your kids because you can’t provide the documentary evidence,’ ” Forseth explained.

The Canadian government required this man to pay for DNA testing to establish his paternity. “All of his original story was eventually proven true,” Forseth said. But by the time Forseth had helped the man sort it all out and bring his family to Canada, the man hadn’t seen his wife and children for seven years. “They came into my office to say thank you, and they dressed up in their national costumes and we took a picture together,” recalled Forseth. “That was quite a proud moment—being able to help him deal with the bureaucracy and the thousands of dollars that he spent trying to phone and speak to his wife.… All of the various stages that we went through to reunite that family after all they had been through, and to welcome them to Canada, and I had a small part in bringing that family together—that was pretty emotional. So, that was a good one.”

It’s a noble pursuit, helping frustrated citizens deal with the federal government’s most difficult bureaucracies, whether with passport applications, immigration claims or pension problems. But the practice raises a larger question: Should our Members of Parliament really be spending their time on such issues? The traditional definition of an MP in the Westminster system of government—to consider, refine and pass legislation, and to hold the government to account—suggests not. Eleni Bakapanos, for one, agreed: “That was the hard part,” she said, “trying to explain to somebody, especially immigration cases, where we were limited in how far we could intervene.… It should not be the MP’s office handling that.”

Bakapanos is right. The practice of MPs intervening in immigration, employment insurance, veterans’ affairs, Canada pension and disability cases raises difficult questions about political interference in a process that is meant to be handled by an objective bureaucracy. Judging from the MPs’ reports of their efforts, Canadians, and would-be Canadians, are receiving unequal and inconsistent treatment. If you know an MP, or if an MP takes an interest in your case, then it seems likely you’ll get better service. Is the Canadian federal bureaucracy one that functions better on the basis of who you know? Do citizens who happen to be Conservative Party members receive the same level of service from their MPs in Liberal-held ridings? What about NDP, Green or Bloc party members? It is a precept of our democratic government that our party affiliation should not act as an advantage, or disadvantage, in our dealings with bureaucrats.

Party affiliation aside, one’s ability to solicit help from an MP can also be enhanced by a personal connection. In
other countries where politicians interact with government in such a manner, those activities are referred to as corruption. Ideally, our bureaucracy should be equally accessible for all, regardless of whether one happened to catch the MP’s attention, or helped out in a certain political campaign.

Then there’s the question of appropriate focus. Working for their constituents in this way, our MPs are acting as de facto front-line service representatives for the federal government. Should an MP’s job description include the imperative to paper over a broken bureaucracy? Or should the federal bureaucracy’s decision-making processes be made more transparent and accessible to citizens, so that the burden of this work can be taken out of MPs’ offices and placed back in the bureaucrats’ hands, where it belongs?

Another question the practice poses: Is it the most effective use of our parliamentarians’ time? Many Members of Parliament are spending valuable time and energy acting as intermediaries between individuals and the federal government. But rather than responding to citizen complaints about, say, an immigration process gone awry, rather than untangling the individual snarls symptomatic of a flawed system, shouldn’t MPs more productively devote their energies toward reforming these snarled bureaucracies? Toward streamlining our nation’s immigration application processes? To improving the customer service provided by Revenue Canada and perhaps simplifying the tax code? To fixing the approvals processes of the pension and employment insurance systems?

All that said, it takes only a little analysis to understand what’s motivating the phenomenon, at least from the MPs’ perspective. Part of it might be decent human kindness: after
all, people can arrive at an MP’s office in pretty dire straits, and it is human nature to want to assist. It also helps MPs take the pulse of the people they represented. “The constituency work is the reality check,” said John Godfrey in an interview on CBC Radio’s
The Current
about his exit interview. “You can be far too abstract if you’re not dealing with real people, one at a time, sitting in front of you, with real problems.”

Let’s not fool ourselves, here, however: a constituent assisted by an MP is a constituent who is likely to vote for that MP in the next election. More fundamentally, constituent service is a manifestation of the same factors that encourage and perpetuate MP freelancing. In many ways, this customer service work is the logical extreme of freelancing. Helping constituents to fill out paperwork, immigration forms, passport advocacy—this is what our federal political representatives descend to, when our political system renders them impotent. It’s a logical symptom of the MPs’ absence of power.

An MP typically starts out as a backbencher who isn’t allowed much control over her political career. She doesn’t choose the committee on which she serves. Her press releases, and increasingly her parliamentary speaking points, are prewritten and approved by the leader’s office. And she certainly doesn’t get much input on the important aspects of government legislation. So how does she assert herself? How does she work in a manner that gives her personal satisfaction and the feeling that she’s made the most of her time in office? Acting as a customer service rep for the federal government is perhaps the easiest way to do that. This is labour that the MPs can control.

It wasn’t always this way. Don Boudria, the Liberal MP from Glengarry–Prescott–Russell who is legendary for his
enthusiasm for constituency work, described the way the MP has evolved into “a personal ombudsman for the grievances of electors.” In fact, he regards this role as so entrenched in the job of the MP that he considers it an additional component to the job description.

“That is to say,” Boudria explained, “Mrs. Smith goes to see you because she’s been disqualified from EI. Why can she not get EI? … Well, as it ended up when the lead guy from EI contacted her to see if she was available, they have disconnected her phone because she had no money to pay [for] it, and there are all sorts of extenuating circumstances—and the MP is supposed to sort through that, and defend the grievances of their constituents. Whether it’s my hypothetical EI case here, or the mother-in-law who lives in Lebanon who couldn’t come to her grandchild’s wedding because some immigration official goofed—or some other situation like that. And they happen like that every single day.”

Boudria acknowledges that this situation isn’t ideal. “To me,” he says, “it talks a lot about faults in the system if the system is designed in such a way that MPs have become an appellate court for the entire bureaucracy—then there is something wrong with that part of the bureaucracy, or the structure under which they work.” Nevertheless, fatalistically, he accepts it.

Not so his parliamentary colleague Bill Blaikie of the NDP. In federal political office from 1979 to 2008 and thus the longest-serving MP we interviewed, Blaikie worries that MPs’ direct work with individual constituents, whether it involves attending someone’s birthday celebration or helping with a component of the Ottawa bureaucracy, becomes “a kind
of a substitute for real political input and real political activity.” He wonders whether this “just naturally happens when people are further and further away from power … to give meaning to your life as an MP.” And to establish the point, he brings up one of his legislative heroes, an MP named James Shaver Woodsworth, the founding leader of the CCF, who served in Parliament for the seventeen years from 1925 to 1942. Woodsworth, Blaikie says, focused on representing the whole of his constituency rather than on his relations with individual constituents—something Blaikie also tried to do. When asked by a constituent to do something that fell into an ombudsman or direct service role, Blaikie would say, “No—no, I can’t do that. I am in Ottawa. I am doing the job you elected me to do.”

Freelancing can result in some wonderful legislative work—such as David Anderson’s stickhandling into existence the Canadian Parliament’s first environment committee, or Jim Gouk advocating for changes to Employment Insurance. But too often it results in MPs resorting to acting as ombudsmen for the federal bureaucracy in order to feel as though they were making a difference.

With that in mind, it’s time to consider giving our MPs a proper job description. It is a critical job in our democracy, and there needs to be some consistency in our collective understanding of its key components, responsibilities and expectations. Let’s begin with their responsibilities in Ottawa. If MPs aren’t given a clear sense of what’s expected of them on the job, who’s really to blame when that job doesn’t get done?