“It’s My Party”: Parliamentary Dysfunction Reconsidered is the third in a series of publications that relate the stories of the MPs who participated in Canada's first-ever series of exit interviews with former Members of Parliament.
Following our first two reports, The Accidental Citizen? and Welcome to Parliament: A Job With No Description, this report highlights the frustrations that former MPs felt about the way politics is practiced in Parliament.
The report outlines how the MPs expressed embarrassment at the public displays of politics in the House of Commons, saying that little constructive work takes place there. Instead, the MPs said their most important work was done away from the media spotlight, in the less publicized venues of committees and caucus meeting.
When asked why this was the case, the former MPs pointed to the way in which their own political parties managed themselves, their members and their work as being at the core of their frustration with Parliament. Notably, these comments were consistent across all parties represented in the House and did not single out any one party specifically.
The MPs said that decisions from party leadership were often viewed as opaque, arbitrary and even unprofessional. Furthermore, those decisions often ran counter to MPs’ stated motivations for entering public life in the first place: the desire to practice politics differently.
These observations raise a number of important questions about political transparency, how politics are practiced in Ottawa, and the impact that MPs’ public behaviour has on citizen engagement. We hope that “It’s My Party” will spark conversation and debate on the role political parties play in Canadian democracy. Please help us by reading it, sharing it, and learning what’s next for this project.