Welcome to Parliament: A Job With No Description picks up where the last report left off: with the MPs’ arrival on the steps of Parliament Hill in Ottawa. As with our first report, it exposes aspects of our political leadership and the culture of our politics that were largely unexplored until now.
In The Accidental Citizen? we discussed how opaque nomination rules and their inconsistent application made it difficult to understand how a citizen is nominated as a political candidate. In this report, the MPs describe their initial orientation (or lack thereof) to Parliament and the allocation of their Parliamentary responsibilities, which are similarly confusing and unclear.
The MPs acknowledged arriving in Ottawa feeling largely unprepared for what lay ahead. They recall their initial orientation to Parliament as hurried, slap-dash or altogether absent. They had little initial sense of where to focus and their assignments seemed to be allocated at random. Likewise, in the same way that there is little consistency in MPs’ backgrounds and in the process by which they decided to run and were chosen as candidates, there is little agreement among MPs in their explanations of the core purpose of a Member of Parliament.
Perhaps more worryingly, the MPs that we interviewed held often-conflicting ideas regarding the role and purpose of a Member of Parliament. Their interviews revealed that they didn’t agree on what they were elected to accomplish or what the essential purpose of their role was intended to be.
Our initial report, The Accidental Citizen?, contained both good and bad news for our democracy. The good news is that Canadian politics are more open and diverse than we often assume. The bad news is that the political nomination process can be very confusing to the public and is fraught with difficulties and inconsistencies, making widespread citizen participation difficult. Furthermore, many MPs claimed they didn’t consider running for federal politics before they were asked—a reluctance that may suggest a more broadly-held belief that politics and public service is something for which one cannot admit ambition, even after the fact.
This professed reluctance was most troubling given the importance of a Parliamentarian’s job. MPs are responsible for framing and leading many of our public debates, deciding on the policies and laws that will shape our country, and serving as the democratic conduits to our citizenry. This is an important job.
This report, unfortunately, contains more bad news than good regarding the current state of Canadian democracy, as you will soon see. We encourage readers to actively engage with this report, to carefully consider its implications and share their thoughts and opinions with others.