The Accidental Citizen? highlights the diverse set of issues that motivated MPs we interviewed to run for federal office. Below is a sample of quotations where the MPs share their reasons for entering public life. Click here if you'd like to read stories on their community experiences in the "public square."
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“I had talked a lot about politics, governance, and good governance, and there comes a point where you decide that you’re either going to put your money where your mouth is, and try and go to another level, or you decide not to and do other things.”
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“The motivation was the referendum... being an immigrant who comes to this country and seeing what the separatists were trying to do in terms of breaking it up. They can package it up any way they want to, but the fact is that they want to divide the country; they want to take Quebec out of the Confederation. The country would not be the same, no matter how you slice it.”
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“I was very disgusted with some of the things that were taking place with the debates at the Federal level, particularly with the idea of bringing in the Constitution and the Charter of Rights.”
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“I had this feminist reawakening or awakening, and so I was taking feminist values to Ottawa. One of the first things I wanted to do was get support payments to be taxed in the hands of the person who was sending the payments. In other words, the person who earned the money, I thought, should pay the income tax, not the person who was receiving it... In those days most judges were awarding a pittance to a mother, for example. At that point I had four children. At one point my husband came back, we had another child and then he left again. So I was very, very poor. Because every second month he’d forget to send a cheque.”
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“I looked out and surveyed the economic climate and I could see that this was not… what I experienced as a kid. Now my children were stepping out into this, this whole new environment that didn’t really look very comfortable… their opportunities would be rather limited. And that was… when I started getting involved in politics.”
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“As an immigrant, national issues always impacted me. I never really had an interest in provincial or municipal politics, or the school boards, or anything like that, those “stepping stones” that a lot of people think they have to do first before they run. And it was interesting because when I first ran, I spoke at a breakfast meeting, and that was their criticism – ‘How dare you think you can go right to the national stage?’ And I said, ‘This is where my interests lie, this is where my passion is, this is what I’m willing to serve as. And it will be up to people to decide whether I go on, not for me – I’m just offering.’”
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“I was very concerned about what you see happening in rural areas with lack of resources. One example is abused women, safe shelters for women and families.... That’s why I got into politics. That’s why I ran.”
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“I think people who pay taxes should be represented in real terms... if you’re paying taxes and you’re contributing, you should be able to participate in a real meaningful way.”
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“I wanted more representation in the job situation within government. Visible minorities all had the front-line, low-paid jobs. You get into middle management and you get a few others who had been very successful and ambitious. I wanted to go in to a room with management and have that room reflect what I see on the street.”
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“I went to law school and became convinced that we didn’t have enough people in Parliament who were familiar with international issues. I am a big believer that we are in a global village; the world is getting closer and closer to everybody, we are getting more and more integrated and yet the language of the politicians was totally divorced from the reality of the globalized world. I became very conscious of that, as a lawyer and an international law professor. It was a bit romantic. But that was my perception. There was the possibility of the election in 1984 and a group of friends of mine came to me and said, ‘Would I be willing to run?’ I gave it some thought and said, ‘Why not try and bring a sort of more international perspective up to Parliament?’ So that was kind of the motivation.”
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“I had some friends [involved in the party], and finally they had this convention… and CPAC was covering it, and I was flipping channels and thought, ‘Oh this is interesting. I’ll watch.’ Then I began to listen to what the people at the microphone were talking about, and I was quite surprised. This began to resonate with me. This wasn’t old politics—they were talking about voters deciding who their local candidate would be regardless of what the leader said.”
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“My motivation for getting in at that time was basically to bring some of the ideas I had been thinking about over the previous 20 years into public life, particularly when I was working on things like the determinants of health and the human development story and understanding the importance of early childhood development and thinking, ‘We had better make that in to policy. How do you do that in public life? How do you actually take it from the theoretical to the practical?’ And that…was one of the specific things that drove me into it was trying to introduce new ideas in to politics and at the same time being offended by a number of things that had happened under Mulroney, one of which was the sale of… this great Canadian iconic company which had produced insulin…. We sold it and I thought, ‘That’s not right.’”
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"There were a lot of issues swirling around. There were a lot of divisions in the country. 1988 had been free trade, then GST, which, by the way, I think are two of the most important things any PM has done since the war in this country and, in fact, were the right things to do. I think there was a lot of discussion in Canada and a lot of division, especially if you were in Alberta. So many people hated the GST. This was the time: ‘The West wants in,’ Preston Manning, the Reform Party. So all of this was swirling around and I think I had just reached a point where I thought, ‘Okay. I have some things that I want to say about this. I have some views on the future of the country, national unity, and the role of government in Canada.’”
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“I had my own views on provincial-federal relations; I had already quite strong views on the role of federal government and higher education and research.”
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“One of the things I had been doing was writing a column for a local [business publication] and I had done a few columns on the free trade negotiations that were going on at the time and I said to myself, ‘This is a pretty damned important issue and I have views about the country.’”
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“Everybody’d been through some pretty tough times, particularly in rural areas. When we had those interest rates at 21%, I was doing mortgages for people that were just getting creamed because they couldn’t handle that. I wanted to see a change, and we weren’t going to get the change in my riding unless we had a better candidate.”
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“I ran to make [the system] more democratic. We were also talking about balancing deficit in three years. I’m an accountant by profession and I was acutely aware of what the damage was for our next generation of our deficits accumulating at $40 billion per year. This was all worrying me, and this was my way to express it.”
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