Politics can be a very competitive game,
so it’s to be expected that tension will exist
between a
party’s leadership and an individual
MP. What we didn’t expect to hear from the
MPs, however, was how little effort they felt
their parties put into mitigating this tension, at
times even aggravating it.
The MPs routinely expressed frustration
with what, in other workplaces, one might term
management processes. As outlined in Chapter
1, MPs said their political parties routinely
encouraged overly partisan behaviour in
Question Period, effectively authorizing and
encouraging MPs to behave badly.
From what the MPs told us, parties also made
seemingly arbitrary decisions about advancement
and discipline within their ranks, making it
unclear what performance was valued—and what
actions would be punished. Parties provided little
or no guidelines on how to dissent, leaving MPs
to guess how to voice their opinions when they
differed from those of their party. Finally, many
MPs complained that their parties directly interfered
with their Parliamentary work by disrupting
committees and enforcing party discipline even
on private members’ bills.