This report observes how little consistency existed among the MPs when they explained the core purpose of a Member of Parliament. They held disparate, and often conflicting, views as to the essential purpose of their position and what they were elected to accomplish. They also acknowledged feeling unprepared for their roles as Parliamentarians, and indicated they received little or no formal training or orientation.
The overarching themes in this report are very similar to those of our first report, The Accidental Citizen?, which described the MPs’ backgrounds and paths to politics (summarized HERE). Both reports highlight the lack of preparation and happenstance nature of how way most citizens come to national public life.
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.