In placing such emphasis on the work they accomplished in the more private areas of Parliament, and distancing themselves from their behaviour on display during Question Period, the MPs expressed deep concern for how the public perceives political leadership in Canada.
In fact, most MPs were acutely aware that the public behaviour of politicians can have negative consequences for citizen engagement. “Citizens...have the impression that politicians are clowns. So they are disaffected, and they lack confidence in their representatives,” said one MP.
Another acknowledged that the behaviour of MPs makes it more difficult to attract good people to public life.“You see it in surveys—the people with the worst reputation are politicians, along with used car salesmen. What motivation would [anyone] have to go [into politics]? The women and men who would be up to the challenge, they don’t want to go,” he said.
However, this portrait also raises a more important question: if the MPs so deplore their own public behaviour, even fearing that it would turn people away from politics, why would they not act to change it? After all, their descriptions run counter to the way most people choose to act, which is to behave themselves in public, and keep private the less savoury aspects of their personalities.
There are no doubt many reasons why this behaviour persists, but trends in the interviews suggest that there are at least two worthy of greater reflection.
First, it appears as though most of the MPs didn’t see themselves as the problem, and instead choose to distance themselves from their
colleagues and their profession. This may indicate that the MPs held the same negative view of politicians as the general public.
In The Accidental Citizen?, we noted that most MPs claimed not to have considered a career in politics before they were asked to run. We wondered if these descriptions of coming to politics by accident betrayed a fear that politics is something for which one cannot admit ambition, even after the fact. Instead, the MPs chose to portray themselves as “outsiders,” and indicated they came to the job with that mindset.
Perhaps the MPs are illustrating a similar point here: they would prefer to describe themselves in ways that emphasize an image different from the public’s view of a typical politician, shaking his fist and heckling his opponents.
In fact, only a couple of MPs didn’t attempt to explain away their aggressive behaviour. In discussing personal attacks he made against one party leader, one MP told us, “That man has kids. He has a wife that loves him. When I was in politics, I told myself that I would never stoop so low as to attack him. But I did. I hated him! But today I say, ‘My God, his service to this country cost him so much.’”
The second reason why the MPs did so little to change a political culture they so routinely criticized is that there were few incentives to do so. The animosity on display during Question Period is so entrenched in party behaviour that it persists, despite the damage it does to individuals and to the wider public good.
It turns out that when the MPs described the incentives and challenges that complicated their lives in Ottawa, it was not the Parliamentary staff, the public service or the media that they blamed. Rather, when the MPs reflected on their frustrations with the way politics is practiced in Canada, they consistently pointed to one obstacle: their own political parties.