Even for the first few decades after Confederation, many MPs went their own ways, trading votes for benefits to their constituency. Muskoka’s A.P. Cockburn mastered this political marketplace, first at Queen’s Park, then in the Commons. Sir John A. Macdonald called such members “loose fish” because they’d swim wherever their advantage, not the party’s, took them.
By contrast, today’s MPs are fixed in place like mounted trophy fish on the wall. Voting the party line will intermittently contradict express pledges made during an election campaign. Some even violate an MP’s individual values and beliefs. “Free votes” are rare.
“I want to make a difference, and I can make a difference,” the New Democrat’s strong local candidate Tom Young told 345 voters in Bracebridge last week. “I want to restore faith, honour, and integrity to politics.” Young was clear and forceful, reflecting his strong commitment to our community and its people. Conservative Scott Aitchison, Liberal Trisha Cowie, and Green Gord Miller each spoke, as well, about what they’d do in Ottawa. Carrying strong beliefs in democratic values, and hoping to realize them on Parliament Hill, is a reassuring quality in anyone aspiring to represent the people; we’d not want it otherwise.
However, to put into perspective our new MP’s capacity to translate goals into outcomes, it is sobering to take stock of his or her prospects for actually doing so. Soldiers say “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” In public life nowadays, you’d say “No vision expressed in the constituency emerges intact from Ottawa’s grinding mills of power.”
Entrenched institutional practices, which resist change, are the first hurdle. Second is the tight governing political structure emanating from the Prime Minister’s Office. Third is the economic power structure’s veto. An MP next encounters the “team loyalty” juggernaut. Fifth, backroom party insiders wield inordinate unseen influence. Sixth, and in like fashion, opinion pollsters can cause reversal, or at least the shelving, of a stated party position on which candidates campaigned and for which voters gave an electoral mandate. Seventh is the tsunami of distractions. Political capitals have always offered a circus of sideshows, enticements, new causes, and wasters of time and energy. The internet age expands them limitlessly, and globally. Eighth is the need to internalize conflict between local imperatives and national ones. This one proves MPs are still really human because, on some occasions, this is more painful than eating a plate of ground glass. Ninth is Ottawa’s culture of secrecy; more is hidden, and kept from MPs, than any other democratic capital. Tenth is the party organization’s far-reaching disciplinary control over MPs. Despite all these challenges, representing citizens in Parliament is one of Canada’s highest callings.
