What life is like for a rookie on Parliament Hill
This summer, we’ll bring you the stories of MPs learning the ropes — no easy task
What do Canadian political journalists call people who don’t get appointed to cabinet when Liberals are in power? Two words: “anonymous sources.”
Late last year, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was immediately settling into power after the election, you could get some laughs with that joke.
The most knowing laughs came from reporters who had covered past Liberal governments, when the words “caucus tension” and “disgruntled backbenchers” were stock phrases in political coverage.
The phrases have fallen out of common usage over the past decade. Former prime minister Stephen Harper kept a firm hand on potential dissent among his MPs, while Trudeau and his Liberals are still in the heady, grateful-to-be-out-of-the-wilderness stage of their new government.
Canada’s 42nd Parliament, the one elected after last year’s extra-long election campaign, has more rookies than any other since 1993 — nearly twothirds of the 338 MPs now sitting in the House of Commons are there for the first time.
Only a year ago, all these people abandoned other careers, dispensed with vacations and hit the barbecue, debating and door-knocking circuit — an intense, high-profile application process for the jobs they now hold.
For 17 of them, the gamble paid off big-time: more than half of Trudeau’s cabinet is made up of federal Parliament rookies. You see them in the news daily and regularly on the world stage: Environment Minister Catherine McKenna; Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, Health Minister Jane Philpott or Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould.
We don’t hear as often from the other 180 or so MPs who have spent the past eight months learning their jobs away from the spotlight.
Over the years, mostly in retrospect, we’ve heard that these early days in elected life can be instructive — the culture shock can be daunting. The 2014 book Tragedy in the Commons, by Samara organization founders Michael MacMillan and Alison Loat, is probably the best chronicle we have of the adjustment. Their book was based on 80 in-depth interviews held with former politicians of all stripes.
“While the sense of responsibility and history inspired them, the MPs were startled to find how little help there was for them after they arrived,” the book reports. “It’s at this point that new MPs realize they’re on their own — and sometimes painfully so.”
Carolyn Bennett, a former family physician who is now the indigenous affairs minister, has run what you could call a sideline industry in coaching newcomers to politics, particularly women. For many years since she was first elected in the mid-1990s, Bennett has conducted weekly conference calls among women aspiring to make a similar jump into electoral politics. Some of those conference call participants are now sitting in the Commons.
Bennett says that some of the advice she gives to rookie politicians is similar to mental health prescriptions she handed out as a doctor.
“Make sure there are things or people every week that create energy, in order to deal properly with the things that sap energy,” Bennett says. “That’s what balance means to me. Energy in has to be greater than energy out.”
When asked what aspect of political life most overwhelms rookies, Bennett says it’s the demands on their time, particularly the amount of time they have to spend away from their families. She urges new politicians to make the extra effort to carve out designated time with spouses and children, make it clear to staffers that this is not optional except in extreme cases, and stick to it.
The daily coverage of politics doesn’t often delve into this huge, personal adjustment of people to political life.
So for the rest of this summer, I’ve decided to use this space weekly in the Star to profile rookie MPs who are living very different lives than the ones they did a year ago. Was all that door-knocking and handshaking last year worth it? What do they know now that they didn’t know when they leaped into the fray?
Choosing which MPs to profile will be an imperfect science (and, of course, suggestions are welcome). I’ve narrowed down the field to rookie Ontario MPs, because Ontario was where all three main parties were most competitive in the last election — remember “battleground Ontario?” — and the source for most of the rookies in the new Parliament.
We’re hoping that these profiles yield some common, universal lessons for would-be politicians, as well as some particular, interesting stories of the relatively unknown people who occupy those coveted seats in the Commons.
And of course, if the profiles turn up any cases of disgruntled backbenchers, or what Tragedy in the Commons described as a painful adjustment process, we’ll be sure to tell you those stories, too — preferably not just from “anonymous sources.” sdelacourt@bell.net