Dear MPs: Time to seize your moment

THE STAR’S VIEW

To the members of Canada’s 44th Parliament:

First, congratulations. It takes courage to put your name on a ballot and subject yourself to the judgment of your community. It is a high honour and great responsibility to be elected.

But let’s not bury the lede any longer.

For many of you, if history is any guide, election night and your swearing-in was likely the high-water mark of your political experience.

Many who arrived on the wings of idealism this week for the opening of a new Parliament will soon take the precipitous fall into disillusionment experienced by so many of your predecessors.

You will learn how little power a backbench or opposition MP truly holds. You will find yourselves told where to sit, what to say, when to applaud, how to vote.

But don’t despair. It doesn’t have to be that way. There has probably never been more widespread public disgust with our politics and greater appetite for change. That will be up to you.

Nevertheless, it would be wise to inform yourselves about politics as it exists. You cannot fix a balky engine until you identify the problem.

So some homework:

For years, the think tank Samara has conducted exit interviews with outgoing MPs. Overwhelmingly, they speak of the regret of acting as potted plants, playing partisan games, debasing the Commons with antics better suited to reality TV

Read those interviews. Resolve not to have the same regrets. In 2012, a democracy audit in the United Kingdom found democracy there “in terminal decline,” as the power of corporations grew, politicians became less representative of their constituents, and citizens lost faith in the process.

When engagement drops, it said, the system skews even more in favour of those already “advantaged by virtue of their wealth, education or professional connections.”

Read that report, because we are not in much better shape. Twin trends have combined to lead us to this dreary place. The first is the inexorable centralization of power in the leader’s office. The second is the egregious savagery and character assassination of partisanship run amok.

Resolve to resist both.

Here are a few more suggestions — call them thinking points, not talking points — for your consideration:

Members across the aisle are your opponents, not devils incarnate.

Treat each other with respect. You will find you have more in common than you suspect.

When politics is treated as a game, everyone loses. There will be great pressure on you to do so. From the press gallery. From your base and most rabid partisans. But the seat you ran for, the oath you took, demands more of you.

When you are encouraged to engage in show business instead of the peoples’ business, you are seldom playing to your strong suit. And you are not doing the job you were hired by voters to do.

Don’t be a “potted plant” — the sort of member who passively accepts their impotence, toadies to the unelected powerful behind the throne, sells their soul for a parliamentary assistant post.

Finally, do not tolerate the harassment and abuse of other MPs, particular the sexist, homophobic vitriol of social media, just because the target is of another party. Be as quick to call your own to account as you would opponents.

This is just a start. Still, most big change starts humbly.

In one of its reports, Samara said the widespread disdain of voters for Parliament “seemed closely related to their perception of a gap between what politics is and what democracy should be.”

When your career is done, it would be nice to be able to say that you worked to serve the latter.