Is the job worth the sacrifice anymore?
It used to be that when politicians announced they were stepping down, you got a glimpse of the kinder, gentler side of politics — the joy of public service, the friendships made across party lines.
Now, though, I’ve come to dread learning why many politicians are packing it in — the threats to their safety and mental health, and how the job may not be worth the sacrifice. No longer are we seeing the best side of politics; we’re seeing the worst.
This week, Pam Damoff, the three-term MP from Oakville East, became the latest to announce the toll that her public service has taken on her life.
“The threats and misogyny I have experienced as a member of Parliament are such that I often fear going out in public, and that is not a sustainable or healthy way to live,” Damoff wrote in a letter to her constituents. “Quite simply, politics is no longer for me and so it is time for me to turn the page on this chapter.”
Charlie Angus, one of the New Democrats’ best-known MPs, was one of three in his caucus who announced a month ago they wouldn’t be seeking re-election.
Angus said his departure was triggered in part by the redrawing of electoral boundaries that would make his huge, Northern Ontario riding too tough to serve properly.
But only weeks before, Angus was talking to the National Observer about the torrent of abuse he was facing over his bill to crack down on fossil fuel advertising — abuse that included death threats.
Former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole used some of his final days as an MP to warn about the state of politics.
He had lots to say about the dangers of social media and wedge politics, but he also thought the pandemic had helped make everything worse.
“I think the pandemic was like a pressure cooker on some of the divisions that were already there, and it accelerated social media and this algorithmic descent into division that we’re seeing,” O’Toole said to CBC Radio host Catherine Cullen.
“I think politicians have an important role of making sure that doesn’t become a permanent state of chaos.”
Certainly the spectacle in the Commons this week, culminating in the ouster of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, made O’Toole’s words look prescient.
But what’s more disturbing than the chaos on Parliament Hill is how the toxicity of politics has crept deep down to the riding level.
Damoff talked about not feeling safe in her own hometown of Oakville; other MPs have had violence and threats right at their very doorstep.
In March, an “axe the tax” protest outside the constituency office of Gord Johns, an NDP MP from Port Alberni, B.C., turned menacing when one protester physically threatened the MP and the police had to be called in.
This week, in an internal memo circulated on Parliament Hill and reported by Global News, MPs were warned that another round of co-ordinated, “axe the tax” protests were coming to constituency offices on Thursday, and all were advised to not engage with the protesters and to their keep their “duress alarms” at hand.
Several years back, I started doing an informal poll with MPs, asking them which part of their jobs they liked better — the time they spend in Ottawa, or the time back in their ridings.
With only a few exceptions, they said they preferred the riding work — the face-to-face dealings with constituents and the chance to help solve their problems.
Many said Ottawa was just too toxic.
This is why, perhaps, Damoff’s tales of riding-level abuse leapt out at me when she wrote her letter to constituents.
It was Pierre Trudeau who famously said that MPs were “nobodies” when they got 50 yards from Parliament Hill. (It was in the days before we said “metres.”)
I’m betting that some of them now only wish they could stay nobodies off Parliament Hill, if it meant shielding them from in-person threats and abuse in their own ridings.
Nor is this political abuse limited to federal or provincial politics; we’ve seen a flurry of mayors stepping down too, including across the river from Ottawa, in Gatineau, Que., where mayor France Bélisle said she couldn’t handle the toxicity.
CBC Radio devoted an hour of its daily call-in show in Ontario on Thursday to the question of whether Parliament is broken — prompted by the raucous day we saw on the Hill this week.
It was a slam-dunk; almost all the callers talked in varying degrees of frustration about the mess all around.
Shachi Kurl of the Angus Reid Institute helpfully reminded the show’s listeners that the coarsening of public debate wasn’t limited to politics — that it was being felt in all areas of life. So it may well be that politics looks so ugly now because it is a mirror of something larger out there.
But it raises real questions about who will want to run if public service has now become a job more dangerous than it’s worth.