Book excerpt: Tragedy in the Commons "What job is this anyway?".

AuthorLoat, Alison
PositionExcerpt

In Tragedy in the Commons: Former Members of Parliament Speak Out About Canada's Failing Democracy, authors Alison Loat and Michael MacMillan draw on exit interviews with 80 former parliamentarians to reveal how federal politicians felt about their experiences leading and directing the country. Chief among their findings: many MPs did not have a clear understanding about what their job in Ottawa was, and often felt stymied by a partisan system that constricted their freedom in Ottawa. These selected excerpts from Chapter 4 ("What Job Is This Anyway?") suggest that many MPs interviewed found the most tangible result of their work to be individual casework for constituents in their home ridings, prompting the authors to ask if all constituency work alone is the best use of an MP's talents and time.

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Once they've faced down the challenges of their first weeks in Ottawa--where the office is, how to claim expenses, where to find staff, how to get to the bathroom--new MPs face a more long-term hurdle: managing the many demands on their attention and schedule. The former Liberal MP for Miramichi, New Brunswick, Charles Hubbard, for one, was astonished by the number of people who approached his office to seek help from one of the federal bureaucracies, such as Immigration Canada, Revenue Canada or Service Canada. "Your office is always facing calls where somebody is frustrated with trying to approach the government," said Hubbard. "When you think of somebody having trouble with his income tax or with his El or trying to access the Canada Pension or an old age pension, and they get the proverbial runaround, they wind up calling your office."

In fact, Hubbard's office dealt with this type of matter so frequently that he assigned the equivalent of two and a half full-time people to handle the calls (most MPs have only half a dozen staff between their two offices). The staffers, Hubbard said, averaged more than a hundred such calls per day; in the 15 years that he served as an MP, Hubbard figures his staffers handled more than a hundred thousand calls that involved constituents seeking help in their dealings with federal government bureaucracies.

A high school principal before entering politics, Hubbard shared a story about a former student in desperate need of help. By then about 35 years old, the man had a wife and three kids, and was dying of cancer--and yet Service Canada was denying him his disability payments. When Hubbard heard about the situation he called the man's doctor, who subsequently wrote a statement to support the man's claim, which Hubbard then made sure was read by the proper person at Service Canada. A month before the former student's death, Service Canada approved the man for the disability pension. The money...

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