Under one roof: federal and provincial parliamentarians share constituency office space.

PositionInterview with legislator Gilles Bisson - Interview

Interview with Gilles Bisson, MPP

MPP Gilles Bisson represents a large Northern Ontario riding. To maximize his access to constituents in geographically dispersed communities he began sharing office space with two of his federal colleagues. In this interview, Bisson describes the many benefits of this arrangement for his constituents and how staff members in each office manage their casework flow.

CPR: How did you first come up with the idea of combining constituency offices with these two members (Carol Hughes and Charlie Angus)?

Gilles Bisson: When I was elected as a New Democrat in 1990 it seemed to make a lot of sense to me to try to find a way to share space because constituents would come in the door with an issue and not have an idea of whether it would be federal or provincial. And what would often happen is that they came to the provincial office, they spent time telling their story and then it would turn out to be a federal issue. And I would have to send them down to the federal member's office. And at the time we couldn't do it because he was locked into a lease and the space couldn't accommodate two offices. So I always had it in the back of my head, and when I asked Charlie Angus to run along with Jack Layton, one of the things I talked to him about was that should he be elected we should put our offices together. In fact, he ran on that as part of his platform and it was fairly popular. People understood it was a one-stop shop: you came to one door, you got the answers, nobody could pass the buck.

CPR: Are you aware of other parliamentarians with similar arrangements?

Bisson: Most people won't do it for a host of reasons. First of all, you have to be in the same political party. It wouldn't make sense to share it with a member of the opposite party. But there many other reasons which come into play. There could be lease arrangements which make it impractical. In other cases there might be members who just want to do their own thing. But there's not a lot of appetite to do this because it does take a fair amount of effort on the part of both the federal and provincial members. And it's also a bit of a task for the staffs as well. So it's not something most people would like to do, but it works for us here, it's our brand and people in our constituencies are pretty used to it. But I think most members would be hardpressed to do it.

CPR: Can you give an example of how this "one stop shopping" arrangement has helped constituents?

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