Elementary kinship structures in parliament since 1867.

• Author: Gagnon, Jacques P.
• Position: Report

The title of this study is a nod to the distinguished ethnologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009) who demonstrated that multiple family structures (monogamous, polyandrous or polygynous; patrilineal, matrilineal or bilateral, extended or restricted) all serve the same social functions to varying degrees. Since 2000, the Library of Parliament's PARLINFO service has made available on its website kinship ties of senators and MPs from 1867 to the present on its website. This database is the source for this article. It allows us to look at the considerable number of parliamentarians who are spouses, brothers, sons or daughters of other parliamentarians.

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People who share both a bedchamber and a parliamentary chamber are rare worldwide. Only about twenty married couples over three quarters of a century have sat in the Parliament of Canada. Intuitively, we would expect these couples to share the same ideology and to be more common among the less conservative parties. We would also expect that increasing numbers of couples were elected as more women left the home and entered the workforce and that they would be more common in urban areas than rural ones.

Our Canadian sample shows that most of our intuitions are wrong. Of 20 couples, half are from conservative parties. The two periods with the most couples in Parliament were the 1960s and the 2000s, with no gradual progression from 1930 to 2008. The urban-rural divide is no more apparent: we note only that Ontario sent the most couples to Ottawa (6 of 20).

Nonetheless, we do note the following trends; husbands arid wives always shared the same political philosophy; the husband's political career usually preceded the wife's (18 of 20); the wife's career often began later in life than her husband's (14 of 20). Half the time, a riding was a "political legacy" passed on from husband to wife.

Am I my Brother's Keeper?

Since 1867, 105 parliamentarians (92 MPs and 13 senators) have held office alongside their brothers. They were part of 50 families, 5 of which had three parliamentarians each (the Dorions, Geoffrions, Horners, Macdonalds and Prices). Most often, the older brother began his career before (35 cases) or at the same time (5 cases) as his brother(s). There was no significant difference in the ages of the brothers when they began their parliamentary career. (1) Most held office in the same province (43 of 50), if not in the same riding. The brothers most often represented the same party (42 of 50). The exceptions are most often from the 19th century, when party discipline was less strict than it is today.

Let us now look at the provincial and party distribution for the 105 brothers. Brothers were clearly 'more...