Authors: Michael Ignatieff
My leadership team predicted that Dion wouldn’t survive another election, and so they urged me to wait my turn. We knew that at least one of our rivals, Bob Rae, would try again. We agreed to keep our leadership ambitions out of sight. Parties rightly punish plotters, or at least those whose plots are too public. Like a good soldier, I wiped the frown off my face and fell in behind the new leader. I applauded his speeches, gave advice that was mostly ignored, never raised the flag of discord and bided my time. Every morning in the frigid Ottawa winters, I trudged up the hill to Parliament, past the shivering drunks waiting for the Salvation Army hostel to open, and waved back at my wife, at the thirteenth-floor window of our condo. Over the next year, I toured the country giving talks to the party faithful in high-school gyms, living
rooms and church basements, trying to sustain their motivation, and at the same time, my own. People don’t understand just how much leaders depend for their own morale on the rank and file, on their willingness to turn out on a rainy Friday night and give you a round of applause. When you are in opposition, all you have to keep you going is the party faithful. There are no spoils of office to distribute, no legislative victories or meetings with world leaders to recount. There is only faith, the belief that if we stick together we will win together.
Besides rallying the faithful, I had to pay off a campaign debt of over a million dollars. We did it one fundraiser at a time, and it took a year of comic and not-so-comic interludes, like fundraising dinners with burly and well-padded construction bosses in Montreal, whose warmth and rough charm never quite erased my suspicion that if I were to cross them they might fit me up with a pair of concrete overshoes. Other fundraising moments gave me some inkling of what large amounts of money sometimes do to human character. One billionaire who had made his fortune in mining convoked me to a meeting in a snowy parking lot in Toronto one frigid sunlit afternoon in December. When I showed up, I looked for a Bentley or a Rolls-Royce, but there was only a decrepit cream-coloured Chrysler, vintage 1988, in the far end of the lot, and I circled it before I knocked on the window. The hefty figure in a parka burst out of the door and said, “We’re going for a walk.” I was dressed in my best politician’s topcoat, suit, tie and polished black shoes. He was dressed for a hike. We descended deep into a Toronto ravine and he barked questions all the way down the steep wooded incline. “Why do you want to be prime minister?” When he didn’t like the answer, he would bark, “Try it again. You can do better.” And so it went, stumbled answer, barked interrogation, all the way down, until he pronounced himself satisfied and we returned to the car park, me frozen solid, he cracking jokes and beaming with
rude good health. So this is politics, I thought as I bid him goodbye at the parking lot and he got into his beat-up car and drove away. With strange encounters like this, I paid off all my debts.
Besides paying my debts, I was responsible to the people who had elected me. Your awareness of what these responsibilities are begins when you take your oath of office in a wood-panelled room near the House of Commons Chambers on Parliament Hill. What surprised me is that the oath included nothing about the people who had voted me into office. Instead, as in all Commonwealth democracies like ours, I swore an oath to Her Majesty the Queen and her heirs and successors. The “heirs and successors” part stuck in my throat, since I think we ought to decide, when the current Queen dies, whether to continue to acknowledge her family as our sovereign. Even if we continue to do so, there’s a strong case for an oath that defines the basic allegiance of elected representatives toward their citizens. Other democracies have this. For all my very real admiration for Her Majesty, I didn’t believe I had responsibilities to the Crown alone. Our current oath of allegiance reinforces rather than reduces the gulf between the representatives and the citizens we represent. It seemed regrettable that I was not able to swear to uphold the Canadian Constitution and to defend the rights of the people of Canada.
After taking the oath, I was entitled to take my seat in the House of Commons. In all democracies, the chamber where the people’s representatives sit is a magnificent place. It is so in our capital: the House of Commons has soaring neo-Gothic ceilings, magnificent stained-glass windows, and finely carved wooden desks with seats for more than three hundred members, facing each other across a green carpeted gangway. In the middle sits the mace, symbol of Parliament’s authority, and at the top of the gangway, the focus of all eyes is upon the Speaker’s chair, a veritable throne beneath the Canadian coat of arms. A gallery
for visitors runs around the chamber so that the people and the press, who have their own special section behind the Speaker, can watch and report on the debates.
The first time I took my seat in the chamber it was deserted, as it often is, and there was a lady vacuuming the green carpet and another one sweeping order papers into a black plastic bag. I sat there and recalled that this was where Winston Churchill gave the famous speech in December 1941 with the line that brought the house down: “When I warned them [the French] that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their general told their prime minister, In three weeks, England will have her neck wrung like a chicken. Some chicken, [pause] some neck.”
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In the Speaker’s office, just off the chamber, Yousuf Karsh took the photograph of Churchill that became his iconic image, cigar and cherubic defiance incarnate. It hangs there still and MPs come and have their pictures taken in front of it.
I sat there in the chamber and thought that this was where Canadian leaders had debated the execution of the rebel Riel in 1885, the conscription crisis that tore English and French Canada apart in 1917, the decision to go to war in 1939 (two years before the United States), the pipeline in 1956, and how to confront Quebec separatism in 1980 and again in 1995. It was as if the words spoken in these great debates still hung in the air. No democracy has any health in it unless debutant MPs think of the chamber with awe and respect, and unless young citizens dream of taking their place there one day. In the lobbies off the chamber, where the members lounge about on sofas, making calls, seeing constituents or rehearsing their speeches, you can easily think you’ve just been elected to a gentlemen’s club, but when you enter the chamber, you remember you’re not a member of a club but the representative of the people. You’re there to speak for them.
Every time I would meet a group of citizens in the lobbies of Parliament, I would tell them that this was
their
house, the people’s house. It was theirs, I believed, not just because their taxes paid for it and their votes had put me there, but for a deeper reason. It’s in politics that we define who “we” are. We create this “we” by making a thousand contentious decisions about how much to tax the people for the services they receive, how much to regulate this or that market, how much to placate this or that interest without compromising a public good. Out of a thousand such decisions, brokered compromises and deals in the corridors—many of them reluctantly entered into, with imperfect information, bad faith and not a little deception on both sides—a common life is stitched together that allows us to live with each other. We persuade each other to compromise and abide by the compromises we make. Compromise is impossible unless adversaries are open to persuasion.
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A person like me wouldn’t have left a good life in the academy to enter the House of Commons unless the romance of democracy had exerted a powerful hold on my imagination.
In my years in politics, I did see democratic persuasion at work countless times in caucus meetings when my party colleagues would stand up and get us to see an issue as they saw it in their districts. Many times, these meetings would change my mind on an issue. I saw democratic persuasion work in union halls, church basements and town hall meetings. Citizens would get up at the mike and tell me how badly this or that federal program was working and I would come away determined to fix the problem if I could. They believed in their system of government and wanted it to work. So I wouldn’t say our democracy is in difficulty. It is alive and well in citizens’ hearts, or at least I believe so. Where it isn’t so healthy is in the place that should be the very temple of our democracy, the House of Commons. I can’t remember a speech I heard in five years that was actually meant to persuade,
though I heard dozens that faithfully recited party talking points. The dead hand of party discipline meant that we all, and I include myself, did not so much represent the people who put us there as represent the party that kept us in line.
It would be hard to exaggerate the hold of party discipline on political behaviour in a parliamentary system like ours. In my time in politics, my friends were Liberal, my colleagues were Liberal, my social gatherings were Liberal, and even when I got in line to board a plane to return to the capital for work at the end of a weekend, I fraternized with Liberals, not with the MPs from other parties who were lining up to board with me. It was only after I left politics that I realized, with an absurd surprise, that there were some pretty good Conservatives and lots of decent New Democrats. When we were actually facing each other in the House of Commons, we never wasted a single breath trying to convince each other of anything. The party whips had already decided the votes, and it was our job to shout down our adversaries or throw them off their stride with a good jibe. Small wonder that Prime Minister Trudeau famously said that off Parliament Hill most MPs were nobodies.
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I’d always hated this remark because of its arrogance and contempt for democracy. The trouble was, it had the sting of truth. As for solutions, they aren’t hard to envision: more free votes, parliamentary committees free to choose their own chairman and run their own business free of party discipline, reining in the prime minister’s power to prorogue and dissolve Parliament on a whim. This would loosen the place up, make it less predictable and controllable, but also more genuinely representative of the people.
One feature of the democracy I saw at work in the House of Commons deserves a special remark because it is so specifically Canadian: the presence in the House of members of Parliament from
the Bloc Québécois, ably led by Gilles Duceppe, all devoted to the break-up of Canada through a referendum on Quebec independence. You have to love a democracy that provides room in Parliament for those who disagree on whether to be in the country at all, who refuse as a matter of principle to speak any language other than French, who refuse to take the oath of allegiance to the Queen and who nonetheless are exemplary parliamentarians, excellent colleagues and good representatives of their people. I felt proud—still am—of a democratic chamber that gave room to a disagreement as ultimate as this and yet maintained comity and respect.
Other aspects of our democracy were far less attractive. Citizens who came to watch us at work in Question Period were in for a shock. QP is an exchange of ceremonial hostility as tightly choreographed as sumo wrestling. Politicians flood into the normally empty chamber when QP begins every afternoon at 2:15 p.m. sharp, and careers can be made or broken in the forty-five minutes of jousting that follow. Questions and answers couldn’t be longer than thirty-five seconds, and no one was allowed more than one supplementary question. Custom required that at least half of my questions were delivered in French. For five years, I duelled with the government, sometimes with the prime minister in person, a sword’s length apart under the eye of the Speaker, with people peering down from the galleries above or watching on cable television at home. Unlike the US president, who never has to run this gauntlet, a prime minister is questioned at least once a week. This is supposed to cut him down to size and keep him in check. What happens in practice, however, is very different. Here the reality and the romance of representative democracy part company. In most Western democratic systems, over several generations, power has flowed away from legislatures and representatives and toward the executive, the permanent bureaucracy, the courts and the media. Any opposition MP
feels this when Question Period starts. On the other side of the aisle, the minister has a binder, provided by his political staff and the bureaucracy, with an answer to every conceivable question. All the Opposition has to go on are media reports, gossip in the corridors, patient digging in the Parliamentary Library and, very occasionally, the leak of an incriminating document by a disgruntled bureaucrat. The information asymmetry puts the Opposition at a disadvantage and, while giving them more resources could rectify this—German political parties have their own research foundations, for example—few governments in power have any real incentive to enhance parliamentary democracy. Their interests lie exclusively in reinforcing their information advantage and cowing legislatures to their will. It would take very enlightened leaders to give more powers to the legislatures whose job it is to hold them to account.
The problem is made worse when a prime minister embarks on a permanent strategy of bringing the House of Commons to heel. In Mr. Harper’s case, this was partly a matter of temperament—he is one of life’s natural dominators—and partly a matter of strategic calculation. He did not command a majority in the House and so he believed his survival depended on playing the Commons game as ruthlessly as he could, refusing to give straight answers and questioning the patriotism of anyone who dared to confront him. More than once, for example, when we in the Opposition raised questions about how Canadian forces were handling the transfer of Afghan detainees to Afghan detention facilities, the prime minister or his ministers would stand up and accuse us of being Taliban sympathizers. More than once, when we questioned why the government was spending so much on prisons at a time when crime rates were falling, we would be accused of being soft on murderers and rapists. This relentlessly partisan approach was not the only road the prime minister could have taken. He could have
sought deals with the opposition parties and, given our weakness after the 2006 election, co-operation would have been forthcoming. On a couple of occasions, we did co-operate. When the nuclear reactor at Chalk River shut down in November and December of 2007, depriving cancer hospitals around the world of radioactive isotopes, we worked out a compromise in Parliament that restarted the reactor and the supply to hospitals. In 2008, when it came time to renegotiate the terms of our troops’ commitment in Afghanistan, I helped craft a compromise that transformed the mission from combat to training and defined a clear exit date. Compromise was possible in this case because our interests coincided. The government was looking for a way to exit and so were we, and both of us had a symmetrical interest in taking the issue of the war away from the NDP, who had opposed a Canadian presence from the beginning. These moments of co-operation were the times I enjoyed my work in Parliament. But I vividly remember, after working personally with the prime minister on the isotope issue, how he approached me in the chamber, just before Question Period, and whispered words to the effect that I had got as much as I could out of the situation and shouldn’t try my luck any further. When I asked whether he was threatening me, he laughed a mirthless chuckle and went to his seat. In the Question Period that followed, he went on the attack, signalling that normal hostilities were to be resumed.