Fire and Ashes

by Michael Ignatieff

  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.

  His instincts were combative in the extreme. Within months of Dion’s taking over as leader of the Official Opposition, he launched a well-funded negative ad campaign on the major commercial network featuring the exchange in our leadership campaign in which I had said, “Stéphane, we didn’t get it done,” and Dion had replied that leadership was difficult. “Stéphane Dion, he’s no leader” became the cutline on every Conservative ad. It was unprecedented for a sitting prime minister in a minority government to attack the leader of the Opposition outside of election time. This was our first taste of the politics of the permanent campaign, and it had an immediate effect. As our poll numbers plunged, the Conservative position in the Commons strengthened: we weren’t about to risk voting against him and taking the country to the polls. The prime minister’s partisan ruthlessness paid off, but the price was a steadily more rancid atmosphere in the House of Commons, and, it should be said, increasing public alienation from the work of the House.

  I duelled with the prime minister often enough and I have to admit it was difficult, though not impossible, to rattle his cage, to throw him off his game and to trick him into an unforced error. He is not prime minister for nothing: he has tenacity, discipline and ruthlessness in spades. He conveys the impression of having fixed and steady convictions, when in fact he is prepared to jettison any policy when it suits him. It is a rare gift to combine the impression of conviction with total opportunism, and again, as his opponent for five years, I have to admire his guile. He was a small-government man when the times favoured that, and a big deficit spender when the recession came. He was against abortion and gay marriage when in opposition, but when he got into government, he was smart enough to concede that his side had lost the culture wars. He moved with the times while grabbing his ragtag bunch of prairie populists, religious enthusiasts and right-wing ideologues by the scruff of the neck and forging them into a machine capable of winning an election. This in itself was a major achievement, and he was increasingly confident in the Commons because he knew that the MPs on the benches behind him were utterly under his thumb.

  Occasionally, when I had had a good day in the chamber against the prime minister or one of his ministers, my colleagues would gather around in the lobbies and slap me on the back. If I had drawn blood, I might be “clipped” on the nightly news and I would end the day believing that we, not the government, had the momentum. If I failed, murmurs would start in the press gallery and in my own caucus that I was losing my touch, that the government was getting a free ride. When I would meet constituents just down from the gallery at the end of the spectacle, their reaction was very different: astonishment at the insults and jeers hurled across the aisle. Most MPs in the chamber are so used to the noise that it takes their constituents to remind them how raucous it sounds. Most of all, my visitors—especially the women—were repelled
by the distorted, jeering faces, the taunting, the pitiful adolescent lowness of it all. Nothing in my time in politics better summed up the gulf between politics and the people than their reaction to QP. For the politicians, it was life as we lived it. For my constituents, it looked like a kindergarten out of control. The public’s sense that politics is a cruel, capricious blood sport conducted in a bear pit far away may be without remedy. For that is exactly what politics actually looks like, at least some of the time.

  Indeed, a good politician has to understand how large this gulf is, has to appreciate that outside the halls of Congress or Parliament, most people regard the spectacle of political combat with a mixture of disgust and alarm, fading quickly into indifference. Working with this permanent state of alienation is an important part of the politician’s art. Politicians have to negotiate trust against the backdrop of permanent dislike of their own profession. When you represent the people, you actually spend most of your time trying to overcome their suspicion that you have left them behind to join a brutal game that will do them no good. You counter this feeling, as best you can, by attending the neighbourhood garden party, the parent-teacher association meeting, the ribbon-cutting ceremony, the school prize-giving: all to show that you have not delivered yourself up to the alien political world. The impossible schedules of politicians, the almost total surrender of their private lives, the way they boast of how many constituency events they attend every weekend: all this activity springs from the need to show “presence,” to prove your loyalty to the people who elected you, not to the dire game played in the capital city. Yet the gulf between representatives and the people cannot be fully overcome. You and your voters do not share the same information, the same space or the same concerns. Political issues divide roughly into two: those that matter only to politicians and to the tiny in-group of press and partisans who follow the game, and the much smaller number that matter to the people at large. You can destroy yourself if you confuse the former for the latter.

  The House of Commons may be the people’s house, but the people are not much interested in what goes on there. We tried, for example, to make the visible contempt that the prime minister had for Parliament into a public issue. We pointed out that instead of allowing us to debate and vote on separate and distinct measures, Harper had chosen to lump them all together in a budget bill, sometimes hundreds of pages long, and make the vote a matter of confidence, meaning that if the measure was defeated, the prime minister would get to call an election. These “Dumpster bills”—disorderly bundles of entirely miscellaneous changes in regulations and legislation, some of them extremely important—were impossible for Parliament to properly debate, inspect, review or amend. We were legislators, after all, but the government made it impossible for us to do our job. It was up or down, my way or the highway, and we thought this was a flagrant display of contempt for Canadian democracy. It was also a violation of democratic conventions for the prime minister to shut Parliament down altogether, as he did on at least two occasions, through prorogation. We Liberals shouted at the top of our voices, and about a hundred thousand Canadians of all parties signed a petition to protest the shutdown, but we couldn’t persuade anyone else to take any notice. When politicians cry foul in the middle of the game, voters mostly ignore them, on the sensible suspicion that “they would say that, wouldn’t they?” Voters also thought, and this reflects a widely shared conception of representative democracy, that they had selected us to represent them and we should just get on with it and come back and see them at election time.4 As a consequence, however, when we defended the privileges of Parliament, its right to demand papers and documents, its right to debate, review and amend legislation, its right to do, in effect, what representative democracy demands, the public reacted with a yawn. So instead of getting the democracy they deserve, voters end up paying for their own disillusion. They get the democracy their politicians inflict upon them.

  Only a small part of representing the people takes place in a legislature. A large part of the time, a good representative is back home, “working the district.” I had a storefront office on a main street in my riding and people streamed through all day long. My constituency assistant, Mary Kancer, and her team would book me day after day of meetings with community stakeholders, and I would mostly listen to the people who ran LAMP Community Health Centre, the women’s shelter, JobStart (the local employment training agency) and the Daily Bread Food Bank. These meetings helped me to understand what a social safety net actually means in a modern society. It’s a ramshackle, mutually competitive structure of small, underfunded agencies trying to figure out both how to expand their piece of the funding pie and how to adjust to the constantly changing dramas and needs of their client base. Being a representative means understanding how these agencies work, getting them more money when you can and listening to their stories of life fighting on the front line for the immigrants and unemployed and handicapped people they are trying to help. I came away from my time in politics with enormous respect for the determined individuals who run the social services of a modern city, who spend their careers repairing and renewing the social fabric.

  What representing my fellow citizens also meant—and this was a major discovery—was that I had to defend them against the incompetence and indifference of government itself. As the son of a public servant and as a liberal, this was a shock—and also a wake-up call. As citizens showed up in my constituency office with their tales of passports delayed, visas withheld, tax files mislaid, my staff and I would pick up the phone and try to help. Every representative has to develop a staff with networks deep inside municipal, provincial and federal bureaucracies. Thanks to them, we fixed thousands of problems for the people of my district. They were often tearful with gratitude when we resolved some Kafkaesque imbroglio with a bureaucrat. Being a representative of the people turns you into a combination of citizens’ advice bureau, financial advisor, family lawyer and psychotherapist.

  Liberals put their faith in good government but we often make the mistake of falling for our own good intentions. The reality of government service delivery was something to see: often dilatory, arbitrary and just plain inefficient. A citizen seeking a service, after all, is claiming a right, not a privilege, but the citizens who ended up in my office often had the cowed look of people caught in a labyrinth of rules beyond their comprehension. They clutched papers they did not understand and repeated instructions from some bureaucrat that they could not follow. A few of them were far from innocent, but most were just dispirited by encounters with a government they were told was there to serve them.

  They also had expectations of what I could do for them that were way out of line with my actual powers as an opposition MP. Being out of government, I had to beg favours from Conservative ministers and their staffs, and while many of them behaved honourably, a few used their power exclusively for Conservative supporters. Most of the favours my staff asked for related to immigration. Here the gulf between liberal good intentions and bureaucratic reality widened into an abyss. A country that takes in up to a quarter of a million people a year is bound to have a backlog of applicants, but our Citizenship and Immigration service seemed overwhelmed by the tide. Constituents would beg me to secure a visa for some family member from India, Pakistan or the Middle East to attend a family christening, wedding or funeral. All of these visas are granted on a discretionary basis and the decisions often seemed arbitrary and unreasonable. Our party had opened up the country to multicultural immigration in the late 1960s and we had traded on this for domestic support ever since. What we failed to attend to was that a baffling visa process seemed to stand in the path of every family reunion in our visible-minority communities. Multicultural citizenship for these communities was a costly and incomprehensible obstacle course. I remember particularly two sisters, trained nurses of Indian parentage, who worked with us to get their aging parents over from India so the family could spend their last years together. The sisters took charge o
f the process. They went back to India and shepherded their parents through medical exams and immigration interviews, but still no visa was forthcoming. Finally, after I made a direct plea to the minister of immigration, the parents, by then in their late seventies, were granted a visa and arrived in Canada to be met by their overjoyed children. A week later the father died. The whole process had taken six years. There was no single individual to blame for this tragic result—there rarely is—and the sisters even brought my staff flowers to thank them for their efforts. But the political implications were disturbing. Liberals like me, who believed in an empowering government, failed to appreciate what it was like to beg for visas, to queue in a government office, to be kept waiting by a computerized government answering service or to hang around a mailbox every day for a late pension or employment insurance cheque. Having had their fill of these experiences, some of my constituents wanted to keep government as far away from their lives as they could. Once the liberal state fails to treat citizens with respect, citizens conclude that the less they have to do with it the better, and the less they have to do with the state, the lower they want their taxes to be. The political beneficiaries of this downward spiral were our Conservative opponents. They offered no solution—slashing services in order to lower taxes is no answer if the services remain as necessary as ever—but they had heard the mood music out there and we Liberals had not.