MPs drifted into tasks that fell well outside what we might ever have imagined their responsibilities to be.
ACCORDING TO Canada’s Library of Parliament, an MP in the Westminster system of government has three traditional roles. The first is to consider, refine and pass legislation; in other words, to establish policy and pass laws. The second is to hold government accountable for its administration of the laws and to authorize the expenditure of required funds; that is, to ensure that the laws are being carried out properly, and that tax dollars are being spent responsibly. The third role is to determine the life of the government by providing or withholding support—voting for bills you favour and voting against those you don’t.
None of the MPs in our group described their jobs in terms consistent with the traditional Westminster definition, and only a few were even close. Gary Merasty was the only former MP to acknowledge that he had a problem defining an MP’s job responsibility. During his campaign in December 2005 and January 2006, First Nations voters on the Saskatchewan reserves asked him a question that others, more informed of federal politics, might not have thought to ask: “What does an MP actually do?” What is illuminating is that Merasty was a bit stumped. He knew the broad-strokes answer—in fact, he thought of the job as requiring three different hats. “Battle hard for your constituents; be available to respond and advocate for them as much as you can,” he says. “Two, you have a responsibility to this country as well; be involved in the national and international policy debates. And three, advocate for your party.”
But in detail, hour by hour? “As far as really knowing what an MP does, I’d go on the website and look at the committee work and see all that. [For] work in the riding, [I’d] look at different MP websites and try to figure out what a daywas like. I couldn’t understand all that,” Merasty recalls. “My experience leading to Ottawa was that you should have a clear understanding of what an MP does. But even when I explained it to people, I didn’t [entirely] know … and [when I asked others], I didn’t get a clear answer.”
University textbooks reflect this confusion. “The concept of political representation is misleadingly simple: everyone seems to know what it is, yet few can agree on any particular definition,” says Professor Suzanne Dovi in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Despite divergences, however, when we asked MPs to describe how they conceived of their roles, two broad categories emerged.
Many of the MPs we interviewed described their roles in ways that corresponded to two classic but competing definitions of a political representative’s role: “trustees” and “delegates.” According to political theory, trustees are representatives who follow their own sense of the best action to pursue. A trustee believes she was elected by the public to use her own judgment to make a decision. Meanwhile, delegates are understood to be representatives who follow the expressed preferences of their constituents, regardless of their own personal opinion. On occasions when an MP’s judgment on a legislative matter differs from voter preference, assuming they can appropriately identify their constituents’ view, the trustee will vote according to her own judgment, while the delegate will allow voter preference to have the ultimate say.
Among parliamentarians from the Liberals, New Democrats or the Bloc Québécois, no clear preference for the role of trustee or delegate emerged. Each of those parties had MPs in both groups, and in fact, many MPs straddled the categories.
Describing a classic trustee’s conception of the job, NDP Bill Blaikie said: “My job as an MP was to do the thinking and the listening at the committee hearings and the meetings—albeit out of a certain perspective that I was up front about when I ran—and then to make
ACCORDING TO Canada’s Library of Parliament, an MP in the Westminster system of government has three traditional roles. The first is to consider, refine and pass legislation; in other words, to establish policy and pass laws. The second is to hold government accountable for its administration of the laws and to authorize the expenditure of required funds; that is, to ensure that the laws are being carried out properly, and that tax dollars are being spent responsibly. The third role is to determine the life of the government by providing or withholding support—voting for bills you favour and voting against those you don’t.
None of the MPs in our group described their jobs in terms consistent with the traditional Westminster definition, and only a few were even close. Gary Merasty was the only former MP to acknowledge that he had a problem defining an MP’s job responsibility. During his campaign in December 2005 and January 2006, First Nations voters on the Saskatchewan reserves asked him a question that others, more informed of federal politics, might not have thought to ask: “What does an MP actually do?” What is illuminating is that Merasty was a bit stumped. He knew the broad-strokes answer—in fact, he thought of the job as requiring three different hats. “Battle hard for your constituents; be available to respond and advocate for them as much as you can,” he says. “Two, you have a responsibility to this country as well; be involved in the national and international policy debates. And three, advocate for your party.”
But in detail, hour by hour? “As far as really knowing what an MP does, I’d go on the website and look at the committee work and see all that. [For] work in the riding, [I’d] look at different MP websites and try to figure out what a daywas like. I couldn’t understand all that,” Merasty recalls. “My experience leading to Ottawa was that you should have a clear understanding of what an MP does. But even when I explained it to people, I didn’t [entirely] know … and [when I asked others], I didn’t get a clear answer.”
University textbooks reflect this confusion. “The concept of political representation is misleadingly simple: everyone seems to know what it is, yet few can agree on any particular definition,” says Professor Suzanne Dovi in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Despite divergences, however, when we asked MPs to describe how they conceived of their roles, two broad categories emerged.
Many of the MPs we interviewed described their roles in ways that corresponded to two classic but competing definitions of a political representative’s role: “trustees” and “delegates.” According to political theory, trustees are representatives who follow their own sense of the best action to pursue. A trustee believes she was elected by the public to use her own judgment to make a decision. Meanwhile, delegates are understood to be representatives who follow the expressed preferences of their constituents, regardless of their own personal opinion. On occasions when an MP’s judgment on a legislative matter differs from voter preference, assuming they can appropriately identify their constituents’ view, the trustee will vote according to her own judgment, while the delegate will allow voter preference to have the ultimate say.
Among parliamentarians from the Liberals, New Democrats or the Bloc Québécois, no clear preference for the role of trustee or delegate emerged. Each of those parties had MPs in both groups, and in fact, many MPs straddled the categories.
Describing a classic trustee’s conception of the job, NDP Bill Blaikie said: “My job as an MP was to do the thinking and the listening at the committee hearings and the meetings—albeit out of a certain perspective that I was up front about when I ran—and then to make
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