3.
What Does an MLA Actually Do?
So I was an MLA — a Member of the Legislative Assembly.
How do you learn to be an MLA?
An MLA has no job description. There’s no training. A veteran MLA or an experienced staffer may offer advice, but there’s no systematic effort to orient the new MLA. Besides, what works for one MLA may not work for another. MLAs bring very different skill sets and experiences to the job. Each constituency is in some way unique, so each MLA is left to create his or her own version of what it means to be an MLA. Many struggle, but few admit it, because they don’t want to be thought weak.
There’s also no supervision. MLAs spend time in their constituencies, but nobody tracks them. They travel back and forth between constituency and downtown Halifax, and around the constituency. They operate out of their homes, their cars, and their constituency offices. They have one or two employees. A constituency assistant isn’t about to reveal what the MLA gets up to, because his or her paycheque depends on discretion. Besides, once MLAs leave the office, assistants don’t always know where they are or what they’re doing.
When the legislature is sitting, you can see your MLA in his or her seat, but there’s no public record of attendance and no systematic recording of votes. Unless you watch from the public gallery every day, there’s no way of knowing if your MLA is there or for how long. Even when they’re in the building, most of them are in and out, anywhere but in their seat. And when the legislature is done, the fifty-one MLAs head back to their constituencies, and any one of them doesn’t know what the other fifty get up to.
The Way It’s Supposed to Work
There is one thing that only an MLA can do: sit in the House of Assembly and vote on laws and budgets. Nobody else is allowed into the chamber. Nobody else can speak. Nobody else can vote. No substitutes are allowed.
So legislative work — enacting laws and adopting budgets — is the core of the MLA’s job.
Province House is where the legislative work happens. It was built two hundred years ago to house Nova Scotia’s legislature, and it has served that purpose continuously ever since. It’s Canada’s oldest legislature. It’s a pre-Victorian gem, sitting in the heart of downtown Halifax, between the harbour and Citadel Hill. A wrought-iron fence encloses the small public park in which it sits. The famous statue of Joseph Howe, still Nova Scotia’s most recognized politician, even a century and a half after his death, stands in the southern yard. The northern yard, now a paved parking lot, features an equally striking but less well-known memorial to the Boer War.
The second floor of Province House is where the action is. At the southern end is the Red Room, the most beautiful room in Nova Scotia, the home of the now-abolished upper house. In the middle of the second floor is the Legislative Library, with its winding staircase and gallery. When it was still a courtroom, this is where Joseph Howe gave his stirring defence to a charge of criminal libel. His acquittal paved the way for freedom of the press in Canada.
At the northern end of the second floor is the legislative chamber, which hosts fifty-one elected members for three months out of every year.1 The norm these days is for the House to sit for two months in the spring, typically from late March to the Victoria Day long weekend, mostly to consider the annual budget. It also sits for a month in the fall, typically starting in late October. Every session is open to the public, is broadcast on television, and has a verbatim transcript.
Here’s how the legislature is supposed to work.
New laws can be proposed in both the spring and fall sittings. Anyone can propose a new law in the form of a “bill.” The bill can do something new, or it can amend or repeal an existing law.
In order to become a law, a bill must go through three stages. These are called “readings,” but the bill is not literally read aloud. The introduction of the bill is “first reading.” The bill’s sponsor stands and reads the title. The bill is then copied and distributed to all members. Approval in principle is “second reading.” That’s when most of the debate occurs. During second reading debate, any MLA can stand to argue for or against the bill. If a bill passes second reading, it moves on to a committee (the Law Amendments Committee) that hears from the public. From there, it passes back to the House for examination in detail (Committee of the Whole House). Final approval is “third reading.” And once a bill passes third reading, it becomes law when the Lieutenant-Governor signs it (Royal Assent). It enters into force on Royal Assent, unless the bill specifies a different date or permits the government to choose a date.
Apart from passing new laws, the principal business of the legislature is to approve the annual budget. In many ways, this is the true heart of democratic government. The formation of British-style government was motivated by the desire to control the raising of money through taxation and to control the purposes for which tax money was spent. That is why only the government is permitted to propose revenue or spending measures. The budget’s importance is underlined by the rule that a government must resign if it loses a budget vote.
The budget is usually proposed in the spring sitting, which is why the spring sitting is longer than the fall sitting. The budget debate (“Estimates”) has a special set of procedures. The budget is divided into two parts, and each part is discussed for forty hours. This eighty hours of budget debate is spread over a minimum of ten sitting days.
That’s it, simple and clear. Fifty-one elected representatives get together in a beautiful old building in downtown Halifax to debate bills and budgets. After the debate, they vote. The majority wins.
This is responsible government in action.
Except the Nova Scotia legislature doesn’t really work that way. It is, in fact, a parody of democracy.
The Way It Really Works
The first time I stood in the House to give a speech, on March 23, 2001, it was a special moment for me. Few people stand for public office, and fewer are elected. I had picked up some insights on the campaign trail that I wanted to share with my new colleagues in the House.
And so I was startled to realize, as I gave my maiden speech, that no one in the room, absolutely no one, was listening. In any other gathering of grown-ups, this would be shockingly bad manners. About fifteen minutes into my speech, I stopped, and you can almost hear the surprise in my voice:
MR. STEELE: …Just because the government has decided to build a new school to replace a sick, old school doesn’t mean that is the end of the issue. One of the most important issues in what I will call Fairview proper, the Fairview portion of Halifax Fairview, is what is going to happen to the old school site.
Mr. Speaker, I paused there for a moment because as a new member, I wasn’t sure if this level of noise was normal in the House, perhaps it is. It is something that I would like the members on the other side to hear…
But in the Nova Scotia legislature, ignoring the person speaking, and a general background clamour, is normal. Here’s Speaker Murray Scott in reply:
MR. SPEAKER: The honourable member has the floor. Just to answer your question, it is probably fairly quiet for what it can be sometimes. It is probably fairly quiet for what it will be in the future. The honourable member for Halifax Fairview has the floor.
MR. STEELE: I know the members are being kind enough not to actually heckle me while I am talking. I know that will change in due course. I know that will change. I would like the members on that side of the House to hear, because the most important public policy issue in the Fairview part of Halifax Fairview remains the Halifax West High School.
The ideal is that our elected representatives listen to each other carefully and make up their minds accordingly. The reality is that our MLAs mostly ignore each other: they chat with their neighbours, read the newspaper or a book, fill out the crossword, and in the fall sitting, sign Christmas cards. As technology has advanced, the in-House habits of our MLAs have changed too: now they watch movies, listen to music, and incessantly email and text. Look down from the public gallery, and you’ll see that most MLAs are peering at their smart phones or tapping on a laptop computer.
When our MLAs do pay attention to what someone opposite is saying, it is usually to heckle, interrupt, even insult. The last thing on their minds is mature consideration of someone’s argument, which is fitting, because the speaker is rarely making an argument worthy of mature consideration. The MLAs who stand to speak rarely do any research and usually read a script written by staff. They routinely speak off-topic, misrepresent facts, distort what others have said, and talk mostly about themselves and their constituency.
Of course the legislature has its moments of lucidity. Occasionally the place can stand up straight and be everything it’s supposed to be. These tend to be special occasions, when the tone is formal and everyone knows misbehaviour will jar. On some other occasions, an individual MLA will speak with real insight and real emotion. The House becomes still and attentive, because the members know they’re hearing the real deal. But these moments are rare. More importantly, they don’t persuade anyone to vote differently than they otherwise would have.
I have never worked in a place as thoroughly dysfunctional as the Nova Scotia legislature. Fifty-one grown-ups act in ways that, if repeated in their private lives, would end their personal relationships, and if repeated in other workplaces, would get them fired. Visitors to the gallery often go away shaking their heads in bewilderment, just as I had when I observed the passage of the Workers’ Compensation Act. Groups of schoolchildren watch grown-ups act in ways that they, the children, have been repeatedly told not to act.
Why does this happen? How did we get to this point? Does it have to be this way?
There should be no mystery here: MLAs are responding in normal, predictable ways to their environment. There are three environmental forces at work: MLAs’ background and experience do not equip them for legislative work, all substantial decisions on bills and budgets are made elsewhere, and party discipline drives all real debate behind closed doors. That’s why the House is a parody of democracy.
MLAs’ Background and Experience Do
Not Equip Them For Legislative Work
Our legislature is full of pleasant, gregarious, community-
minded people who are fairly clueless when it comes to reading, understanding, and debating laws and budgets. If they have those skills, it’s a lucky coincidence.
To understand a bill properly, you first have to understand the issue that the sponsor of the bill is getting at. This is hard enough, because of the bewildering variety of topics for which the provincial government is responsible.
Even if an MLA understands the issue behind a bill, the next barrier is the language of the bill. Bills are legal documents, and they’re written in a style that’s like a foreign language, which new MLAs do not know and which many veteran MLAs never learn. The House has a staff of lawyers who specialize in the arcane language and rules of legislation. Nobody else is permitted to write a bill, or even an amendment.
So unless a bill is short and the subject-matter readily understandable, most MLAs don’t read the bills. Exactly the same can be said of financial statements, which are the other half of the legislature’s bread and butter. The provincial budget consists of a stack of documents. No MLA ever reads it all. Even if an MLA did read it all, he or she would not really understand what’s going on inside a department. The departmental business plans — which by themselves comprise another thick volume — should help make sense of the numbers, but they’re written with deliberate blandness. An MLA has to be sharp and experienced to read between the lines and see what’s actually going on. Most don’t even try.
Why should we be surprised? The way that parties choose candidates isn’t designed to find good legislators. Sometimes there’s a contested nomination meeting, but those are all about signing people up and getting them to the meeting hall. Sometimes the parties will seek out a candidate who fits a profile likely to attract votes or someone who is well known in the community. Sometimes the parties have trouble finding a candidate and will take anybody who’s willing and presentable. In none of these scenarios does ability as a legislator enter into the calculation. The only ability the parties really care about is electability.
Voters have a role in this too. Typically they’re voting primarily for a party or a leader, or against a party or a leader. They’re not thinking about who, among the local candidates, is most likely to be a skilled legislator any more than they’re thinking about the colour of the candidates’ hair. The combined result of the nomination and election processes is an almost comic mismatch between the skills required to be a good legislator and the skills that our MLAs actually bring to the House.
MLAs have adopted a variety of coping strategies to deal with their low level of legal and financial literacy. Among them:
Nova Scotia’s MLAs could raise their level of legal and financial literacy, but they don’t want to. For one thing, they tend to see themselves as achievers who are bringing life experience and common sense to the business of government. They don’t readily accept their need to upgrade their skills — they were good enough to be elected, weren’t they? It is very common for new politicians to attribute their election to their personal qualities. Few will acknowledge they are virtual unknowns in their constituency and that most voters were voting for the leader or the party.
The other reason why MLAs resist training is that, of all the things in which they could invest their time, the political return on building their legislative skills is low. They resist not because they are stupid and like it that way, but quite the opposite — they resist because they are smart maximizers of their time. The greatest political return on their time is in the constituency, working toward re-election, so that’s where they want to spend their time.
All Substantial Decisions on Bills
and Budgets are Made Elsewhere
The truth is that Province House is not the place from which Nova Scotia is governed. The real decision-making about everything — health, education, support for the poor and disabled, justice, transportation — happens behind closed doors in office buildings scattered around downtown Halifax.
By the time a bill or a budget is tabled in the House, the government is rarely open to any amendment. The content has already been decided in the Premier’s Office or in a minister’s office or in the government caucus office. Politically, they cannot allow any amendment that would allow the opposition to take credit, which is just as well, because the opposition rarely understands an issue well enough to propose any sensible amendments. By the time the opposition MLAs get to the House, they too have already staked out a political position. The tactics have been decided in advance by the House leaders. Speeches are made, but nobody is open to persuasion. Members’ bodies are present at Province House, but their heads and their hearts are back in the constituency.
This phenomenon reached its logical conclusion in the spring sitting of 2013, when Manning MacDonald, the veteran Liberal MLA for Cape Breton South, didn’t bother to show up at all. He went on vacation to Florida instead. His defence, when he was asked to justify his absence, was revealing. As he told the Chronicle-Herald, “The constituents are not paying me to be in the House, they’re paying me to do my constituency work. I was in touch with them every single day I was down there. I checked my messages every day and I called everybody that’s interested in getting something done — every single day. And when I’m sitting in the House, I’m there watching the NDP and a majority government — there’s nothing I can do about anything that happens in there, but there’s a lot I can do in my constituency.”
An MLA was finally admitting that he saw no value in attending the legislature at all. Manning knew that an individual MLA has zero impact on either bills or budgets, especially in the face of a majority government. Manning knew that constituency work is the only work that constituents value. The MLA doesn’t even need to be in the constituency. Constituency work can be done from anywhere with a phone and an Internet connection, like Florida. These things are true — and every MLA knows it — but it took someone with Manning’s bravado to say them out loud.
In politics, regrettably, the undecorated truth is usually unwelcome. The backlash to Manning’s remarks was immediate. He resigned shortly afterwards, in order to save himself and his leader further embarrassment. He hadn’t intended to re-offer anyway, and the election was imminent.
Manning MacDonald had a long career in elected office, first as mayor of Sydney for fifteen years and then as an MLA for twenty years. Along with Paul MacEwan, he was the most successful Nova Scotia provincial politician of his generation, if success is measured in longevity. Both built their political careers on a tight, personal connection to their constituents. When Manning resigned, he was the longest-serving MLA currently sitting in the legislature, along with Clare’s Wayne Gaudet. It is unfortunate his career had to end on such a sour note — especially because he was only speaking the truth.
Party Discipline Drives All Real Debate Behind Closed Doors
Politics is a team sport. You have a team. There are other teams who would like to see you fall flat on your face. At the next election they are going to try to take your job away. So you want to get the upper hand over the other teams. Once you have the upper hand, you want to keep it. You want to win. And you can’t win on your own.
Individual members discipline themselves, and each other, in order to maintain a facade of party unity. The party leadership doesn’t need to say “you must vote this way, whether you like it or not, because we say so.” They’re capable of it — and when all else fails they will indeed threaten and cajole — but usually it’s not necessary.
Veteran MLAs and staffers warn you that your opponents and the media will jump all over you if they see any daylight between you and someone else in your party. I saw it a few times when Mark Parent or Howard Epstein would muse aloud about not supporting something their caucus was doing. It’s an easy story. The leaders always get dragged into it, and they don’t like it. Any difference of opinion within the caucus is taken as a challenge to the leader’s ability and authority. Any benefit from expressing yourself honestly is outweighed by damage to the team.
If you do break from your team, punishment follows. Even in opposition, there are caucus posts, committee positions, and travel, all in the control of the leader and caucus, and all of which can be denied to someone who is not toeing the line. In government, there are all of these things, plus Cabinet positions and all kinds of legislative, budgetary, and constituency favours. Ask Brooke Taylor, who paid for questioning John Hamm’s leadership by being excluded from Hamm’s Cabinet, despite his seniority. Ask Howard Epstein, who was excluded from the Dexter Cabinet, despite his seniority. The punishment can go on for years. Politicians have long memories.
In my fifteen years in politics, I can remember only a handful of times when an MLA was willing to stand up and vote differently than the rest of his caucus. There was Jon Carey and Cecil O’Donnell voting against the extension of common-law benefits to same-sex couples in 2001. There was Cecil O’Donnell voting against a back-to-work law for health care workers, also in 2001. There was Kevin Deveaux voting for a tax break for the Dartmouth refinery in 2004. And then there was me, breaking with my party in 2005 over expenses.
Summing up the Legislative Work
Manning MacDonald told me once, shortly after being thrown out of the House for bad behaviour, that he did it deliberately because “it plays well at home.” And that, for a politician, is what really matters: What plays well at home?
A well-researched speech, a thoughtful amendment to a bill, an informed intervention in a committee proceeding — all of this is good legislative work, but it counts for precisely nothing back home. Behaving badly enough to get tossed from the chamber, on the other hand, is guaranteed to get you in the newspaper and maybe on the evening news on television. You have to pick your spots, and you can’t do it too often, but people love a fighter.
Good work in the legislature is rarely noticed, but one bad thing can dog you the rest of your days. For ten years, Dave Wilson of Glace Bay was a fine parliamentarian — when it came to question period, there was nobody better — but nobody will remember that after his conviction in the expense scandal. Charlie MacDonald from Inverness once compared a compulsive gambler to a compulsive golfer. After that, he couldn’t say a thing, on the record or off, without a chorus of “Fore!” from the opposition. He was never taken seriously again and lost in the 1999 election to a young future premier named Rodney MacDonald. Hyland Fraser, elected from Antigonish in 1998, had a long career in municipal politics. His provincial political career was damaged irreparably by an impaired driving charge while he was an MLA, and he was defeated in the 1999 election by a handful of votes.
Our politicians find the current system too comfortable to change. It doesn’t take much effort to sit in the House — not with all the decisions being made elsewhere and no requirement to listen or prepare — and they aren’t truly interested in reforms that will make their work in the House tougher. So they talk about making it better, but their proposals for reform only pick around the edges.
Frankly, the only thing that keeps MLAs in the House at all is the rule on quorum. Business can’t be transacted unless there are at least fifteen members in the chamber, so the government has to ensure at least that many members are in the House at all times. Without the discipline of quorum, the House would be empty, as it is during the so-called “late debate” when the quorum rule does not apply.
If they could get away with it, most MLAs would happily stay in their constituencies and dial in their votes.
Day in and day out, constituency work is what an MLA actually does, because re-election and job satisfaction are tied to what they do in the constituency, not what they do at Province House.
Today’s MLA is essentially a full-time constituency worker who occasionally — and reluctantly — goes to Province House for a sitting of the legislature. The traditional role of the MLA has been turned upside down.
What are they doing in their constituency? There are three broad categories of constituency work: visiting, listening, and casework.
Visiting
Visiting with people is the heart of constituency work. The politician can fill his or her day with events, big and small, formal and informal, whose purpose is see-and-be-seen. How many other people get paid to socialize? You go to a market, the coffee shop, an opening, a school fair, a legion, a lunch. Whatever is going on in the constituency, you’re there. Be seen, be pleasant, be helpful. Vicki Conrad, the MLA for Queens, would make a point of strolling down the main street of Liverpool with me whenever I visited, saying hello to whoever passed, dropping in on stores, because everybody would see us and note approvingly that their MLA had the finance minister at her side. Howard Epstein staked out the same spot at the Halifax Farmers’ Market on a Saturday morning, chatting with people as the crowd flowed by. I heard of another MLA, from before my time, who would hang out for hours at the local Canadian Tire, pretending to shop but really just patrolling the aisles to meet people.
Visiting is not mentally demanding. You’re not talking about problems, and if someone approaches you with a problem, you can easily say, “I’d love to talk, but not right now. Come see me in my office.” You’re just out there, shaking hands and passing the time with people, connecting. This is work at which pleasant, gregarious people excel, in the same way they excel at door-to-door campaigning. That’s why we have so many pleasant, gregarious people in the legislature.
If you’re really good, you remember names. In politics, a memory for names is magic, and nobody was better at it than John Buchanan. Decades later, people would tell me John Buchanan stories and smile at the memory. He would see someone, cross the street, pump their hand, and ask by name about their parents, their kids, their spouse, their dog. He knew when they’d last met and what they had talked about.
Say what you like about his financial record: John Buchanan won four majority governments in a row. Since he left, nobody has won even two in a row. He was the best mainstreet politician of our times, and his computer-like memory for names had a lot to do with it.
My own memory for names is so poor that I would sometimes introduce myself twice to the same person at an event. And I would dread the question “You don’t remember me, do you?” because I would usually have to admit that no, I didn’t. People understand that a politician meets thousands of people over the course of a campaign, never mind a career, and only a few gifted individuals like John Buchanan can remember them all. But introduce yourself to a campaign worker as if you’ve never met them before and watch the confusion and disappointment cloud their face. I’ve done it.
I tried to compensate for my poor memory with a database in my constituency office. We started with the voters’ list and then added information every time we were contacted, whether by phone, by email, or in person. When I had enough lead time, like when I was canvassing or returning a phone call, I would check the database for prior contact. I surprised people with the apparent depth of my recall, but it was just a good database substituting for a bad memory.
I remembered Denis Burgess’s advice from my nomination in 2001: “People like it when you visit them at home.” The kitchen table, not the office desk, is where the best constituency work is done. Being a politician and visiting people in their homes gives you privileged access into their lives. I was their elected representative. I wanted to know these people, to know their stories and their struggles, to know where government fit into their lives and how I could help them.
I especially enjoyed meeting people, now in their seventies or eighties, who had grown up in the neighbourhood and told me how things used to be. One elderly woman told me that Fairview’s steep streets used to gush with water after a heavy rain, and her father carried her to school through the torrents. Another told me about skating on a pond where my constituency office was now located. I met the last surviving charter member of the Fairview Legion, Murray “Tucker” Fry. I met the in-laws of Nova Scotia-born country star Hank Snow, who moved to Fairview from Queens County and married a local girl, Minnie Aalders.
I heard sad stories, like the mother still grieving for a teenage son killed in a collision thirty years before, and who took me into her living room to show me his picture. Or the family members beside themselves over the time and money the father was spending at video lottery terminals.
I visited people struggling with illness, either physical or mental, usually because they wanted me to know how the health system had helped them, or was failing them. And there are so very many people struggling with money problems.
Of course I particularly remember the most poignant stories, but there were a few lighter moments. One time I was knocking on doors on Ridgevalley Road on Cowie Hill, and an energetic puppy bolted out the door with his teenage owner in anxious pursuit. I joined the chase, since it was me who’d been propping open the door for a chat. We ran and ran — that was one frisky puppy — until finally we cornered him in the corner of a backyard fence a couple of streets over.
Listening
The one thing that an MLA can bring to government and the legislature that no one else can bring is a keen appreciation for what’s going on in his or her constituency. How do people feel about the laws and budgets before the House? What do they think should be before the House? What’s their experience of provincial public services? The only way to know the answer to those questions is to listen, and I mean really listen, to what constituents are saying.
Listening doesn’t mean taking at face value every single thing that anybody says. It’s not as simple as adding up the “for” and the “against.” (If it were that simple, we could elect computers instead of people.) It means building a picture of public opinion from every conversation, every call, every email. The essence of political judgment is how to translate what you hear in the constituency into legislative action.
And first you have to listen.
I hardly ever got a letter in the regular mail, and relatively few people dropped in to the office. The vast majority of the contact was by phone and email. The volume of email picked up over time — a change in technology, not politics — and the volume picked up even more after we formed the government in 2009 and I became a minister. The more my political reputation grew, the more I’d get calls and emails from people in other constituencies, but for the most part, I was firm in referring them to their own MLA. I had my hands full in Halifax Fairview without taking on problems from elsewhere.
I got calls and emails about everything you can imagine. There were calls about all the issues of the day: gasoline prices, power rates, property assessments, and insurance premiums, plus individual experiences with the health care system, schools, and job applications. Landlords complained about tenants, tenants complained about landlords, and neighbours complained about neighbours. They called about raccoons, bedbugs, and rats (“I just saw a giant rat on Olivet Street!”).
The volume and variety of emails was one thing, but it’s the tone that, in the long run, is especially wearing. There’s something about the speed and cheapness of email, and the fact we’re not looking at the person to whom we’re writing, that promotes our worst instincts. When the recipient is a politician, anything goes, or so it seems. Too much of an MLA’s email is negative, much of it aggressive, some of it outright threatening.
It’s easy to ignore the worst of the emails, but there’s a mid-range to which it is tempting to reply in kind. Over twelve years, I did it only a few times — I’m only human — and lived to regret it each time. The last was a tart email I sent to a group of teachers who had showed up unannounced at my office one day — my constituency office happens to be the closest MLA office to the Nova Scotia Teachers Union headquarters on Joseph Howe Drive — and then criticized me for not being there. They made no effort to be reasonable or civil, and I replied in kind. That was dumb.
All elected officials are used to verbal abuse. Occasionally, but thankfully still rarely, the abuse becomes physical, such as when a constituent angry over same-sex marriage assaulted the late New Brunswick MP Andy Scott in his constituency office. The student protests in Quebec in 2012 included several incidents of vandalism at constituency offices, including graffiti, window-smashing, and the throwing of explosives. Thirty years ago, David Muise, the MLA for Cape Breton West, was briefly held at gunpoint in the Birch Grove Fire Hall by a constituent distraught over his impending divorce. There is also the relatively new form of public protest — so common in some Spanish-speaking countries that it has its own name, escrache — of confronting elected officials at their homes. Protestors angry about the cleanup of the Sydney Tar Ponds camped across from Premier Russell MacLellan’s Sydney residence during the summer of 1999. Anti-fracking protestors took their protest to the BC premier’s front lawn in the summer of 2013.
Elected officials can be magnets for people with certain forms of mental illness. This phenomenon is familiar to anyone in the public eye, like athletes and actors. There are also people who are so desperate, often with a short fuse, that they will lash out at anyone who is not able to give them exactly what they want. I’ve had them in my office and it’s not fun. Because of these people, MLA offices are becoming less welcoming and more defensive in their location and set-up.
Many of the people calling are very needy, whether financially or emotionally or both, and they have a circuit. If they get a sympathetic ear at the constituency office, they add it to their circuit. They know what they need to do to get attention: cry, threaten suicide, talk without drawing breath. I was fortunate to have a loyal constituency assistant, Cath Joudrey, for almost my whole time in office. Cath brought her own life experience to bear in dealing with our troubled callers. Partly because of her own background and her extensive experience taking calls on a local help line, she had an admirable empathy that far exceeded mine. In the end, many people call an MLA’s office because they need someone to talk to, and in Cath they found a good listener.
Other people see MLAs as automatic teller machines — if you press the right buttons, money will come out. This is the MLAs’ fault. Politicians don’t like saying no, so when a parent or a team or a local group comes looking for money, the MLA will usually make a donation. Then because the MLA has said yes, more people will come looking for money, and the same request will be repeated the next year. These incessant requests for cash donations, and MLAs’ desire to say yes, go at least some way to explaining the crazy system of MLA expenses. The requests far exceed what is reasonable for an MLA to pay out of their own pocket, so MLAs had to find the money for donations somewhere.
I started off believing that I would do things differently. I said no to the first donation request I received. I remember the shock in my constituent’s voice. She’d had one of my signs on her lawn in the election. The last MLA gave money. Other MLAs gave money. Why wouldn’t I? I held the line on that particular one, but eventually I gave in as the donation requests poured in.
There was one time, many years later, that I got a glimpse of just how far some MLAs were prepared to go to find money for constituency causes. I got a call from a constituent who was looking for money for his hockey team, which played out of Fairview’s Centennial Arena. I asked him how much he was looking for. He said, “Five thousand dollars.” I laughed. My usual donation was around a hundred dollars, maybe a little more if there was a team program and I could expense it as advertising. But five thousand dollars? There was no way. Then he said something that made me sit up: “But Bill Dooks gave five thousand dollars to his team. If he can do it, why can’t you?” I told him that I had no idea how Bill Dooks (at the time, a minister in the Conservative government and the MLA for Eastern Shore) had produced that kind of money out of his constituency budget, but I’d check.
I did check with Bill. After some back and forth with his executive assistant and a conversation in the backrooms of the legislature, he confessed that he’d allocated the money from his “ministerial discretionary fund.” I’d never heard of such a fund. I could only imagine what it was used for. When I was a new MLA, I might have exposed this story as a misuse of public money. But now I had a constituent with a need, and I wanted to say yes. I asked Bill if he would make a similar donation to the Fairview team from his ministerial discretionary fund. Without it ever being said out loud, Bill knew he’d been caught. There was only one way to keep it quiet. He made a donation, though it was, as I recall, a little less than he had given to his own team.
When we got into government and I was on the Treasury Board, I made sure there were no more ministerial discretionary funds.
Casework
The third category of constituency work is casework. That’s when the MLA goes to bat for an individual constituent who is having difficulty with the government.
There was a time, not very long ago, when casework was almost unheard of. Politicians have always answered their constituents’ calls for assistance, but the systematizing of casework as a core function of the MLA’s job appears to have been created by a pair of New Democrat MLAs from Cape Breton, Jeremy Akerman and Paul MacEwan, in the 1970s. They saw the electoral advantage of good casework. The gratitude can build personal support that wins votes and survives all political tides.
Before Akerman and MacEwan changed the game, almost all MLAs did their elected work part-time. They were paid accordingly. They continued on with whatever their regular job or business was. Akerman and MacEwan turned the role of MLA into a full-time job, but it took a while for the pay to catch up. Akerman wrote a book about those times, a slender but still valuable volume called What Have You Done For Me Lately?
Nowadays, casework dominates an MLA’s life. Every MLA puts aside their previous job or business and devotes themselves full-time to their job as MLA — which is mostly casework. At least an MLA’s pay now reflects the full-time nature of the job.
I remember well my very first casework call. It was the day after my election in 2001, and I was still riding high. A woman called me at home. (Throughout my time in politics, my home telephone number was in the phone book.) Her teenage daughter had lost her bus pass, and what was I going to do about it? I thought to myself, “Here we go.” I don’t know why anyone would call a politician about a lost bus pass, but I knew better than to say that out loud. I explained to her that Metro Transit was run by the municipality and that as her provincial representative there wasn’t much I could do about a lost bus pass. If she couldn’t get satisfaction from Metro Transit, maybe she could call her city councillor. This was a sensible answer, but she was not happy. She just wanted me to fix it, and I didn’t.
The nature of the casework varies around the province. In Halifax Fairview, our casework was dominated by social assistance. In other constituencies, the most common calls might be about roads, or jobs, or workers’ compensation. In Cape Breton the MLAs do employment insurance and Canada Pension Plan appeals, even though it’s a federal issue. Veteran MLA Paul MacEwan used to say there was nothing better than a CPP appeal to build support.
People are hazy about the responsibilities of the different levels of government, so we’d also get lots of casework calls about municipal and federal issues. I was fairly strict about referring people to their municipal councillor or their Member of Parliament, but not every MLA was. For the MLAs who had once been councillors themselves, it was especially difficult to resist municipal casework. Invariably they would complain about how busy they were, but it was their own fault. They just couldn’t say no. Russell Walker, who was the HRM councillor for Fairview throughout my time as MLA, gave me a friendly warning when I was first elected: he wouldn’t try to do my job, and I shouldn’t try to do his.
Besides the belief that casework is tied to electoral success, there is a more altruistic reason why MLAs do it: there are so many people who need help, and there’s really nobody else to help them. Legal aid covers only the poorest and is mostly limited to criminal and family law. The non-profits are well meaning, but their resources are limited, and advocacy isn’t usually why they were set up. Because the MLA has no job description, everything fits. So when the casework call comes in, it’s pretty well impossible to say no. You say yes, over and over, until one day you realize that casework is all you’re doing.
At first I threw myself into the casework. My legal background had given me good training in how to figure out what rules applied, what the issue was, what evidence to gather, how to figure out who the decision-maker was, and how best to argue for a favourable decision.
We had some real successes, and it felt good. An early win was to help one constituent finally get a decent workers’ compensation settlement for a knee injury. A veteran’s license plate was denied on a technicality, and I helped overturn the decision. (Then I drove past the veteran’s house for the sheer satisfaction of seeing the plate on his car.) I took on the cause of unfair ambulance fees, and the government gave up trying to collect the bills.
The work wasn’t always about the government. I saw, for example, how collection agencies’ harassing phone calls could stress people to the point of breakdown. They came to me as their MLA, but with my legal background I could step in, make sure they knew their legal rights, and act as a go-between. That was usually enough for the calls to stop.
When you get a good casework result, you’ve made someone’s life better. Your own life is better too. You can go home and say to your family, “I did something good today.” That, in a nutshell, is why MLAs would rather do constituency work than anything else.
Over time, I became more ambivalent about the casework. Often people’s problems went well beyond what we could help them with. Some of the cases were unfixable. Some of the expectations were unreasonable. You learn there are two sides, at least, to every story. Sometimes the MLA office became merely part of a circuit of dependence. If the purpose of casework was to build electoral support, it wasn’t doing that. If the purpose of casework was to connect people with their government, it wasn’t doing that. If the purpose of casework was to help me understand what government looked like on the ground, it was doing that, but only in glimpses.
After I became a Cabinet minister, I had much less time in the constituency office. My constituency time was reduced to a day a week, and less when the legislature was sitting. The nature of the work changed too, as people from all over the province used my constituency office to vent at the government.
I didn’t knock on doors after the 2009 election, even though I’d prided myself on canvassing between elections. I did canvass in Fairview for the 2011 federal election, but my presence on the doorstep allowed too many people to air their provincial grievances. I had a foretaste of what I’d be facing in the next provincial election, and it wasn’t an attractive prospect. Close contact with the constituency is a politician’s secret strength. When I fell out of touch with the people I was representing, my political strength was gone.
Most Canadian politicians report, at the end of their careers, that casework was the most satisfying part of their job. Despite my ambivalence toward the end, that might have been true for me too.
Except for one dreadful mistake.
John, a constituent, asked me to be a reference for a pre-sentence report on an impaired driving charge. I had met John during my first campaign in 2001 and ran into him and his wife many times afterwards. They were good people, and I was happy to help, even though I’d never done anything like this before. I spoke to the probation officer and told her what I knew, or thought I knew, about John’s situation, including his wife’s strong support in his struggle with alcoholism. I heard no more, assumed everything had gone fine, and forgot about it.
It was only a couple of years later, when I knocked on John’s door, that I heard what really happened. I knew immediately something was wrong because his wife, usually very friendly, was cool toward me. Eventually she invited me in, and I walked down the front hallway to the kitchen. John was sitting at the table. He didn’t get up. He talked about what I had done to him, and it took him a couple of minutes to realize I didn’t know what he was talking about, so he told me the story. The probation officer had focused on what I had said about John’s alcoholism — something about which, when you get right down to it, I knew nothing — instead of focusing on the real point of my comments, which was the support he would get from his wife if he were granted probation. My words had been used to justify a jail sentence, instead of the expected probation. The probation officer had rubbed it in, telling them that even their MLA didn’t support them. John and his wife thought I had betrayed them. That’s why they hadn’t told me.
There are a lot of ups and downs in politics, but nothing compared to the sick, cold feeling I felt as I stood in John’s kitchen.
It doesn’t matter how many people I helped. I can’t shake the sense of responsibility I feel for John going to jail. An MLA doing casework is catching only snippets of people’s lives, usually when they’re in crisis, but I had presumed to know more. When I finally heard what happened to John, he was already out of jail, so I couldn’t fight it. It was done, and it could not be undone.
No casework success would ever make up for that one awful mistake.
1 Throughout my time in the House (2001–2013) there were fifty-two seats. After redistribution in 2012, which took effect for the 2013 election, there are fifty-one seats. For the sake of consistency, I will use the number fifty-one throughout this book.