The story of the years between my first election in 2001 and winning government in 2009 is the story of Darrell’s slow, patient build of NDP support. He was good at it, and it showed in the steadily improving election results and increasing poll numbers. The NDP went from eleven seats in 1999, to fifteen in 2003, to twenty in 2006.
Unfortunately, I am not patient by nature. I found the pace excruciatingly slow. I was in politics to participate in government decision-making, not to write letters to the editor as a member of the opposition. But in our system of government, the opposition is entirely shut out of decision-making.
So during those eight long years I had to content myself with constituency work and find ways to keep myself — and my party — on top of the issues and in the news. I found my political home on the public accounts committee of the legislature.
This same period also saw a big blow-up between me and Darrell over MLA expenses — a blow-up that would colour the rest of our working relationship.
When Darrell became leader of the NDP in 2001, he was a virtual unknown. By the fall of 2006, he moved ahead of Premier Rodney MacDonald in the polls as the most popular choice for premier, and he stayed there right through the 2009 election. The growth in Darrell’s popularity was not sudden, and it was not an accident.
New Democrats had been terrifically disappointed by the results of the 1999 provincial election. Expectations were high after the breakthrough in 1998, when the NDP went from four seats to nineteen. But in 1999 the voters didn’t let the young, aggressive Robert Chisholm take the next step into the premier’s office, preferring instead the reassuring, grandfatherly John Hamm. NDP strategists like Darrell Dexter and Dan O’Connor took careful note.
So when Darrell became interim leader in 2001 and then leader in 2002, he was determined to change the image of the NDP. If John Hamm was everybody’s grandfather, Darrell would be everybody’s uncle. If Alexa McDonough had been shocked and appalled, Darrell would be calm and measured. If Robert Chisholm had done everything he could to bring down the MacLellan government, Darrell would demonstrate his willingness to make the legislature work for the benefit of the people.
Perhaps because of his family background — his father was a sheet metal worker, and Darrell grew up between rural Queens County and north-end Halifax — Darrell has a keen sense of what matters to working families. His political focus was never on ideological battles but on pocketbook issues like auto insurance premiums, health coverage for seniors in nursing homes, and the cost of home heating.
Auto insurance premiums in Nova Scotia went skywards starting in 2002. I remember clearly the first call I got in my constituency office. It was from a retired firefighter living on School Avenue in Fairview. He had just opened his annual renewal from Allstate, and the premium had tripled from the previous year. Many more calls came in over the ensuing weeks and months, and the same thing was happening in other MLA offices. It was clear there was a widespread crisis of affordability. Having a car, or access to a car, is a practical necessity for most Nova Scotians outside the urban core of Halifax. So this was an issue with tremendous resonance.
Auto insurance was a subject on which Darrell was very comfortable. As a lawyer, he had represented people seeking compensation for injuries suffered in motor vehicle collisions. He had even gone as far as taking the insurance adjuster’s course, just so he would understand the thought process of the insurers he would be negotiating with. There was nobody in the legislature who knew auto insurance better than Darrell. It was the perfect issue for Darrell to build his profile.
On behalf of the NDP, Darrell staked out a position in favour of public ownership of auto insurance. Public ownership has been enacted by NDP governments in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. Once public auto insurance is in place, it is never repealed, even by very conservative governments.
My point here is not to argue the merits of public auto insurance, although I do believe it works well. Skyrocketing premiums hit almost every family in the pocketbook, and people everywhere saw a steady, knowledgeable leader proposing what sounded like a plausible solution to the crisis. The proposal for public auto insurance resonated with party members, too, because it was a policy closely identified with the NDP and its hero, Tommy Douglas of Saskatchewan.
The auto insurance crisis was a hot issue in the 2003 provincial election. In the end, the Conservatives won that election, but they were reduced to a minority. With the support of the Liberals, they passed auto insurance reforms that succeeded in slashing premiums while keeping the industry in private hands. With the sharp drop in price, the auto insurance issue evaporated as a political issue. Darrell’s reputation, though, was on the rise.
The issue that really cemented his public standing was his campaign to stop charging seniors in nursing homes for the cost of their health care. Nova Scotia has a publicly funded health care system, as we all know, but not everything is paid for. Strangely, residents of nursing homes were charged the full cost of their health care. If they weren’t in a nursing home, the public system would cover it. If they were in a nursing home, they had to pay for it themselves.
Unlike auto insurance, this issue did not come up in a crisis. It was a carefully planned campaign. The idea was Darrell’s own, based on situations he’d seen as an MLA and as the NDP’s health critic. He saw what was happening, he knew it was wrong, and he set about to fix it.
The seniors’ health care campaign started in 2002. At first it was swamped by more prominent issues like auto insurance. After the fall of 2003, when auto insurance reform was passed and premiums started dropping, the seniors’ health care campaign emerged as the NDP’s main policy focus.
The issue was a winner for Darrell on so many levels. Ending the practice of charging seniors in nursing homes for their health care was so obviously the right thing to do. Darrell emerged as a champion for seniors. He showed himself to be a defender of publicly funded health care, which — like his stance on auto insurance — resonated with party members. He showed he was a force for positive change.
At first the Hamm government resisted, but eventually they realized that resistance was futile. They included coverage for seniors’ health care in the 2004 budget. They tried to take credit, but that too was futile. Everyone knew the credit belonged to Darrell Dexter.
The third key campaign that Darrell undertook was to take provincial sales tax off home heating. Nova Scotia winters are cold, space heating is a necessity, and the cost of both furnace oil and electricity was climbing steadily. Darrell’s message was simple: the necessities of life should not be taxed, and in Canada, home heat is a necessity. This campaign started in 2005, as I recall, and was a key platform commitment in the 2006 election.
The Conservatives again had their backs to the wall, just like on the nursing home issue, so again they matched Darrell’s promise. After they won the 2006 election, with a further reduced majority, they implemented an 8 percent household energy rebate, effective January 1, 2007. The campaign was so clearly identified with Darrell that the Conservatives did all the work, and Darrell got all the credit.
The energy rebate was never popular inside the Department of Finance. When I was finance minister, senior staff would suggest to me every year that the energy rebate be dropped. I imagine that the Conservative government received the same advice. In an attempt to control costs, they cut back on the rebate in the 2008 budget. All that did was give Darrell an opening to promise to restore it. When we won the 2009 election, that’s exactly what we did, in the first budget I delivered as finance minister.
Of course much more happened during the years in opposition under Darrell’s leadership, but these three campaigns — auto insurance, health care for seniors in nursing homes, and home heating — epitomize the work he did to earn, slowly and steadily, Nova Scotians’ trust. He wasn’t flashy or loud, but he knew what mattered to people and he got things done. He was the uncle, the brother, the friend that everybody wanted to have. By the time of the 2009 provincial election, all I had to do on the doorsteps of Halifax Fairview was mention that I knew Darrell, and faces would light up. People liked him. They really, really liked him.
Finding My Stage: The Public Accounts Committee
While Darrell was building his own image — something from which all of us benefited — I found my own favourite stage during the opposition years: the legislature’s public accounts committee (PAC).
Most committees of the Nova Scotia legislature are a waste of time. The structure of the committees is antiquated. There is no committee, for example, that clearly covers health, or justice, or transportation. Unlike most other legislatures, legislation isn’t automatically referred to committees, so the committee members never develop real subject matter expertise. The committees meet monthly, if they meet at all. They might listen to a civil servant talk about the department’s plans, or they might listen to an organization explain how it operates. This is all worthy stuff, though dull, but it could easily be done in more productive ways. For the members, a committee meeting is an easy way to pass a couple of hours. Little or no preparation is required, any real work is done by caucus staff or committee staff, and there is no follow-up. The MLAs collect their per diems and go home. Nothing changes. It is exceptionally rare for a legislative committee to have any impact on government decision-making.
The public accounts committee is different.
The PAC’s mandate is to examine what the government’s actually doing with the billions approved by the legislature. Effectively, the PAC’s mandate covers everything, because every issue has, on some level, a financial or operational element. The PAC also works closely with the auditor general, who attends every session and uses the PAC as his means of communicating with the legislature. As a result, the PAC is usually working with much better, more rigorous information than other committees.
The PAC is the only committee that meets in the legislative chamber, the only committee that is broadcast on television, and the only committee that is routinely covered by reporters. It is also the only committee that meets every week. The golden opportunity offered by the PAC was the chance to direct a sustained line of questioning at key decision-makers. That opportunity was not available anywhere else, and certainly not in the stylized, partisan theatre of question period. In fact ministers were never called as witnesses by the PAC, so the questions and answers at the PAC have a substance that question period entirely lacks.
I was a member of the public accounts committee for almost my whole time in opposition, from September 2001 to our election to government in June 2009. For six of those eight years, we faced a minority government. Committee membership reflects the composition of the House, so during the minority years the opposition controlled the committees. We could outvote the government members and put any item on the agenda, and we did, routinely, choose topics and witnesses that were sure to make the government squirm. For two hours every Wednesday morning, I had a political stage, and I used it to maximum advantage.
As a young lawyer, I had been lucky to work with excellent trial lawyers like Ron Pugsley, Joel Pink, and Jonathan Stobie. One lesson stuck: prepare, prepare, prepare. If you’re going to question a witness, you have to know the material at least as well as they do, if not better. You also have to know all the ways witnesses try to wriggle out of an answer and all the ways to pin them to the wall. So I worked hard, often late into the night, reading documents, doing my own research, writing my own questions. Preparation for the public accounts committee became my political focus. When we look back at the controversies that dogged the Conservative government, they all ended up, sooner or later, in front of the PAC.
The first big controversy, in the fall of 2001, was the financial collapse of Knowledge House, a Halifax-based e-learning company. The consequences of that collapse are still working their way through Nova Scotia’s legal system, more than a dozen years later. The provincial government’s relatively small investment in Knowledge House was a tiny corner of the story, but it was enough to justify calling Dan Potter, the company’s CEO, before the PAC. It was the first time he had been questioned in public, and it received lots of attention in the media.
When Conservative minister Ernie Fage resigned from Cabinet in early 2006 over a conflict of interest — involving an economic development loan to a company with which he did business — the PAC was the forum for questioning the department, former premier John Hamm, and Fage himself. Both the government and Fage had been less than forthcoming about the circumstances around his resignation, so there was an inherent drama in Fage’s appearance. The reporters couldn’t get enough of it. Fage did eventually return to Cabinet, after the 2006 election, but resigned again within a few months after driving away from a motor vehicle collision.
The PAC also delved into the Provincial Nominee Program, in which would-be immigrants invested in a Nova Scotia business in exchange for speeded-up immigration processing. The program had the best of intentions and the worst of results. The “investments” turned out to be mostly a sham, and the controversy dogged the MacDonald government through 2007 and 2008. A huge volume of documents was handed over to the PAC, and I spent weeks over the Christmas holidays reading them all.
One of my favourite political moments came during one of these PAC sessions on the Provincial Nominee Program. The secrecy of Cabinet documents is supposed to be sacred, but I had laid my hands on the Cabinet memorandum underlying the program. The civil servants who were testifying that day were shocked: How had a Cabinet document gotten into the hands of the opposition? The government sure wanted to know the answer, but they never found out, and I swore to my source that I would never tell.
Over the years, the PAC looked into all aspects of the gambling industry, including allegations of conflict of interest at the Atlantic Lottery Corporation; wait times, pharmacare, and doctors’ pay in the health system; pensions, liquor, and gasoline prices; the Conservatives’ peculiar obsession with all-terrain vehicles and their purchase at taxpayers’ expense of ATVs for kids; and much more besides. Sometimes the PAC created the news, sometimes we followed the news. But always we were near the centre of whatever was hot in Nova Scotia politics.
Ministers don’t sit on the public accounts committee, so my PAC days were over after the 2009 election, when I was named finance minister. The best compliment I got was from the reporters, who told me that the PAC was never as interesting after I left.
The February 2010 auditor general’s report on MLA expenses dominated the news for months and was a major factor in the collapse of public support for the Dexter government. But the story of the MLA expense scandal didn’t start in 2010. It started many years before. My personal entanglement with the expenses story started shortly after I was first elected in 2001.
An Introduction to the Crazy World of MLA Expenses
How can I possibly describe the crazy expense system that MLAs built for themselves? How can I explain the psychology that allowed MLAs to persuade themselves that this crazy system was acceptable, even necessary?
For starters, one-third of an MLA’s remuneration was tax-free. I don’t know why, and nobody else seemed to either. Supposedly it was originally meant to cover expenses, but over the years the House of Assembly had created plenty of categories of expenses, and the tax-free status remained long after the justification for it had disappeared.
There was a $45 per diem for sitting in the House; there were expenses for running a constituency office, with a maximum of $2,700 per month with receipts; and there was another category, not requiring receipts, for miscellaneous expenses. There was also a lump-sum “franking” or postage allowance, not requiring receipts. This was rolled together with a travel allowance, designed to compensate MLAs for the cost of travel within their constituency, but for which no mileage log had to be kept. The “franking and travel” allowance was a large, sweet bonus, in the neighbourhood of $10,000, arriving just before Christmas each year.
Each of these categories grew steadily. From 2001 to 2009, the per diem grew from $45 to $84. The receiptable expenses grew from $2,700 to $4,500 per month. An annual “new technology” allowance of $5,000 was added, which allowed MLAs to buy the latest electronic gear. The non-receiptable expenses grew from $500 per month when I was first elected in March 2001, to $600 in September 2001, to $700 in April 2002, and to $1,000 per month in January 2004.
The worst abuse was the $45,000 allowance when an MLA left office. There was already a severance payment provided for by law, but the MLAs didn’t want to put a bill through the House to increase it, so they crafted another way to shovel money to departing colleagues. The mechanism they found was the non-receiptable allowance for closing down a constituency office. This amount went from the normal monthly allowance for three months, to $5,000 per month for three months, to $15,000 per month for three months. No receipts, no tax, no publicity.
Let’s be frank: Expenses were back-door income. Nobody wanted to push a wage increase through the House. There is never a good time, politically, for an MLA wage increase. So instead there was agreement on all sides to pump up the expenses — which weren’t really expenses.
And finally, there was the rule that anything bought for an MLA’s constituency office belonged to the MLA personally. Once an MLA left office, anything in the office was his or hers to keep. Needless to say, this curious rule gave MLAs an incentive to buy only the best for their taxpayer-funded offices. Eventually, that sofa or chair or television or computer or coffee maker could wind up in their house. Not everybody took advantage of this loophole, but plenty did.
But there was more to it than money-grubbing. In order to understand what else was going on, we need first to understand how decisions were made about an MLA’s salary and expenses.
Who Made the Decisions?
The House of Assembly, as the supreme budget-making body, decides how much to pay its own members. To deal with this conflict of interest, the task of setting MLA salaries was delegated by law to an annual, independent commission. Typically the commission had three members, and none could be an MLA. The commission would hold hearings, gather information, and make recommendations.
Although the commission’s recommendations were to be implemented automatically, the legislature could override them, and frequently did. As a result, MLA pay grew only in fits and starts, and for long stretches didn’t grow at all.
The whole expense system was separate from pay and was governed by a committee called the Internal Economy Board (IEB). The IEB made the rules and decided how to interpret them. The members were all MLAs. The IEB was chaired by the Speaker, who is effectively the House’s CEO. It also included the Deputy Speaker, the three House leaders, the finance minister, and two other members from the government caucus.
Because of this membership, the government always had a majority on the IEB. In a very real sense, all IEB decisions were government decisions. If the government wanted something to happen, it happened. If the government didn’t want something to happen, it didn’t. But the IEB generally tried to work on consensus, not on party lines.
Or at least I think it did. All meetings of the IEB were held in secret. Minutes were kept, but were closely guarded. When I asked Dan O’Connor — Darrell’s chief of staff and the guardian of the NDP’s copy of the minutes — if I could see the minutes, I found they were written with deliberate obscurity. It was impossible to know who had initiated a proposal, what arguments were made for or against, and what cost analysis, if any, was done. It was all hidden behind phrases like “After discussion, it was agreed that…” All that we in the NDP caucus knew was what we were told by our House Leader, first John Holm (1998–2003), then Kevin Deveaux (2003–2007), and finally Frank Corbett (2007–2009). We could never be sure that we were getting the true story, or the whole story, about what happened at the IEB.
The whole edifice depended on secrecy. This was the key: the IEB could erect a crazy system of expenses only if no MLA stepped out of line and talked about it publicly. On one occasion Murray Brewster of the Canadian Press was tipped about an IEB-approved increase in the MLA mileage allowance. There had been a spike in gas prices. The government-controlled IEB voted to increase the mileage allowance for MLAs, but the government would not do the same for civil servants and didn’t want civil servants to know that MLAs would be getting a higher rate.
When the Canadian Press story appeared on the front page of the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, on October 24, 2005, the IEB speedily reversed itself, but grudgingly. The House Leaders’ main interest was finding out where Murray got the story. He got it from me, but they never found out. I was fighting against the worst of the expense increases, but I still wasn’t brave enough to speak publicly.
Expenses Gone Wild
John Holm was the NDP’s House leader during my first term as an MLA. Whenever the subject of MLA remuneration came up in caucus, he made clear that he’d had enough of wage freezes.
Frankly, I agreed with him. In my opinion, an MLA salary should rise by the same amount — not more, not less — as other civil service salaries. You could argue for some other measure, but in the end, the civil service comparison is the fairest. And yet the wage freezes continued. As a result, there was a direct connection between the freeze on MLA salaries and the behind-the-scenes pumping up of expense allowances.
There was another factor too. The NDP wanted to improve and standardize the wages of our constituency assistants (CAs). After the 1998 election, the wages and working conditions of our CAs was all over the map, and some were frankly unfairly low. The allowance for constituency offices was also under the control of the IEB. So our House leader, first John Holm and then Kevin Deveaux, would go to the IEB to argue for higher allowances for constituency offices. They told us, when they reported back to our caucus, that in return they had to agree to proposals for higher MLA expenses. They would always finger Manning MacDonald, the Liberal House leader, as the one who was asking for higher expense allowances. For a while, it seemed that every IEB meeting was devoted to discussions about how to increase expenses.
But I don’t know how true all of this is. I am no fan of Manning MacDonald, and I could easily believe that he was behind the steady increases in expense allowances. But maybe his reputation made him a convenient scapegoat. Since the IEB met in secret, and since the minutes were obscurely written, there’s no way to know exactly how the horse-trading played out.
What I do know is that expense allowances continued to rise, as did allowances for constituency offices. The end result was decent wages for constituency assistants, and enough money to provide professional service to constituents. Those are good things. But the quid pro quo was a crazy, indefensible system of expense allowances.
Lifting the Lid, Finally
I raised concerns about expenses almost as soon as I was elected in 2001. I looked at the system and knew it was wrong. I objected at caucus meetings and caucus retreats. Occasionally I was supported by other members of the caucus, especially Maureen MacDonald, but usually I was speaking alone. For four years I gave in to the peer pressure not to speak publicly. I collected the allowances like everyone else. When I finally decided to speak out, it was because I’d had my arm twisted one time too many.
In the fall sitting of 2005, the government introduced Bill 252, an amendment to the House of Assembly Act. The purpose of the bill was to eliminate the MLA pay commission for that year and to substitute a 2.9 percent wage increase, which was the same pay increase payable across the civil service. The bill also, finally, eliminated the non-taxable portion of an MLA’s salary.
I supported those changes, but I also wanted the MLA pay commission to look more broadly at expenses. Eliminating the commission and legislating an increase meant that expenses would, again, escape public scrutiny. I wanted to see our caucus really, finally, tackle the expense mess. Bill 252 was just another way of kicking the can down the road. But I caved in again, feeling miserable, and I voted for the bill on second reading along with every other MLA.
But only a few days later, we received word that Premier Hamm would propose a resolution to appoint someone to look at the question of MLA compensation. All of the House Leaders had agreed to support it. The resolution was artfully worded, but the key was that the report would be filed after the next election, whenever that might be. Hamm had announced a month before that he would be stepping down as premier and Progressive Conservative leader as soon as a new leader could be chosen.
The effect of the resolution, as I saw it, was that Premier Hamm was sidestepping, once and for all, any responsibility for the crazy growth in expense allowances that had happened on his watch. The basic structure was in place when Hamm came to power in 1999, but it was under his government that the craziness took full flight. Manning MacDonald and the Liberals may or may not have been behind the push to increase allowances, but the structure of the IEB meant that nothing could happen without government support. And the government that allowed it to happen was led by John Hamm.
Now, on November 3, 2005, it was within the power of the House to restore some sense to the whole secret expense mess. It was time to do the right thing. John Hamm no longer had to worry about keeping his caucus in line or keeping the minority government together. That would be his successor’s concern. But with Resolution 5183, all sides were kicking the can down the road again, just as they had kicked it only a few days before with Bill 252.
I knew, finally, that I would not cave in. It was time to speak up, and speak publicly. Only a few days before, I had felt miserable when I voted for Bill 252. To have this resolution follow so quickly, and to be expected to vote for it, was too much. I’d had enough of the hypo-
crisy and the peer pressure. I told my caucus that I would not vote for the resolution.
There is an arcane but crucial bit of House procedure that you have to understand: When a resolution is introduced, there is a mandatory two-day waiting period before it can be voted upon. The only exception is if the waiting period is waived by all MLAs present. In other words, a single no is enough to kill, or at least stall, a resolution. The premier’s resolution on expenses was to be introduced on the last day of the House’s fall sitting — a common stratagem by MLAs to minimize public attention — so if I insisted on being in the House and refusing consent, the resolution would fail.
When the premier was informed, prior to the House going in, that there was not unanimity within the NDP caucus, he decided to go ahead and present the resolution anyway. I still do not understand why. I believe he was misinformed about the nature of the dissent. He must have thought that one or more New Democrats were dissenting because they wanted richer expense allowances. In this scenario, going ahead with the resolution would expose the NDP as less than high-minded idealists.
I knew that my refusal of unanimous consent would attract attention. I sat in the back room, behind the chamber, my heart thumping. I had never voted against my own party before.
Darrell had missed the caucus meeting that day and was late arriving at the House. When he did arrive, I was sitting alone in the back room. He had heard I was unhappy. We had a very brief discussion in which I confirmed that I would not support the resolution, nor would I absent myself from the vote. I have never seen Darrell so angry. He swore. He was carrying a sheaf of papers, and he threw it, not directly at me, but past me. He immediately left Province House and didn’t return.
When Premier Hamm rose, he read the resolution and asked for unanimous consent. I looked at the Speaker and said “No.” For the first and only time in my legislative career, I voted contrary to the wishes of my leader and my caucus.
Manning MacDonald, the Liberal House leader, immediately jumped up to take a partisan shot. He said he was “extremely disappointed” that a “reform” resolution could not make it through the House. He said he thought there was prior agreement the resolution would pass. And indeed there had been agreement — among the House leaders — and usually that’s all it took. Not this time.
Shortly afterwards, I got a note from Jean Laroche, CBC’s legislative reporter and a veteran of the press gallery. I still remember the exact words: “Care to come out and explain your vote?” At this point, the reporters believed the Conservative and Liberal spin that I was disappointed not to get more generous allowances. I walked out to the waiting scrum and told my story. I shocked them, I think, because they were expecting to hear an MLA begging for higher allowances. Instead, I was lifting the lid, finally, on MLA expenses.
Premier Hamm later set up the MLA remuneration committee anyway, even without a House resolution as authority. Hamm claimed the resolution had been blocked, but that was false. The only thing that had been blocked was an immediate vote. The government would have been within its rights to call a debate on the resolution two days later, and the motion would have passed by 50–1. But it was the last day of the sitting, and there was no time for a debate, and except from me, no desire for one. The fact the commission was set up anyway demonstrates the resolution was window-dressing. Its purpose was only to secure the support, and the silence, of all parties in the House.
Was this, then, a great victory? Hardly. The MLA remuneration commission, chaired by former MP Barbara McDougall, reported after the 2006 election. The status quo was more or less frozen. Now that everyone knew there was an MLA who would object, there were no new proposals to pump up the allowances. For the rest of the MacDonald government’s term (2006–2009), the system stayed pretty much as it had been before the McDougall report. The problem, of course, was that this post-2006 status quo was a status quo of indefensible rules. The auditor general’s report in February 2010, which finally blew up the whole sorry mess, covered precisely this period. It did not go further back than 2006.
I got no support from other MLAs. There were a couple of MLAs on our side of the House who said they agreed with me, but they wouldn’t say so publicly. A Conservative minister, David Morse from Kings South, approached me in the parking lot of Province House to say that he thought I was right, but he too declined to say so publicly. This kind of thing was more annoying than helpful. I was under pressure from my caucus to keep quiet and not talk to the media any more. I surely could have used even just one more voice of support, especially from someone on the government side. But those MLAs who agreed with me — and there were only a few — were afraid to break the code of silence.
I heard later — many years later — that Darrell took the whole episode very hard. He left the legislature that day and didn’t come back, and in fact dropped out of sight for several weeks afterwards. He took my contrary vote as a significant, direct challenge to his leadership. He never fully trusted me again. I would feel the repercussions for years, right into our time in government, which at that point was almost four years in the future.
Here’s what I learned about politics from eight years in opposition.
Being in politics makes you dumber, and the longer you’re in politics, the dumber you get. That’s because you learn habits of behaviour and speech that serve political purposes but are at odds with the way normal people think and talk. As the habits become engrained, you no longer even notice that you’re thinking and acting like a politician. You do it because it works.
These are the Rules of the Game:
Learning the Rules of the Game
To the new politician, the Rules of the Game seem foreign. Some vow to resist. They got into politics “to make a difference.” Inevitably, though, the biggest difference is in themselves. They are socialized into the ways of the tribe or they leave.
Sometimes the socialization process happens suddenly. The leader or a caucus veteran sits the new politician down — usually because he or she has caused some sort of trouble — and lays down the law. “This is how things are done around here,” the veteran says, “and if you want to stay in this caucus, here’s what you’ll do.” The new politician has been warned, and doesn’t like it. The new politician wants to belong. The new politician wants to be liked and valued by the party leadership. The new politician wants to be re-elected. So new politicians do what they’re told.
Usually, the socialization process is more gradual. The new politician watches who succeeds and who doesn’t and starts mimicking the successful ones. The ones who follow the Rules of the Game get ahead — with the party leadership, with the reporters, with the voters. The new politician discovers through experience that the Rules of the Game are the best way to handle the challenges of political life. The socialization process is so gradual that the politician may not even notice. The Rules of the Game don’t announce themselves. They just seep in.
So one way or the other, every successful politician follows the Rules of the Game. The ones who don’t follow them eventually leave politics: they become disillusioned and quit, or they are discredited, or they are defeated.
The socialization process is complete when the politician starts teaching the Rules of the Game to those who have just joined the tribe.