A report card for MPs

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 3, 2012 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Samara finds that 55% of Canadians are satisfied with the state of our democracy, 20 points lower than a similar survey in 2004.

If you use the results from the Canada Election Study, satisfaction has fluctuated over the last fifteen years.

1997: 56%
2000: 63%
2004: 54%
2006: 59%
2008: 68%
2011: 64%

Samara also found that only 36% were satisfied with how MPs were doing their jobs. Specifically, MPs received failing grades for “holding the government to account,” “representing the views of constituents” and “managing individual constituents’ concerns.” And then there’s what MPs received a decent grade for.

Although this bleak report card suggests a need for all-round improvement, one result is particularly worrisome. Canadians awarded MPs the highest marks at representing the views of their party, fully 15 points higher than the mark they awarded for representing the views of the Canadians who elected  them to office.

In other words, Canadians feel MPs are doing  the best job at the very thing Canadians see as a low  priority: representing the views of their political parties.

Questioning the press gallery

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 27, 2012 at 3:32 PM - 0 Comments

Samara‘s latest report looks at political news coverage and how it compares to some frequent complaints.

Firstly, for these two stories, it seems that Canadian news media are not uniformly negative … Secondly, the political media are not nearly as preoccupied with partisan wrangling as is commonly believed … While our evidence challenges two of three common allegations against the news media, it supports the charge that the news media is not very informative. Our evidence suggests that citizens must sift through many news stories to find the information they seek. We also found a direct relationship between the focus of a news story and the amount of information about politics that it provides. It should be noted that it is not impossible to find informative process or political game stories, as we actually did find some. But the important point is that information on the issues in political game or process stories is rare.

(Note: Stories from Maclean’s were not included in this survey and so I am now free to sneer and shake my head at the failings of others.)

The survey covered a three-month period last fall—a majority government situation during which neither the New Democrats nor the Liberals had permanent leaders—and, in terms of Parliament Hill, looked specifically at coverage of three pieces of legislation. Given those terms, the second count—is the media too preoccupied with partisan brinksmanship?—likely requires further investigation. What sort of results, for example, would have come from a comprehensive investigation of the minority government years? Or perhaps the year before the next election?

The first count is a bit difficult to figure. I know and understand what Samara was trying to measure and I think I understand the general complaint, but I’m not sure I can say what the significance is of what they’ve found.

The third count, I think, is most relevant. I think it gets at a legitimate complaint and something the political press had to think seriously about. To what degree is political coverage difficult to understand or simply impenetrable to the casual observer? How many readers or viewers struggle to either keep up or, if coming to a story late, get up to speed? Anecdotal evidence is dangerous, but I’ll note here that the most popular thing I’ve written so far this year (at least in terms of pageviews) was this rough guide to C-38. That was published more than a month after the bill was tabled and owes a great deal to my editor’s judgment that it needed to be written at that point. I, having published dozens of blog posts and a magazine piece already on C-38, likely wouldn’t have otherwise paused to explain what was going on. But it seems to have met a need that existed.

This is ultimately, I believe, an argument for political coverage to be more comprehensive and thorough. (And online coverage more easily enables something like a rough guide to the budget implementation act: in a daily newspaper or nightly newscast that kind of piece might be lost or discarded by the next day, but online that rough guide can linger for more and more people to read and come back to.) And there is probably useful information in this Samara report for an industry that is presently struggling to figure out how to make itself valuable to consumers.

Making sausages

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 2:41 PM - 12 Comments

Andrew Potter questions our stated distaste for politics.

These may be descriptions of actual experiences, but they are also threadbare cultural clichés. This is what Orwell denounced as the corruption of thought by language, “gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else.” Is it possible that when it comes to political engagement, most Canadians are in a position somewhat similar to Schrödinger’s cat: they are neither alienated nor engaged until they are asked by a social scientist, at which point they just fall back on the default public vocabulary of a broken machinery of government manipulated by knavish politicians … Everyone loves justice, but everyone hates lawyers. Or how about lamb chops versus abattoirs? Politics is the process of democracy, law is the process of justice, and the abattoir is the process of getting to lamb chops. It isn’t clear that any big conclusions can or should be drawn from this, apart from a variation on Bismarck’s famous line: democracy is like sausages. It’s better not to see it being made.

They know what they don’t like

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 8:25 AM - 13 Comments

For its latest report on the state of our democracy, Samara consulted the public.

Overall, our research shows that declining political engagement is, at least in part, due to concrete experiences with politics. Indeed, participants’ answers belie the notion that the Canadian public is not knowledgeable or sophisticated enough to understand how their political system works. Rather, the people we spoke to are keenly aware of the forces that affect politics.

Greg Fingas looks on the bright side. Continue…

Outside and in

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Steve Paikin talks to Alison Loat about Samara’s latest report.

The patient is unresponsive

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 12:43 PM - 1 Comment

Jane Hilderman argues that people won’t vote if they don’t think the system is truly accountable.

As we are learning from our focus groups, more important to Canadians, who are less likely to participate, is a government that listens when a problem arises, works to fix it, and keeps promises it made. On this they were resoundingly clear: improve the legitimacy of our existing institutions (and by extension politicians, too) through better responsiveness and accountability. The rest will take care of itself.

On that note, Mark Dance has some thoughts on opening Parliament up to the digital word here, here and here. The second of those posts proposes what Mark deems a “Digital House.”

Battle of the drones

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 9:42 AM - 0 Comments

Chantal Hebert reads Samara’s latest report and challenges the current roster of MPs.

On Monday, the 2011 class of MPs will settle in the Commons for the first four-year mandate in a decade. It will be their loss if they do not use that time to expend more energy than their predecessors on challenging a system that is turning them into drones.

See previously: The rebel sell

The rebel sell

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 11:44 AM - 9 Comments

Andrew Potter considers the overarching theme of Samara’s findings.

To begin with, Samara’s findings underscore the profound amateurism that permeates our national politics. When the vast majority of members of Parliament, upon leaving office, feel obliged to insist that well, they never really wanted to be a politician in the first place, that only reinforces the broad cynicism that many people feel toward public life. After all, if our members of Parliament don’t take their jobs all that seriously, why should anyone else?

To amplify that point a bit, it raises the question of who is ultimately responsible for the health of Canada’s democracy. Institutions are not buildings, they are sets of norms and procedures designed to achieve certain goals, and being “institutionalized” simply means that you accept those norms and are committed to keeping them healthy. Parliament’s central function is to enable representative self-government, which in our system involves working within and through institutional structures that are centuries old.

Bless this mess

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 1:51 PM - 0 Comments

Samara has released its fourth report on the lives of MPs, including proposals for reform from those parliamentarians: reduce the power of political parties, fix Question Period, better train incoming MPs and so forth. Some of these proposals have been covered here and here. Coincidentally, Carleton’s Initiative for Parliamentary and Diplomatic Engagement will be conducting a two-day conference for MPs this weekend.

Samara has also launched a Democracy Index which will track the state of ours on an annual basis.

That best political book contest: but what about real influence?

By John Geddes - Thursday, August 4, 2011 at 7:01 PM - 17 Comments

It’s was fun watching the contest that Samara and the Writer’s Trust of Canada held to anoint the best Canadian political book of the past 25 years. The winner announced yesterday—selected by the gold-standard method of online voting—is Ezra Levant’s Shakedown: How Our Government is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights, which I haven’t gotten around to but I gather is about how our government is undermining democracy in the name of human rights.

No offence to fans of Shakedown (or any of the other finalists in the contest, which spotlighted some superb books), but when I scanned down the short list, something seemed to be missing. Not fine writing —Ron Graham’s One-Eyed Kings, for example, provides plenty of that. Not polemical verve—Andrew Cohen’s While Canada Slept is your ticket there. Not journalistic timeliness and historical insight—other books in the running offered these virtues.

Continue…

The last 25 years in books

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 30, 2011 at 12:10 PM - 8 Comments

Samara and the Writers’ Trust of Canada have released their shortlist for the best political book of the last quarter century.

Included is Right Side Up by our own Paul Wells.

The political profession

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 at 4:57 PM - 23 Comments

Kyle Crawford considers Parliament, cabinet, politics and professionalism.

While Canadian cabinets must always be composed of people possessing a delicate balance of skills, and considering regional and demographic representation, this analysis suggests that, when cabinet is chosen, political experience is valued very heavily – perhaps at the expense of other kinds of experience.

The concern that we are privileging one form of experience over another was also shared by MPs in Samara’s MP exit interviews. One MP-turned-cabinet-minister said, “There’s a lot more talent sitting on the backbenches than sitting in the front row,” adding that those with a long partisan history are usually appointed to cabinet, “whether with the Liberals or the Conservatives.” … Several cabinet ministers expressed surprise when their appointments had little to do with their pre-parliamentary knowledge or interests. “When I was appointed to cabinet, [the policy area] came as a complete surprise to me. I didn’t see it coming,” one MP said, adding that he had no background in the area.  

Less white, less old, less male

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 at 10:02 AM - 14 Comments

Alison Loat considers the 41st Parliament’s diversity.

Furthermore, Canadians also elected a higher number of women and visible minorities than in the previous Parliament. There are 76 female MPs – the most in history — meaning women are roughly a quarter of Parliament. Much of this is thanks to the NDP, whose caucus is 39 per cent female (the Liberals is 18 per cent and the Conservatives’ 17 per cent).

This Parliament is also home to a record number of visible minority MPs, with 29 or just over 9 per cent of Parliament. Again, the NDP is behind this increase, with nearly double the number of visible minority MPs than the other two national parties.

Is our politicians learning?

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 11:52 AM - 77 Comments

From the print edition—part of a series of stories on innovation—an attempt to tie together various threads on the matter of political leadership.

“Can you imagine a doctor saying, ‘Well, I never thought of becoming a doctor before’?” asks Alison Loat, co-founder of Samara, a charitable organization dedicated to the study of Canadian democracy. Indeed, one would probably not entrust their health to a brain surgeon who claimed to have come to the profession quite by accident, made it through a confusing and mysterious nomination process, and shown up for the first day of work feeling mostly unprepared for the surgeries they were expected to perform. And yet, we expect little more of our parliamentarians.

For sure, politics is a pursuit neither easily explained, nor particularly well-regarded. The job of elected office itself is subject to wide interpretation and powerful competing pressures. But if the political process is to be improved upon, it may require dealing with these issues of confusion and ill repute, up to and including how we might build a better politician.

How to fix our politics

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 5 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

“Can you imagine a doctor saying, ‘Well, I never thought of becoming a doctor before’?” asks Alison Loat, co-founder of Samara, a charitable organization dedicated to the study of Canadian democracy. Indeed, one would probably not entrust their health to a brain surgeon who claimed to have come to the profession quite by accident, made it through a confusing and mysterious nomination process, and shown up for the first day of work feeling mostly unprepared for the surgeries they were expected to perform. And yet, we expect little more of our parliamentarians.

For sure, politics is a pursuit neither easily explained, nor particularly well-regarded. The job of elected office itself is subject to wide interpretation and powerful competing pressures. But if the political process is to be improved upon, it may require dealing with these issues of confusion and ill repute, up to and including how we might build a better politician.

Two years ago, Loat and her team set out to conduct exit interviews with recently defeated or retired members of Parliament. In a series of reports based on those conversations, Samara has raised a number of questions about the political experience: from the nomination process to the power of political parties and the competing views on what exactly the job of an MP is supposed to be. First and foremost among these concerns is how many former MPs claimed to have come to elected politics quite inadvertently. To Loat, this goes to the very nature of how we talk about politics as something one might—or, rather, should not—aspire to. “We don’t encourage people to consider public life as a way to spend their time or something to consider in their careers,” she says.

Continue…

Just a number

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 27, 2011 at 9:01 AM - 5 Comments

Behold, our baby-faced new Parliament.

Samara and a group of volunteers–Janet Rodriguez, Tyler Somers, and Sarah Somerton–have been compiling information on the new MPs, including their year of birth. This information has proved enlightening. For instance, the average age of an MP taking office in the 40th Parliament was 52. The average age of an MP taking office in the 41st Parliament is 51 … And our new MPs are also a year younger than their more seasoned counterparts were when they entered politics. Given this information, perhaps the media’s focus on the youth of the new Parliament is a little exaggerated.

Nonetheless, a few points of interest. Continue…

It's their parties

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 11 Comments

Alison Loat talks to Steve Paikin about Samara’s latest report.

Try, try again

By Erica Alini - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 12:24 PM - 0 Comments

Andreas Krebs considers the electoral history of the 41st Parliament.

In this election, the number of MPs who had previously ran increased to 102, or 33% of the House of Commons … Another way to look at “persistence” is the average number of election defeats per MP. On average, each MP in the House lost a total of 0.48 elections prior to winning their seat. If we break this number down by party, however, the NDP has a higher previous-losses average than other parties.

Party and power

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 18, 2011 at 10:19 AM - 26 Comments

Samara has released its latest report on the life of an MP.

The MPs’ insistence that important work was done only in private raises some serious questions for Canadian democracy and citizens’ ability to engage with it. After all, how are Canadians to observe and understand the work of their elected representatives— to say nothing of their ability to hold them accountable—if all the “real work” is done away from the public gaze? And if the MPs were so embarrassed by the behaviour on display in the House of Commons, why didn’t they do something to change it?

This leads to the second major trend: the consistent observation from the MPs that the greatest frustrations they faced during their political careers came from within their own political party. 

Three questions

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at 8:43 AM - 16 Comments

Alison Loat poses three questions for the party leaders.

First, how do you define your job description, both as an MP and as a party leader?

Second, what concrete steps will you take to make politics, and political parties, more relevant to the citizenry at large?

Third, what are you going to do to bring constructive, public debate to citizens?

The House: 'What is the problem with ambition in public life?'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 12:43 PM - 16 Comments

Rather than simply lament for how little attention is paid to the institution, I thought I’d ask some smart people if they had anything to say in response to my piece about the state of the House of Commons. Over the next little while, those responses will appear here. Next up, Alison Loat.

It seems that few people who become political leaders in this country said they actually wanted the job in the first place. Almost without exception, the MPs we spoke to described themselves as “outsiders” who were cajoled into running for office. Samara’s introductory report on these exit interviews is called “The Accidental Citizen?” because of how accidentally the MPs described their journeys to public life. We might as well have called it “The Reluctant Citizen.”

Most every MP to whom we spoke said they didn’t stand up and ask to run for office. Rather, it wasn’t until someone asked him or her to run that said they even considered it. We heard numerous stories from former MPs talking about how they turned down requests to run numerous times before finally agreeing – often begrudgingly – to run for Parliament.

Read on at Samara’s blog.

Read the rest of this series here.

The best and worst in democracy

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, February 1, 2011 at 12:57 PM - 62 Comments

The anti-prorogation rallies of January 23rd win Samara’s search for the best moment in Canadian democracy last year.

Does this defensive trend bear ill for the health of Canadian democracy?  According to Professor Chantal Mouffe, “Democracy is a fragile construction: never definitively acquired, it is a conquest which has to be forever defended against possible attacks. The prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions, nor to relegate them to the private sphere…but to mobilize these passions, and give them a democratic outlet.”  This suggests that these protests may, in fact, testify to a democratic culture that is more robust than we realize.

The Year in Democracy (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, January 6, 2011 at 10:35 AM - 141 Comments

David Eaves nominates the census debate.

That’s why at a time when Canadian political coverage tries to cleave the country’s citizens into different, competing groups – rural versus urban, French versus English, left versus right – I think the best moment in Canadian Democracy was seeing over 500 groups including all levels of government, non-profits from across the country, business organizations, rural communities, and virtually all the major religious organizations come together and challenge the government with one voice … The decision and the process surrounding it may be one of the year’s darkest moments for Canadian democracy but the country’s reaction was definitely one of our brightest.

The Year in Democracy

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 at 2:40 PM - 13 Comments

Samara is soliciting nominations for the best in democracy for 2010 and Alison Loat notes the trend of the current entries.

From the submissions made so far, it would seem that Canadian democracy is on the defensive. Many of the entries were public outcry in reaction to a policy decision, a government move, or even an individual politician. What does this say about Canadian democracy? Does democracy always need defending?