One of the things that should be top of mind for voters, but I find rarely is, is how well a candidate will be able to fulfill his or her duties if they get elected. To that end, after talking to a couple candidates and a campaign manager, I thought I'd talk to our local MP, Lloyd Longfield, about what his job is like. I enjoyed the conversation. I don't think a lot of it came as a surprise to me, but I suspect most people haven't had the same experiences. I hope what follows will help readers learn a bit more about what it's like to be a Member of Parliament.
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| Lloyd in one of his offices hard a work. Image provided by his staff. |
I think it's important for readers to savour Longfield's comments about not being able to do it all himself. This is an absolutely key point, one that I don't think a lot of people interested in politics have really thought much about. People who run for politics generally have strong opinions about how things should be in the world. The problem is, however, that the 21st century is a very complex time, and people can only really develop expertise in very narrow fields. Lloyd mentioned several times through the interview about how important it is to be part of a team. This includes staff, volunteers, and, colleagues in the Liberal party.
One of the things I remember hearing MPs talk about is the value of the work they do in committees. It's easy to get the impression that the work of Parliament is the sort of childish shenanigans you see during Question period. (Remember them? We haven't seen much lately because of COVID restrictions in Parliament---but they will probably begin again once things go back to normal.)
In actual fact, the idiocy we see from news clips is just as good an indicator of how Parliament works as Duck Dynasty is about life in rural America.
I went to the trouble of finding the page where Parliament posts the results of the committee system. If you look there, you'll see a link for the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (PACP---if the acronym looks odd, remember, we are a bilingual country and it makes sense in French). Contrary to the rampant partisanship we see on line, the committee has members from the Conservatives, NDP, Bloc, and, Liberals.
Looking through the web-page, I found a great many reports produced both by the committee, and the government. Pretty much at random, I downloaded their report titled Taxation of E-Commerce plus Government Response on the Fourteenth Report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts Entitled: Taxation of E-Commerce.
The report defines "E-Commerce" as it:
Includes physical products purchased online (e.g., clothes, books); digital products purchased and delivered online (e.g., music, videos); digital services (e.g., e-learning services, financial services); and supplies purchased online that are part of the sharing economy (e.g., accommodation sharing, ride sharing).
Consider this issue with regards to government revenue. I looked-up the Federal Budget in 2018 to see how GST revenue compares to other sources. According to a 2018 budget document, the feds predicted total tax revenues of $262.3 billion, with $36.5 billion of that from GST---or 14%. Now consider the tremendous growth in E-commerce that has happened during the recent pandemic (click on the following image to get better quality version).
If I want to hire a cab or stay in a hotel, I have to pay GST on my bills. But if I get an UBER or stay in an Air BNB---it gets kinda sticky. According to an official UBER page that helps their drivers and delivery people, they aren't working for a huge, multinational business but are instead independent contractors. This is important, because if an individual Canadian has a revenue of less than $30,000/year they don't have to pay GST on what their business charges. The same rule applies to Air BNB.
Not only does this notion that people are "sub-contractors" instead of employees short circuit the "$30,000 or less" rule, it also dramatically increases the cost of enforcement. That's because it's a lot easier to build a case for tax avoidance against a large hotel or cab company than lots of little guys with an extra room, or, a car and cell phone.
What this example---and lots more I could quote---means is huge, multinational corporations with billions in revenue have managed to avoid paying GST to the federal government. And that means that more money has to come out of our pay cheques in the form of income tax and the government has less to put into the services we'd like.
Figuring out how to deal with this tremendous change in the way people do business is enormously complex. Lots of on-line businesses are headquartered outside of Canada. And, as I stated before, sub-contracting causes problems with revenue collection and enforcement. And this doesn't get into other side issues---such as, "How do Canadian content rules work with You-Tube music channels? Do you treat them like a radio station?". This means that a lot of different elements of the federal bureaucracy need to be consulted and accommodated in any legislation proposed to deal with these problems. As the Canadian Revenue Agency states in the Government Response,
Four categories of platforms have been identified in the strategy including the sharing economy (which also covers accommodation sharing), the gig economy, peer-to-peer selling and social media influencers. Each category contains unique risks requiring tailored compliance interventions. (p-2)
The committees of Parliament do a lot of complex work, and, there are a lot of them. (I counted thirty of them on the website.)
Longfield tends to be low key about his work commitments, but it seems to me that from my brief reading, Parliamentary committee work could easily become a full time job just in itself.
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Lloyd talks about where he spends the majority of time---listening to constituents. This is absolutely imperative for a successful politician if they want to build support for re-election, and, come up with policies that work for the majority of people. From what he says, everything seemed to be aimed at listening to different people and coming up with a pragmatic set of policy options that help the most and annoy the least. This is a refreshing contrast to what I often hear from individuals who have a commitment to an ideological worldview and then try to force reality to fit into it.
Of course, anything he hears has to be balanced against everything else he learns from other people. And he has to follow the direction that the leader, cabinet, staff, other MPs, and, the Liberal party set. And there's always the problem of ending up in a silo where he never gets to meet people who are really different from him. But those are endemic problems for everyone---at least he's saying the right things.
One of the things that I never really understood---much to my detriment---when I was involved in the Green Party is how much of a politician's job involves just talking to other party members. You can't just come up with what you think are good ideas, you have to sell them to other people. Most folks won't read a policy brief, no matter how well it's written or how good a case it makes. So you have to sit down with them and talk face-to-face.
Part of this is just showing people that you aren't a total nut job because you have suggested something new (unfortunately, that was a big part of my failure as a Green.) Another part is learning how to express what you want in language that resonates with the person you're talking to. And part is working out quid quo pros with others where they support what you want in exchange for your support of what they want.
This sort of work is extremely time-consuming. It is pretty much invisible to anyone outside of the system. And it is absolutely essential to getting anything accomplished.
This is an important issue as staff not only help Lloyd do his other jobs, they also act as important intermediaries between the Canadian bureaucracy and the general public.
This is tremendously important because rules and regulations have grown exponentially over the last few decades while at the same time, resources for paper shuffling have been reduced. To cite my own case, I sponsored my wife to become a permanent resident through a process that took over two years. Just to contrast this to the past, I've talked to draft dodgers from the 1960s who told me that they crossed the boarder, spent a few hours with the Customs Officers, and, walked out official Landed Immigrants. No one expects this sort of service nowadays, but I believe it is currently far, far too hard to navigate a whole range of government services---at all levels of Canadian society.
I'm obviously not the only person who has had issues. If you look at Lloyd's website, you will see a whole section devoted to how his staff can help you with your problem.
As I said, this is a problem that ranges from municipalities through provinces to the federal level. No one can blame Lloyd for this, but it is a tremendously important part of his staff's job to help find "work arounds" that make sure that people are just needlessly delayed and horribly inconvenienced---instead of suffering some sort of life-destroying, Kafkaesque, nightmare. (Like what may have happened to various interpreters in Afghanistan who weren't able to jump through all the hoops imposed upon them before the Taliban took over.)
I can see this because I'm very detail-oriented and have a lot of experience poking around in the minutia of politics. But lots of people I meet don't have a similar background and they tend to be oblivious to the chaos behind the curtain. And because they don't know all the players behind the scenes, they get upset that things don't change any faster than they do.
Again, the importance of working with others instead of following your brilliant, ideological lodestar. I do think, however, that it might be possible to build a team of advisors who aren't elected officials to help you work on policy. So I think that small parties can go into office with the help of people with history and expertise. But I do acknowledge that it's easier to help out when you are being paid to do it. Moreover, I think that it's easier to hear what someone is saying if you have to get their vote to get your bill passed than if they have to convince you purely on the merits of the issue. (Politics is the realm of inflated egos, after all.)
I like Lloyd Longfield. He seems to genuinely care. And he also sounds like someone who would make an excellent manager. Guelph could do a lot worse than having a "smooth operator" like him representing us. But I didn't see much of the "fire in the belly" that I got from Michelle Bowman and Aisha Jahangir. That's understandable, they are underdogs trying to get their foot in the door of Parliament. Lloyd got tapped by a sitting MP and asked to replace him.
Politics is a strange place right now. The big problem we have right now, IMHO, is that many members of the voting public are pretty much oblivious to the huge problems that we've been ignoring for far too long. This constrains politicians because they simply cannot get too far ahead of the voters if they want to win election. But once they get into office, their hands are tied by those same voting dynamics. I've always seen the "point" of non-front row parties---like the Greens, NDP, Communist, etc---as being about educating the public during elections so the big parties don't get a totally free ride by pandering to people's prejudices. How successful they have been is impossible to judge, but that doesn't mean that the effort is a waste of time.
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Anyway, that's enough time for Lloyd Longfield. As he mentioned, mental health has suffered more than a little during this pandemic. (I know at times I've become a little frayed around the edges.) So try to remember to be nice to each other.
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Yes, the work of Sisyphus: To punish Lloyd for being such an unremarkable Liberal Party lapdog Parliamentarian.
ReplyDeleteWell, "Parliamentary Idiocy" is a real phenomenon. But reform is a "broad front" and consciousness raising, community organizing, unionization, etc, can still continue even if we have people who are technocrats rather than revolutionaries as our elected officials---at least until the "revolutionary moment" arrives.
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