MEGASTARS

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.

- Jack Layton, Official Opposition Leader, August 2011

Canada’s New Parliament

By Essam Farag

The last election in the Canadian Parliament is exceptional for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it featured the youngest ever elected official, Pierre-luc Dusseault, who is a second-year political science student at Universite de Sherbrooke. The second characteristic is the highest number of women MP's elected to the house. Furthermore, this parliament will have the youngest speaker in the history of the House of Commons. The fourth that the new configuration of parties, where the Liberal party lost a significant number of seats, the perennial strong showing of the Bloc Quebecois came to an end as they nearly vanished from Parliament, and the New Democratic Party (NDP) won handsomely to assume the role of official opposition against the conservative majority.

Youngest MP

Few can brag in their sophomore political science class that they are reviewing parliamentary bills rather than doing class readings. Pierre-luc Dusseault can do so as he assumed his position among elected officials in the Canadian parliament. He joined the National Democratic Party (NDP) just two years before he decided running for election. He said that when he began his campaign, despite the tremendously ambitious task he was going to pursue, he insisted he would enter the race with one goal in mind, victory! And in winning his seat, he became Canada’s first ever teenaged Member of Parliament in the last election.

When asked about his education, Dusseault has said he intends to complete his studies but that the degree will have to wait until his official responsibilities in Parliament are attended to. As a new MP, the teenager will get a salary of $157,000 salary, definitely a far more handsome wage than most of his college peers who will likely live in the university dorms and work part-time to cover tuition expenses. The young man from Sherbrooke, Quebec, was elected when he was 19 and took office two days after his 20th birthday. Interestingly, Dusseault defeated Bloc incumbent MP Serge Cardin who was four decades his senior.

Over the last few years, the NDP had decided to reach out to the youngest constituency in the population, students, by recruiting them not only to serve as party aides and candidate assistants, but rather as political figures in their own right. In this 2011 election, five other students at McGill University in Montreal ran under the NDP ticket and in the case of Dusseault, the youth experiment paid off.

Women Representatives

Another major accomplishment of the new parliament that makes it unique compared to its predecessors is a demographic one. In the 2011 elections, there was a marked increase in the number of women candidates. But unlike previous election rounds, this installment of MPs includes the largest number of women ever before.

Once all the votes were tallied, the results showed that 76 women had won seats in the 2011 parliament, constituting 25% of MPs in the house. One of these success stories is the current Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq who faced a tough challenge in Nunavut against the former Premier Paul Oklik, the first Inuit lawyer in the Nunavut bar. In a heavily contested election, Aglukkaq visited every community in the large territory to communicate her election platform. While her success is considered a significant one, it is even more important given the high volume of public attention she received during the 2009 swine flu outbreak.

Interestingly, the first Canadian election which saw women voting was following the suffrage movement in 1921 where four candidates ran for seats and Agnes Campbell MacPhail made history as the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons. Most importantly, 90 years later, 1 in 4 women candidates running for political office is elected where they ran for 80% of all electoral districts (ridings) across the country.

There are some compelling numbers associated with these election results which can be particularly tell about future election forecasting. The party will the largest number and percentage of woman candidates elected is the NDP with 40 seats out of 103. While the Conservative party has the least with 28 seats out of 167.

This landmark puts Canada in the top 40 countries for its female representation in Parliament. Most commentators and opinion leaders have expressed their support for this trend and argued that the trajectory must continue till the percentage of women representatives is commensurate with their proportion in the population at large.

Youngest Speaker

In the wave of new MPs representing a fresher, younger Canadian society, the Parliament's administration will also come under a new young leadership.

The house will have its youngest speaker in history. Mr. Andrew Scheer, a 32-year-old father of 4 children, will assume the prestigious position. After studying at the Universities of Ottawa and Regina, Scheer worked as a Parliamentary aide, before moving to Regina to leave politics and assume a job as an insurance broker. He decided to return to politics, this time as a candidate in 2004 where he was elected to the House and four years later was elected to be the Deputy Speaker.

Scheer was chosen out of eight candidates and it took six rounds of voting before he was finally declared winner. His closest competitor was NDP Denise Savoie. Before his election to serve as speaker of the house, Scheer was preceded by Liberal MP Peter Milliken who had held the position for a decade. 

New Party Map

The 2011 election also established a new political landscape in Canada whereby the Conservatives were able to confirm a majority in the parliament with 166 seats. This gives them the mandate to push forward legislation that PM Harper has been promoting throughout his time in office. With the first Conservative majority PM Stephen Harper met the Governor-General Dr. David Johnston before the Throne Speech.

The Liberal Party, once the most powerful and influential party in Canada and the long-time rival of the Conservatives had a dismal showing, losing many seats to other parties and ending up with a humiliating 34 seats. The official opposition party for many years, the Bloc Quebecois, also had a very disappointing run as they relinquished virtually all their seats from Quebec, leaving them with a symbolic 4 parliamentarians in the 2011 edition. This means that the Bloc have reached the brink of extinction as a party. Following the election, there was a mass exodus of Bloc members to other parties due to their disenchantment with the leadership and their conduct in the campaign and election. To add insult to injury, leaders of both the Liberal Party and the Bloc, Michael Ignatieff and Gilles Duceppe, respectively, lost their seats in this election, leading to their resignation from their party leadership positions.

From the ashes of the Liberals and the Bloc, one party gained the most from their losses--the NDP. A perennially second tier party with limited success mostly in the Maritimes and Ontario, the NDP positioned themselves in this election to overtake the Liberals as the official opposition in a Conservative-majority parliament. They ended up surprising everyone, including their own supporters and staffers when they secured 103 seats. Some say that playing high stakes politics will change the NDP and force it to become more similar to the Liberal Party. Surprisingly, no single independent candidate won a seat in this election.

At a time when the world is experiencing some severe economic tremors and political instability is spreading across the world, there is a growing movement towards changing the manner in which politics are conducted. Challenging the norms of political conduct has become the status quo in many parts of the world. For a country trying to navigate itself clear of these economic woes but doing so with a desire to shift traditional politics, this election is a landmark on many levels. With demographic representation in the House of Commons being nudged ever so slightly, will Canada feel the gendered increase? What might the conservative majority bring? What can be said of the disappearance of independents? How will the collapse of the Bloc affect the Quebec sovereignty movement? How will the new opposition NDP face up to the challenge ahead? What will the experiences of the youngest MP and Speaker bring to the political process and might these be examples to emulate? Will other youth be inspired to get involved in politics early?

In the end, and as Canada looks forward, clearly it will not be the number of women candidates, the percentages of NDP, or the ages of the MPs that will determine the operations of the House, but rather the quality of the representatives.

An Unfulfilled Dream

Coming from a political family, Jack Layton was a left-wing Toronto city councillor for 17 years and spent a year as head of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. He became leader of the federal New Democratic Party in 2003, and in his first election as leader the NDP won 20 seats, and in the 2008 election the NDP was up to 37 seats. The NDP Leader was fluently bilingual, glib, sometimes flashy, full of energy and always media-friendly. Things changed in the 2011 federal election when the NDP won 103 seats and became the Official Opposition for the first time in history.

For Jack Layton, serving as the Leader of the Official Opposition was a challenge he was always prepared to take on. One which put him one step closer to his dream of becoming Prime Minister in the next federal elections. However, in July 2011, Jack Layton faced an even bigger challenge. He announced that he had been diagnosed with a new form of cancer other than his previously diagnosed prostatic cancer.  This led him to make the difficult decision of stepping down as NDP Leader temporarily to focus on his treatment regiment, with the hope of coming back on the job when the House of Commons resumed in September. In the interm, he recommended that rookie MP Nycole Turmel from Quebec fill in for him - a recommendation that was accepted by the other NDP MPs.  But on August 22, 2011, Jack Layton died at the age of 61 in his home in Toronto.  While he had won a political battle only months earlier, he unfortunately for many of his supporters, lost his battle with cancer.  While many political analysts are predicting a potentially weakened NDP Official Opposition in Parliament in September, without their iconic leader "Jack", who demonstrated charisma, dedication, strength and unceasing hope for a better life for all Canadians. However, this may not end up being true, simply due to the release of a very powerful and memorable letter that he had written to his supporters only days before he departed for which his final words (appearing at the top of this article) has quickly gone viral on social networking sites, and may very well be the spark for many young Canadians to make a difference in their country!

Essam Farag, BA Honours (Dalhousie), MA (Guelph) is the Production Editor of the Ambassadors Magazine. Email: essamfarag@ambassadors.net