Free Tragedy in the Commons by Alison Loat Page A

same day, with the camera crew still tagging along, Thompson was heading from oneparliamentary building to another when a shuttle bus drove up alongside him and the driver leaned out to offer him a ride. “I was looking at [the driver] and I stepped off the curb and didn’t see what was there, and I stumbled and nearly broke my neck,” Thompson recalls. “Of course I was the main feature on the news that night.”
    Thompson’s pratfalls publicly illustrated how many other MPs felt. “I was so frightened when I won,” recalls Colleen Beaumier, a Liberal MP who, like Thompson, also went to the House for the first time in 1993. “When I got there we had our orientation and I sat on the steps of the Peace Tower, and Paul Szabo [also newly elected] came out and said, ‘Colleen, what are you crying for? We’ve been wanting this for years.’ And I said, ‘No, this isn’t something I always wanted. Such beautiful people supported me and I’m going to disappoint them.’ ”
    Fear of failure and lack of confidence are typical for freshmen MPs in Canada, as they apparently are in Britain, where the Parliamentary Library’s most-borrowed book is the instructional manual for new politicians: How To Be an MP . The fact that some Canadian MPs had never even visited Parliament before intensified their initial insecurity. “The learning curve was steep,” recalls Blair Wilson, who began sitting in 2006 as a Liberal MP, and who, after allegations of omissions on his nomination application, finished his time in Parliament as a member of the Green Party. “I learned quickly but I have to say that I knew very little about how the actual mechanism of Ottawa worked. I had never been there.… The very first time I walked up to the door of the House of Commons was after I was elected as a Member of Parliament.”
    Rick Casson, the former MP for Lethbridge, Alberta, a safe Conservative seat, remembers talking to his wife about what he’d just gotten them into as they drove home from his nomination victory. “Jeanene and I had a couple of conversations after we won the nomination.… I said: ‘What the hell are we doing now?’ And she said: ‘Well, I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out.’ So the night after we got elected for the general election, [we] said the same thing … we had no idea,” he recalled. He’d been involved in politics municipally, so knew how things worked in southern Alberta. But Ottawa? Not so much. “We didn’t have anything to do with the federal government,” he said. “Our MLA would come and see us once or twice a year. But the MP? Never.”
    Fredericton Liberal and Cabinet member Andy Scott admitted to feeling “overwhelmed” when he first sat in the House of Commons, and “naïve.” He connected the feeling to another attitude we mentioned earlier, saying, “I grew up modestly and never aspired to any of this stuff. I wasn’t one of those people who was thinking about this when I was twelve.” (Andy Scott died in June 2013 at the age of 58.)
    The new parliamentarians’ adjustment to public life was made more difficult by the dearth of structured orientation to help them acclimatize to their new roles. At an orientation day conducted by parliamentary staff after the election and before the first day the House sits, the bare necessities, such as how to file expenses, are explained. But most of the MPs we interviewed felt the orientation was nowhere near sufficient. “You get there, they take you in the House, they give you a book [on] constituency rights and responsibilities, the former Speaker talks about being in the House, and that’s it,” said thelate Reg Alcock, a Winnipeg-area Liberal MP first elected in 1993. “There’s no orientation. There is no training. There is nothing on how to be effective.”
    The political parties certainly didn’t offer much by way of support. Rick Casson, an Alberta MP first elected in 1997 in the second wave of Reform MPs, found his initial