The Written Word
for June 7, 2000

Do politicians get a bum rap?

In many ways I think so.

In many ways the system operates so as to make it almost impossible for them to please us. While I won’t go into it in great detail here – I have in my book Canada: Is Anybody Listening – but suffice it to say that with the “top down” system we have we’ve created a one person “soft” dictatorship which makes it well nigh impossible for the backbench MLA or MP to satisfy what we expect.

Let me talk then about cabinet ministers, of which I had more than five years experience. And let me confine it to British Columbia.

The cabinet minister will make less than $100,000 per year to be one of a very small team running the entire province. He will be away from home much of the time and every hour he actually spends in the Legislature, where his attendance is desired for no apparent good reason, he will have to spend another hour making up for lost time in his office. He will attend one full blown cabinet meeting a week and usually at least one other. He will be a member of at least one, perhaps two major committees of Cabinet which will require two meetings a week and several other lesser committees which will toss another couple a week at him.

During all this he must look after his constituency and if that is a distance from Victoria, it will be hell on wheels. I found I was lucky to get into my riding once a month during which two or three day period I had to travel the length and breadth of it, meeting all the people who were important in each hamlet plus dealing with various and sundry problems. In Kamloops, the center of the riding, I would do at least one, probably two talk shows, a TV interview and two or three speeches plus all the usual ribbon cutting. In my five years in Cabinet apart from two or three weeks I would get away on a vacation, I don’t remember a full day off. On the weekends if not in my constituency or speaking in someone else’s as a favour to them for doing the same for me, I would be reading briefs for the following week, (The one thing a “brief” is not, is brief.)

And you take a lot of crap. Not that you don’t deserve a lot of it but getting dumped on by the truckload, often by those not in full possession of the facts, can get wearying, especially when it’s from your own troops back home.

The pension now is a pittance or none at all compared to what you get in the private sector. Most people are in public life for their best earning years as well.

Now it’s true that for some the money a Cabinet Minister can make is much more than he could make on the street but that certainly wasn’t so in my case or the case of most of my colleagues.

Why the hell did I, do they, do it?

Some of it’s certainly ego. You feel that you can do that which others cannot. But a lot of it is truly the desire to make things a bit better.

Most of the good ones – and I like to think I was – develop the hide of a rhinoceros and understand that the short term pain will, unless you really are bad, pay off in good memories.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Kelowna where Wendy and I had dinner with Bill and Audrey Bennett. It was a grand evening – a solid three hour dinner – and it was fun to look back, laugh at the good times and even chuckle a little at the bad ones. But both Bill and I thought we’d done some good and you really can’t ask for more than that. And I knew that I was lucky as hell that my boss during that five year period was one of the best premiers we’ve ever had – perhaps, given the tougher times he served in, as good as or even better than his father.

Yes, I now earn my living smacking politicians around but the good ones roll with it and know that’s the penalty you pay when you’re in a game where every stroke you take, not just the final score, is examined in excruciating detail.

And I must say this – in all my years in politics and commenting on it, the vast majority of politicians I have met have been good people – very good people indeed.

And underpaid.