Sort of political Monday

The page who was fired
If you don't live in Canada, you almost certainly don't know that a Senate page named Brigette DePape was fired last Friday. She was fired because she left her post and walked to the centre of the Senate floor (and, not incidentally, right in front of the television* camera) and held up a sign that read "Stop Harper" during the throne speech that announced the new government's intentions.

Here is a short list of what the government proposes to do from a story in The Ottawa Citizen

Harper's Conservatives are promising to end direct public subsidies for political parties, abolish the long-gun registry, redraw the political map to give more seats in the House of Commons to growing provinces, reach free-trade agreements with the European Union and India, strike a "perimeter security" border deal with the United States, protect medicare, help impoverished aboriginals, punish human smugglers and reintroduce copyright legislation.

Now reasonable people can agree or disagree about any or all of those initiatives but what causes young Brigette DePape to look at that list and see Armageddon? What leads her to see something so horrible that it justifies throwing away an incredible privilege that has been granted her and hurting her chances in what is already a miserable employment market for at least five years?

Now a perfectly reasonable question at this point is, "Why should anyone care?" After all, young people make foolish mistakes all the time and we can only hope that this young woman has not destroyed her career forever by this ill-conceived act. And that is true to a point. Almost any young person should get more than one chance.

But there is another level on which none of this is really quite as random as it might seem. A while ago I commented on an article about a Doug Saunders piece about the decline of the big centrist parties. Saunders summed up the modus operandi of these parties very well:

The big-tent parties functioned, during their glory years in the postwar decades, as the paternal overlords of protected, closed national economies, engaging in brokerage politics whereby the fruits of growth could be spread out among clients and beneficiaries on the left and right.

Before going on, I'd remind you that the Canadian Liberal party has been the most successful of these parties. It is the New York Yankees of political parties with more championships than anybody else including all the rival professional sports leagues.

Now, let's go back to that quote I gave and ask ourselves, in practical terms what does "engaging in brokerage politics whereby the fruits of growth could be spread out among clients and beneficiaries" entail?

Well, it entails Brigette DePape. The Senate page program gives young people a job while they attend a university in Ottawa. To get the job you have to

• demonstrate that you have an awful lot more knowledge about parliamentary procedure than most teens will have, 
• you have to speak both French and English and
• as my friend Thomas once put it, you have to have the sort of resume at 17 that will make most 35-year olds wonder how they could have frittered their lives away and accomplished so little.

It also doesn't hurt to be come from a political family and to have the sorts of values that will appeal to the earnest people who work for Parliament selecting these bright young lights. And you can't fake these things. They have to be evident in your very existence.

But what are these values? Well, Brigette gave a TEDx presentation last year and you can see them on display. Here's the blurb:

Performing from her self-penned, critically acclaimed play, She Rules with Iron Stix, Brigette DePape asks whether art is an escape from real world problems or part of their solution.

A playwright since the age of 15, and a third year international development student who has contributed to sustainable development projects in Senegal and Bosnia, DePape explores the possibility of new worlds: changing our actual world through activism vs. creating new worlds through fiction. She attempts to reconcile responsibility and creativity, suggesting that plays can be a powerful tool for cultural change.

And here you have a tiny edge of a huge iceberg of a patronage-supported subculture that has supported the Liberal party in Canada for decades now. For this system doesn't give just any worthy kids a shot at having a job that will pay their way through university. It gives kids like Brigette DePape a job that will pay for their education.

And look at the kinds of things she wants to do. Her proposed career above is entirely dependent on wealth generated by people who choose other types of careers. For however noble spreading "fruits of growth" may sound in theory, in practice it tends to mean doing things like taxing young women who work in the service industry in order that young women like Brigette DePape can have a university education and then a government-subsidized job in fields such as the arts, education and international development so that she can be "a powerful tool for cultural change".

Now my best guess is that Brigette DePape was never going to amount to much. Most pages don't. Most people who get scholarships, internships and other such benefits in their youth don't. I got a few myself and I don't run anything much more important than my own life. And there was always the risk that some of these people would choose not to enter politics or move to some other left-leaning party. But that too was part of the system. These programs are part of a huge farm team system that continuously fed promising candidates of the right sort into government. It had to be able to take in a huge number of aspiring players to get the very few that would make the Liberal Party the success it always has been.

Until just a  while ago that is. Something started to go wrong at the end of the 1970s and it has continued to go wrong until the last election. And, as Doug Saunders rightly points out, this same phenomenon is happening in all advanced industrial nations so it cannot be explained in purely local terms.

In the past, the Liberals could afford to lose an election now and then because that farm system was always there pumping out the people who would inherit responsibility tomorrow. But things have changed. The system is still operating and it may survive but, for the first time in my life, it is at genuine risk of being cut back. And that is what Brigette DePape wants to stop happening when she says "Stop Stephen Harper".

*Corrected