This week, Samara Canada released a report on MPs' constituency casework as part of their three-part series on exit interviews from the 2011 election.  The main takeaway that MPs' offices are doing more and more constituency casework, and the more they do, the more it impacts on their ability to do their actual job of holding the government to account.  When an MP's staff is spending all of their time and resources on casework especially immigration casework the job of doing policy research and studying the Estimates falls to the wayside, and this is a huge, glaring problem for our system.  As well, this particular reliance on MPs to do the work of the civil service has grave implications for blurring the lines of responsibilities between parliamentarians and the government, which we can't ignore either.

First things first.  Because the focus of the report is on MPs, it soft peddles the problem inherent in the civil service that is driving this move to have MPs' offices assume more casework.  It never used to be the responsibility of an MP to act in an ombuds role for the civil service, and indeed, MPs rarely had much in the way of constituency offices until the 1960s.  They rarely even had permanent staff in their Ottawa offices until then either (drawing staff as needed from secretarial pools on the Hill), but the explosion in the size of the civil service and the number of services delivered by the governments created gaps where people felt they needed to be addressed.  This eventually started falling onto the shoulders of MPs, whether out of obligation or out of a desire to engage in more retail politics.  After all, it's good optics for MPs to be seen to be helping out constituents with their needs.  Many MPs also say that they enjoy this kind of work, cutting through red tape and helping constituents solve problems by talking to "real people."  Because parliament is increasingly centralized and scripted, this gives MPs a bit more freedom to do the work without having to get the permission of the House Leader or the party Whip, and that's commendable, but it's slowly shifted the expectations of the role of an MP.

We have so few MPs who know their actual jobs of holding the government to account, primarily through control of the public purse (meaning the Estimates) that the increasing focus on doing this work creates some serious danger of blurring the roles an MP is expected to play.  It's hard to hold the executive to account when you're doing their job of service delivery because then you become part of the system.  And sure, an MP might come across a sticky file in their constituency and corner the relevant minister on the Hill before a vote (and yes, this is one of the key reasons why standing votes remain important, because it means all MPs have to be there at the same time), but it becomes hard to see where this ceases being an issue of accountability and being one of service delivery.  Where this is especially a problem is with immigration files.  The immigration department has been under-resourced for years, and I've had staffers tell me that in many cases, the department won't even look at a file until the MP's office forwards its concerns to them.  This is a problem, not only from the perspective of a broken bureaucracy, but also because this is a wide-open door for corruption to start seeping in.  When it becomes who you know to get action on your file, we are in serious trouble.  It's also a growing problem when you have MPs who have constituency staff solely dedicated to immigration files (and demanding more staff and resources to do so) because this only exacerbates the problem rather than addresses the root cause of it, which is the dysfunction in the department.

There is additional trouble with where the expectations from MPs start creeping in.  The Samara report shows definitively how much less time MPs are spending in Ottawa in favour of their ridings, with the biggest drop happening around 1991.  We can't ignore that it was also around that time, and especially post 1993-election where they stopped evening sittings in the Commons in order to be "family friendly."  While MPs talk more about work-life balance, I worry that the current discussion in the Commons around maternity leave and other "family friendly" measures will have MPs to keep pushing for more remote work both voting remotely and appearing at committee via Skype rather than in person and that will further drive the pressure to have their focus continue to be on constituency issues rather than the actual work of accountability and Estimates in Parliament.

Samara's report offers a number of recommendations for how to help address the problems with this growth in constituency work, but most of them are problematic.  Their key recommendation is for the creation of "permanent" constituency offices, centrally governed by the House of Commons bureaucracy, so that staff and files don't change when the MP does a suggestion that blows my mind because it only creates another bureaucratic structure with its own inherent problems, and doesn't fix the existing bureaucratic problems that created this mess in the first place.  Their recommendations to bring Service Canada staff into the offices again doesn't fix the existing problems with Service Canada, or does making these offices "civic hubs" with the offices of both provincial and municipal jurisdictions address problems with bureaucracies in those jurisdictions and in fact rewards those constituents who complain to the wrong level of government.

It would be great if we could refocus MPs' staff on their actual duties in Ottawa, and on outreach and public engagement in their constituencies, but until we can have an honest conversation about the problems inherent in the system the broken bureaucracy and coming up with the transformational change that will fix that problem, then we're only going to be doing triage, and throwing more resources into a void that can never be filled.  MPs will continue to get more remote from their actual duties, and parliament will face an existential crisis.  The increased caseloads of MPs' offices are the canaries in the coal mine, and we should pay attention to what they're trying to tell us.