Our local MP, Peter Milliken, recently became the longest-serving Speaker in the history of the House of Commons. Wednesday night in Ottawa there was a big party at which he was feted, sponsored oddly enough by a lobbying firm. Eight-and-a-half years is not that long really, given that many MPs marinate leisurely in the House for twice that time. Indeed, Milliken himself has been the MP for Kingston and the Islands since 1988, before I first arrived at Queen’s. The students who started university this year were not born when Milliken defeated Conservative Cabinet minister Flora Mac-Donald. Given that the latter had nary a conservative bone in her body, the election of the former was a change in party but not in principle.
Peter, as everyone calls him here, has held the riding for two decades, albeit with diminishing majorities. There are few high school graduations, strawberry socials or Christmas concerts where he cannot be found, happily congratulating, greeting and lending an air of good cheer. His only apparent electoral liability is that he has no interest in being anything other than Speaker, which means he demurs from taking positions on any substantial issues. The proprieties of his position require that to a degree, but it also suits him. Peter loves Parliament for itself, and has done so since he subscribed to Hansard while still in high school. As such, he is something of a rarity, a parliamentary man in a partisan age.
One reason speakers have generally not held the job long was that it was, until the mid-1980s, a patronage plum of the prime minister, usually given to a member of caucus who did not qualify for Cabinet for one reason or another. Usually after one Parliament, the prime minister favoured speakers with other appointments (both Roland Michener and Jeanne Sauve went on to be appointed governor-general). In short, it is not a position most occupants have desired to hold for very long.
Milliken is different. He is about Parliament itself, the process of legislation, rather than any particular policy option. That attitude can be caricatured, as in the old Yes, Prime Minister series, in which Jim Hacker announces that his policy is precisely not to have a policy. Yet in an age in which a hyper-partisan House of Commons has been reduced largely to a forum for scoring points, it is a good thing to have at least a few MPs who care for Parliament itself.
Canadians generally know the Speaker as the quirky, robed, white-haired man who bounces up and down in his great chair during Question Period, vainly pleading for order between barking out ever-more ridiculous-sounding constituency names. The biggest complaint of Milliken’s tenure is that he has permitted Question Period to degenerate into nothing more than a shouting contest. There was once a time when real oratory and genuine wit was rewarded in the House. Now the back-benchers are on their feet, clapping, braying, stomping for the most unremarkable utterance of their leaders, as if Churchill himself had come down off his portrait in the speaker’s chambers and addressed the House.
It is hard to see how that is the speaker’s fault. If MPs wish to behave badly… well, the speaker is the servant of the House, not its master. He can only enforce those which are agreed to as the ground rules, and it evident that the rules of the playground are what most members prefer.
Indeed, it would be salutary if there were more members who cared for Parliament itself, and not merely how Parliament could be used as an instrument of partisan advantage. That can never be avoided altogether, but the imbalance is so extreme that increasing numbers of keen political observers, to say nothing of the public at large, are tuning out the House of Commons altogether. As between Parliament and party, Peter opts unreservedly for Parliament. When he was appointed Deputy Speaker in 1997, he confessed to friends that his greatest joy was that he was no longer obliged to attend weekly caucus meetings and party conferences.
Milliken’s longevity is more impressive because he has been elected by his peers, under different governments, in both majority and minority Parliaments. Perhaps even as they disdain the purposes of Parliament, MPs choose Peter as a tribute to those who esteem the people’s chamber as she deserves.