The Independents: A Roundtable Discussion with Independent and Independently-Minded Parliamentarians

On January 18, 2024, the Churchill Society for the Advancement of Parliamentary Democracy welcomed three parliamentarians to discuss the experience of Independent parliamentarians and independently-minded partisan parliamentarians in Canada. Moderated by Professor Alex Marland, roundtable participants included Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin, an MLA who won re-election as an Independent after previously being elected with a party, Bobbi Ann Brady, an MPP who was elected as an Independent without previously being elected with a party, and Scott Simms, a backbench MP who spent time on both the government and opposition sides of the House. Topics included the pros and cons of sitting as an Independent or as a party member, the constraints of party whips and “messaging,” and how these parliamentarians carved out a degree of freedom while either inside or outside of a party during their time in office. The session was dedicated to the memory of Peter Russell, author of Two Cheers for Minority Government: The Evolution of Canadian Parliamentary Democracy and other works, who passed away shortly before the event. *This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The original recording of the event is available on the Churchill Society’s YouTube Channel.

Participants: Bobbi Ann Brady, MPP, Scott Simms, and Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin, MLA Moderated by Alex Marland

Bobbi Ann Brady is MPP for Haldimand—Norfolk. She was first elected in 2022. Scott Simms served as MP for Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame from 2004-2021. Elizabeth Smith- McCrossin is MLA for Cumberland North. First elected as a Progressive Conservative in 2017, she was re-elected in 2021 as an Independent. Alex Marland est titulaire de la chaire Jarislowsky en confiance et leadership politique à l’Université Acadia.

Alex Marland: I just want to situate things by helping everybody here realize how fortunate we are to be joined by our guests. Let’s think about all the politicians who have ever been elected in Canada at the federal or provincial level since 1972. The reason why I picked 1972 is that was the first election at the federal level when party labels appeared on the ballot. Up to that point you had your occupation listed. From that point forward, people could not know who their individual representative was as long as they knew who their party was. Since 1972 if you were to take all those people who have been elected, including the three of you, you would be able to fill a midsize hockey arena. I’m using that image as context. If you were to take all the people who were elected as an independent [not people who were elected as a member of a party but subsequently left to sit as an independent or were removed from caucus and then sat as an independent], they would fit a small van.

To get even more precise. The people who ran for the first time [as an independent] and were elected as an independent [and not previously elected with a party], you (Bobbi Ann Brady) could sit in the front seat of that van. You are one of five people who have done it since 1972 as far as I can tell. It’s quite an accomplishment.

The three of you all bring similar yet different perspectives. What I’m hoping you’ll do is share some of your stories so that collectively we can learn from those stories.

I want to start out in a place where you might not think I would start out. I would like you to help us understand why are political parties necessary and when are political parties good? We’re going to start from a premise that political parties are not evil, terrible things, and we need to get rid of them. It’s more they exist and they’re entrenched… what is good about political parties in your experience?

Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin: Maybe we’ll let Scott start… (laughs)

Scott Simms: I thought you were coming to me for sure because I never was independent, I was independent-minded. For many reasons, I gravitated to the Liberal Party because of my values. In 2004, Paul Martin was leader.

The big benefit of the party is that the machinery that surrounds you is easily attainable once you win a nomination. One thing you can say to everybody is that you’re an independent when you go after the nomination for a particular party to a certain degree. You’re independent because of the resources that you have. You can’t even use a party logo if you run for a nomination and it’s harder to raise money.

Now, once you win the nomination you get the party machinery, such as the advertising. You still have to pay for it, but it’s at a reduced rate because everything is printed. You get the benefit of people who have won before. You also get the benefit of people who’ve lost before, which I think is probably more important. If you want to win, learn from people who lost.

To me, the machinery itself allows you to be more efficient – especially if there’s a snap election and you don’t have a lot of experience running. There were a lot of things that people came up to me with because they were longtime Liberals. They told me ‘you should do this’ or ‘don’t go to that door, go to this door’ for whatever reason. I’d ask why, but they’d say you’re wasting your time. There is a lot of field work that comes automatically with a nomination win. That, to me, is probably the biggest benefit.

If you’re a person who toes the party line, your message also becomes very easy. You don’t have to do a lot of homework. You just memorize the lines. I say that facetiously and I mean that facetiously. A lot of people who run use prepared texts by someone they’ve never met. They go through the issues based on lines from people who never voted, lived, or set foot in your riding. That’s someone… (pause), even if I wanted to vote Liberal, I wouldn’t vote for that person. But, people do take advantage of that. To me, those are the major benefits of being in a party.

AM: Bobbi Ann, you spend time in the legislature. You see political parties operating. What are some of the benefits of political parties in our system?

Bobbi Ann Brady: I think for the electorate it’s the clarity. You gravitate toward a party that supports your ideals or where you best fit in. It creates a sense of clarity. You know somebody is handing you messaging on a daily basis and that all creates clarity when you’re concise and you’re all singing from the same hymn book. Now, when you stray from that clarity and have a party that runs on a platform but strays from that platform, then the clarity for the taxpayer becomes very murky.

ESM: In addition to that, I would just say, on the surface, parties could work, but when you get into the so challenging.

The unification of shared values does help, but the negative of that is that you can be so easily branded. If there’s 20 people that are part of a party elected together, there’s no way that they all share the exact same [ideas] and it’s not fair to brand them all that way. If parties truly functioned democratically, then I think they could be positive. But there’s so much work done that’s not democratic. For example, staff telling elected officials what they can or cannot say. Most people would be appalled to learn that, right? They say: ‘We didn’t elect the staff, we elected you to be our voice. What do you mean they’re telling you that you can’t speak for us?’

I think on the surface they can work. But they’ve just morphed into something they were never meant to be.

AM: Maybe we can use that as a transition to talk about some of the troubling things about political parties. What are some things that we’re not aware of, or only have a surface awareness of, that we should hear?

BB: I think that the majority of people believe that their representative goes to Parliament and represents them. They don’t understand the branding. They don’t understand how tight the messaging and the control is. They don’t understand that in a caucus boardroom there are staffers who tell elected officials to sit down and keep their opinions to themselves.

Let’s say I’m a hockey player. When you leave the ice, the door is closed in the change room and you have that discussion with your team. That’s how you get better. That used to be the way caucus worked from what I’ve been told. I’ve never been in a caucus room, but that’s what I was told as a staffer for 23 years. It worked that way, but it no longer works that way.

I feel that these regimes, these parties, are not interested in actually getting better. They don’t want to listen to the grassroots. They don’t want to listen to their members who are in the coffee shops and on the ground when they’re not at Queens Park. It’s a real detriment.

ESM: I recall the very first time that it happened to me. I was the health critic and I had done my first interview about this situation. I had been a nurse for a long time, and so the journalist asked me a question. I gave an answer and I said this is how we could have made an improvement. Right after the interview I was hauled into the office by one of the staff and told ‘You can’t ever do that again.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ They said, ‘You’re only allowed to criticize the government. You can never give a solution to what the problem is.’ I said that’s ridiculous. That’s not why I got elected – just to criticize the government. People expect more of their elected representatives in my opinion.

That was the first experience, but it continued on and on. You know the phrase the tail wagging the dog? Absolutely, there is a lot of power with the staff because elected MLAs or MPs are giving them that power. But if you stand up and say, ‘No, people didn’t elect you, they elected me,’ then that takes you down a troublesome road too, because you’re not toeing the line.

AM: You know, we live in a world now where things are really fast. There are a lot of things going on. It’s really important to have staff who can be constantly looking on their phones and keeping elected officials informed, kind of steering things and assisting them. There’s a reason why there’s so many of them. And yet, the concerns that you’ve raised are actually fairly common from elected officials. Scott, what’s your perspective about the role of political staff?

SS: Well, I think about caucus and how it’s becoming more and more useless over time. But when it comes to staff… There’s power in certain staff members, especially at the cabinet level and certainly at the leader, premier, or prime minister level. Caucus, in many cases, is just becoming a perfunctory operation of a gabfest where we all get together and try to be friends with each other.

This goes back to the 1980s, when polling started taking over. There was a time when caucus told the leader about what’s happening in their corner of the world. In the 1980s, pollsters came along and made an incredible amount of money doing their job by telling the leaders: ‘Those caucus members say that, but that’s not entirely true. Here are the numbers.’

I heard a leader once say to a caucus, during a three-hour caucus meeting about a very heated issue, ‘Remember, there are stories, but there’s also data.’ I reminded the leader, ‘Excuse me, but behind every piece of data there is a story. We’re not data people. Otherwise, we’d be useless and there would be no such thing as a local representative. If you only rely on the data, why would you need us?’

The story needs to be told because policies are complex and people who are affected by policies are complex. This is where staff can help. Staff can build into your knowledge base and bring it to the top. If you’re using staff only to push the message out to your own constituents, they’re not being used in the right way. Leaders would love to have every member of their caucus to be messengers. What a fabulous world that would be for them. But you’re doing a total disservice to yourself and to the country. Because if you’ve got it wrong, you’ve got to reverse engineer a bad decision.

AM: Scott you were about to mention caucuses. I’m wondering if you can describe for us what it’s like in a national caucus when there might be over 100 MPs from across the country in that room. And then maybe Elizabeth and Bobbi Ann can explain what it was like in Nova Scotia or Ontario, because the caucus is not going to be as large as what happens in Ottawa. I’d like to compare the two.

SS: I was a Liberal, which means it’s a big tent party. So, I’m in a room where, in 2004, where one person who believes marriage only belongs to heterosexual couples is sitting next to someone who believes marriage should be open to anybody. And then one person believes that there should be zero spending on military defense, when the next person believes that we should up it by 25 to 50 per cent.

This becomes an interesting conversation. If there’s more of a conflict in caucus, it serves the country better. But, a lot of times, we used to poke fun at people who would get up to the microphone and say wonderful things about how we’re doing. That’s a cabinet audition.

There are people who cabinet audition. There are people who talk to their issues. There are people who will defend friends of theirs. And we do become friends after a while. That’s one of the reasons why it’s hard to vote against the party. Everyone thinks it’s just about discipline, but it’s because you’re getting the person sitting next to you, your friend, in trouble too.

Caucus can be a fantastic dynamic and it can also be useless. It doesn’t take much to go from one to the other.

ESM: I was a part of a caucus for four years. There were some positives and there were some challenges. I think one of the dynamics in my personal experience is that I jumped into a leadership race six months after being elected to my first term. Maybe that was kind of crazy to do, but, looking back, I have no regrets. But the dynamics that happen in a caucus during a leadership race can be very unhealthy and that was certainly my experience. There are groups and bands, a real lack of trust, and no real team. There wasn’t teamwork or camaraderie when it comes to making decisions.

Nova Scotia is a small province; however, the needs of those living in Cape Bretton are very different than those living in Cumberland County, and very different from those living in Yarmouth. Working as a team makes sure that all of the issues and concerns from all of us caucus members are being brought to the legislature.

Unfortunately, it didn’t always happen. One of the big reasons that led to my removal from the party was the border shut down between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick during the pandemic. We have a border town, and literally 50 per cent of the people that worked at our hospital lived next door in New Brunswick and 50 per cent of the people on our side worked in New Brunswick. There was about 17 months of just complete disruption.

The decisions that were being made by government never took into consideration the impact on the people that lived in my area. Eventually it led to my removal from the party. But leading up to that, I wrote four different resignation letters over a period of about two years because it was so frustrating for me knowing that the needs of the people that I represented were not getting or met.

AM: Bobbi Ann and Elizabeth, you’re both Independents and you’re arguably a caucus of one. In Ontario there are other Independents, but they’re very different from you because they weren’t elected as Independents.

BB: I’m glad you recognize that. (All laugh)

AM: What’s it like to be a caucus of one?

BB: There are challenges, but I would say that the benefits far outweigh the challenges. The main challenge is that you don’t have support staff to lean on. I worked for a Progressive Conservative MPP for 23 years, and we did a lot of work. When my member went in the House, he was largely handed items from a Minister’s office, or from the leader’s office. There was no free thinking. There was no individual touch to what he was presenting in the legislature.

As an independent, I don’t have party overlords telling me what I can and cannot say or what I can vote for. The people of Haldimand-Norfolk tell me or guide me in how I conduct myself at Queens Park. It’s very freeing as somebody who was in the party system for over 23 years and who was the local PC Association president for 20 years.

Some reporters ask me, ‘Are you lonely?’ I understand the context of the question, but I am not lonely. I have an army of people back in Haldimand- Norfolk who support me this way. They saw what happened in Haldimand-Norfolk as a slap in the face of democracy. They rose to the occasion. They went to the ballot box and they did something they were told never to do. We are different in Haldimand-Norfolk, and I like to represent them in a very different way. I’m not your typical politician.

One of the things that we’ve missed in some of the questions so far is that the party takes away your ability to be an individual – to be unique, to be dynamic, to be interesting. They want you as boring as possible. (All laugh) I don’t believe I’m boring, and my constituents don’t think I’m boring either. That’s a good thing. I think that’s the thing that I love the most; my creativity and my personality aren’t stifled by a brand.

ESM: I love being an independent as well. When you’re an independent, your team are your people – the people that you represent. In my case, the people of Cumberland North are my team. There’s no conflict anymore about which team I’m with. If you’re with the party, you’re expected to be part of that team. Too often that team is not representing the people that elected you.

I’m able to go to the legislature, put forth bills and legislation, and ask the questions in Question Period that actually matter to the people that I represent. Since becoming an independent in 2021, I’ve tabled 54 bills. Probably about two-thirds of them are on healthcare because that’s my main focus. A lot of them are also on affordability, finance issues and tax issues that are important to not only Cumberland North, but, in many, cases all Nova Scotians.

A lot of the other MLAs have taken me aside privately and said: ‘We envy you. We wish we could be independent like you.’ I say to them, ‘You can. Don’t let anyone convince you that it’s a weakness. It’s actually very empowering for the people that you represent, and for democracy.

SS: That’s really good. That’s essentially at the core of it.

AM: Scott, you were with a political party, with a brand, for a long period of time. How do you react to that? About your ability to be your true self as a partisan?

SS: Oh, it’s maddening. You talked about the benefits of the party. The benefit of being independent is when a microphone comes (gestures toward himself), it’s ‘Let’s go.’ Now, I got to that point later on because I had no greater ambitions to be in cabinet. I didn’t want to do any of that stuff, I just wanted to represent my riding. I was able to get a few things. I was appointed to committees that allowed me to do some things and travel in Europe. I wouldn’t have had that as an independent.

But, at the core of a functioning democracy… I mean here’s the problem. People who come up to politicians and say I wish I was more independent like you. A good friend of mine, [MP] Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, is very partisan, very Liberal. But he also does his own thing when he talks about certain bills. Leaders will always say, ‘I will give backbenchers more power.’ Garbage! They can’t. They want to, and they can’t. I don’t care who the leader is. In order for backbenchers to have the power to be in a spot similar to what Elizabeth talked about, you have to take it yourself. If you have to face whatever punishments there are, if you have to be ostracized by your colleagues, so what? Nobody in caucus can vote for you. Everyone seems to forget that.

I always say that the people who don’t serve the conversation well when it comes to strengthening a party, and people who should be on the receiving end at a caucus meeting should be cabinet members and those who want to join cabinet. These people have set ambitions. It depends on what you want to do. If a backbencher wants to be a backbencher, be one!

ESM: As human beings, we all want to be liked. We all want to be included. But, I think sometimes when you’re there, you can easily forget why you’re there. You’re there to represent the people back home, and if you always keep reminding yourself of that, you’re going to always make the right decisions.

Can I share a little story? The premier called an emergency session last summer to deal with a potential raise that he didn’t want for the MLAs. The house leader for the government came to me and the other house leaders in opposition and said, ‘We want to put this bill through without going to committee of the whole and third reading. We just want to do it all in a day. But we need unanimous consent.’ The two other opposition party House leaders said yes. I said, ‘You know, there is something you could do for me. I’m a little worried because the emergency room expansion at our regional hospital was announced by the previous premier and I would just like to have in writing from the government that this is not going to be delayed.’ The house leader said sure, came back to me an hour later, and said ‘The minister of Health has assured me that everything is on track.’ I said, ‘Great! Can you just give it to me in writing?’ He said, ‘No, we can’t do that.’ So I said, ‘Okay, I can’t give unanimous consent.’ If it’s true, there’s no reason why you can’t give me that in writing. It’s something that means a lot to the area.

It came down to the vote, and out of 55 people I said no. They were furious with me because it meant we had to come back after a long weekend. But I said, ‘Listen, I’m not here to make you all happy. I like you, but I’m here to represent the people of Cumberland North. The day after we left, they actually did a press release saying the emergency expansion is on track and on time. So, I actually got what I wanted. They wanted to make sure that everybody knew that it was on track. I just make that point because it’s so easy to forget what team we’re on and why we’re there.

BB: I think when I went to Queen’s Park, the Liberals and the NDP were watching me closely because they believed that I would be a puppet for Doug Ford. I was a conservative staffer for 23 years, and that’s what they expected. So when I came to Question Period the first time and asked a really hard-hitting question, I think that helped earn that respect. There are times where I’ll stand up and I’ll vote with the Conservatives, and the Liberals that sit beside me heckle me a little bit in a fun way. But I think there’s mutual respect. Nobody’s angry with me when I vote one way or another. Even the Conservatives just kind of hang their head and say, ‘Aw, shucks.’ But I don’t think anybody is really keeping track except for maybe the leader’s office.

AM: Scott, were you able to get things done for your constituents as a backbencher in a political party?

SS: I’m still working on it. (All laugh) I’m kidding. Sometimes we forget that there’s a micro side of this job, as opposed to the macro issues, that is very fulfilling. I once saved a family from being separated. A man met his wife in the United States – she’s a Mexican national. Things happened with immigration that were bad. She had a child in Canada and she and her oldest son were being deported out of Canada to Mexico while her husband and youngest child had to remain. We worked to the point where we actually were able to get the Minister’s office to do something to keep them united. That’s the type of thing that never makes the news, but it’s pretty fulfilling.

I’ll never forget… We had this oil spill in my riding, and I called the Minister’s office. Every Minister has staff that work on the political side of things and on the bureaucratic side of things. I called and said, ‘I’ve got this oil spill and I need to talk to someone about what’s going on.’ They said, ‘Oh, well we’ll give you the lines to use.’ Lines! What am I going to say? That ‘as a government we’re hoping that it’ll be cleaned up, and hopefully the middle class will persevere’?! I just want information. These people want to know who’s coming to clean it up.

That’s an exquisite example of being a messenger. I find that people who are very partisan take that type of attitude. I’ve met these people when they weren’t in politics anymore, and they’re angry about a lot of things. They’re angry because they allowed that to happen. By exercising your own little bit of power, you could do great things. You just do your research and be patient.

BB: Just following up on that. A member of government said to me ‘It’s not my fault. It’s the bureaucracy’s fault.’

Well, whose fault is it really? It’s up to you to lead the bureaucracy. The messengers, they rely on that too much; that ‘it’s not my fault.’ Constituents don’t want to hear that.