Notice of Commotion

In the early 1970s, as a parliamentary intern, I discovered a secret known to all. Selling liquor was banned, theoretically, in the buildings of the House of Commons, but a blind pig was used by many. It was operated, ostensibly undercover, for six decades by the Parliamentary Press Gallery. Thither were Hill staffers sent for refreshments, especially in those distant times when the Commons held nightly sittings, a practice subsequently abolished, in no small measure because of the arrival of more female members of Parliament.

Night sittings featured a gaggle of MPs who gave speeches or talked among themselves, read newspapers, handled correspondence, heckled those from other parties — behaviour that sometimes reflected the influence of libations from the unsanctioned bar. MPs on night duty knew that the media considered these sittings to be a sideshow to the main event of afternoon Question Period and debates. Very often just a single Canadian Press reporter looked down from the press gallery.

Occasionally something striking, unexpected, or untoward occurred with those few reporters present, liquor not infrequently having loosened tongues and encouraged, shall we say, unparliamentary language or decorum. Some of these night scenes and many others in the House of Commons, the Senate, and nearby premises pepper Charlie Feldman’s collection of weird, lively, dramatic, and offbeat doings in and around Parliament Hill.

Unparliamentary does not pretend to be a political primer or a text on how Parliament works. There are dozens of worthy books of that genre. Anyone who has been around the Hill for long knows that the kinds of mini-scandals, freakish behaviour, and funny incidents that Feldman recounts are the exception to the norm, which is — at least in my experience — that the vast majority of MPs work diligently, try to do their best, and hike back and forth to their ridings, where they invariably are subjects of abuse. MPs are, for the most part, citizens like the rest of us, although more obviously involved in the public life of the country. Feldman’s account is therefore an amusing and thorough assemblage of the oddball and sometimes illegal activities of some MPs and senators.

Feldman, whose research is admirable, has trawled through piles of newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and volumes of Hansard for episodes worthy of being remembered as shocking, hilarious, unbecoming, or quirky. Many date to the first decades following Confederation, when taking strong drink was more common among parliamentarians. Indeed, some of Sir John A. Macdonald’s public performances betrayed his fondness for the bottle.

Liquor aside, sex and money and over-the-top partisanship created many of the moments Feldman chronicles. Perhaps the most publicized mingling of sex and politics occurred in 1966, when a German-born woman named Gerda Munsinger, a waitress in Montreal, was alleged to be a spy. Among her acquaintances was Pierre Sévigny, the associate minister of national defence. The Munsinger Affair, as it became known, seized the media’s attention. It led to a commission of inquiry that concluded that although Munsinger was indeed involved in the sex trade, she was not a spy. The saga felled many trees for the newsprint needed to report it.

There are other stories of sex and money here, even tales of missing parliamentarians. In 1998, for example, a mariachi band played in the Senate foyer. It was the Reform Party’s clever idea to draw attention to the long absence of Andrew Thompson, who was appointed to represent Ontario in 1967 but who attended fewer and fewer sittings beginning in the mid-1980s. He so infrequently visited Ottawa from his home in Mexico that his fellow senators finally voted fifty-two to one in 1998 to suspend him for the rest of the session. Thompson eventually yielded to public opprobrium and the unhappiness of his colleagues. He resigned, admitting that he “probably could have” attended more often.

Feldman is understandably attracted to MPs with causes ignored by others because, while not involved in anything scandalous, they are frequently intriguing personalities. The NDP’s Lynn McDonald, for instance, crusaded against smoking when it was still permitted in Parliament. (Ed Broadbent, the party leader, liked cigars.) To show her abhorrence of smoking, McDonald smashed two dozen glass ashtrays in a committee room. A smoke-free policy was ultimately enacted, in December 1989.

Jim Fulton, also of the NDP, represented a northern British Columbia riding where fishing was an important source of income. In 1985, after many speeches denouncing what he considered wrong-headed policy, he snuck a salmon into the Commons chamber inside a pant leg, then pulled it out, showed it to astonished members, and proceeded to place it on Brian Mulroney’s desk. (The prime minister was absent, attending an international meeting.)

Then there was the case of Jacques Hébert, a Liberal senator and good friend of Pierre Trudeau’s, who was so incensed at the elimination of funding for Katimavik, a youth employment program, that in February 1986, at the age of sixty-two, he began a hunger strike and started sleeping on a bench outside the entrance to the Red Chamber. His protest lasted seventeen days, and he lost nineteen pounds before a non-partisan committee was established to raise enough money to keep Katimavik afloat.

Droll stories abound of hijinks and methods of drawing attention to political causes, but once in a while violence has been at play. In May 1966, Paul Joseph Chartier smuggled a bomb into Parliament. He killed only himself when it exploded in a washroom. Incidents like that — plus verbal threats against MPs and the knowledge of terrorist attacks elsewhere — have led to greatly enhanced security around Parliament Hill. On another occasion, in 1989, Charles Yacoub hijacked a Greyhound bus out of Montreal, pulled a gun on the driver, and demanded to be taken to Parliament Hill. There ensued a six-hour standoff that ended with Yacoub being talked down. He was sentenced to six years in jail, served only two, received a pardon, and proceeded to buy more weapons.

Tighter security makes it less likely that the treatment given Eugene Whelan, who served as Pierre Trudeau’s agriculture minister, could be repeated. In 1976, he found himself surrounded outside a Commons entrance by a group of irate Quebec dairy farmers, then as now one of the most powerful lobbies in Canada. They hurled cheese and butter at him — even a jug of milk — in a “maelstrom of dairy products.”

So, yes, colourful characters, unusual happenings, fiery partisan debates that occasionally produced fist fights, demonstrations for various causes — Parliament Hill has witnessed it all and more, as Feldman details. Thank heavens nothing like the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, with the mob being encouraged by Donald J. Trump, has ever happened in Canada. The events described by Feldman as “unparliamentary” are mostly child’s play compared with that rampage in Washington. Canada remains, by comparison and with all its faults, a “peaceable kingdom.”