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who was in the Parliament of Canada, and no black woman was at Queen’sPark or any other place I could look at,” said Jean Augustine. One aboriginal MP was conscious of past exclusion. “My mom, she’s seventy-five and she remembers when she wasn’t allowed to leave the reserve. She needed a pass. So you are battling that history,” said Gary Merasty, the former Liberal MP for Saskatchewan’s Desnethé–Missinippi–Churchill River riding.
    For immigrants, moving to a new country is often such an integral part of their experience that it plays into the dynamics of their self-identification. “The majority can’t [appreciate] the struggle that a minority feels,” said Saudi Arabian–born Omar Alghabra, a Liberal MP from Mississauga–Erindale. And Marlene Catterall, the daughter of a German immigrant, recalls approaching Parliament right after her election as a Liberal MP from Ottawa, still thinking of her family as relative newcomers: “I remember walking up the steps to go into the Centre Block and thinking, ‘Okay, Daddy, so what’s the daughter of a lousy immigrant tailor doing here?’ My dad had just died about six months before and you know, he would have loved to see this.”
    And even some new MPs with prior, more local, political experience expressed a sense of feeling out of place in the wider political arena. “I’ve always been driven by trying to represent the people who elect me. That’s what motivated me: to represent them as best I could in Ottawa and be the voice for the small guy. I always put my riding and my province first, sometimes to my own peril,” said Bill Matthews, a Newfoundland MP from 1997 until 2004, who had earlier served fourteen years as a provincial politician.
    THE TWO NARRATIVE components of our interviews—reluctance to pursue a political career, and the maverick “anti-political” sensibility once in office—seem to be caused by, and perpetuate, the same negative perception of politics and the people who work inside the system. The cynical public does not believe it, and it discourages high-calibre candidates from pursuing public office. “Once politicians start pretending they’re not politicians, but their opponents are, it has the effect, not just of driving voters away from their opponents, but of driving them away from the political system itself,” said former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff in a 2012 speech at Stanford University on partisanship. “If politicians don’t start sticking up for their own profession voters certainly won’t.”
    Would the calibre of our politicians improve, and would politicians become perceived as more trustworthy, if our elected representatives chose other narratives about themselves? Andrew Potter’s 2010 book, The Authenticity Hoax , observes that contemporary politicians and the parties that back them are marketed just like consumer goods, a phenomenon he refers to as “the Big Macification of civil discourse.” The trouble, however, is in the tactics that Canadian politicians often employ to market their brands. The advertising world features many cases where two or more brands compete for a limited market share—a situation analagous to the competition for electoral votes. But we don’t see advertisements from Coca-Cola or Pepsi criticizing the soft-drink industry. Nor do we see McDonald’s and Burger King criticizing fast food. “Why doesn’t Kenneth Cole go after Ralph Lauren?” Potter asks in his book. “Because it would run the risk of turning the public off the entire category and shrinking sales for all concerned.”Unfortunately, Canadian politics, with its outsider-identifying, maverick candidates, has not yet shared this insight.
    Our common cultural history seems to include a period when politics was perceived as an esteemed calling, a respected profession, a time when fine and upstanding men and women enthusiastically pursued the honour of party candidacy and political office. Our interviews