New guide aims to improve Hill staff mental health, make better decisions – National

As the 44th Legislature prepares to start next week – the first Legislature to have a Federal Minister of Mental Health – a group of multi-party MPs is urging parliamentarians to do more to take care of their mental health and mental health. their staff.

The group handed out a Mental health manual for parliamentarians and staff, a resource guide. Its authors hope it will spark more discussion and awareness about mental health, especially among political staff. This is a group of around 3,000 people who work with little job security in a very stressful and “always on” environment for often relatively low pay.

“It’s not an easy task,” said Senator Stan Kutcher, a psychiatrist who, along with Toronto MP Ya’ara Saks, oversaw the preparation of the guide. “It’s not a nine-to-five job. It is a difficult, difficult task. I think sometimes we can underestimate how difficult it is.

Both authors, as well as politicians themselves, argue that the benefits of improving the mental health of Parliament Hill employees can translate into potential gain for the whole country.

“We want to make sure, in this unique environment, that we and our staff have the resources we need to be able to make good decisions,” said Saks, a Liberal MP who represents the constituency of York Center. Saks is the founder of Trauma Practice for Healthy Communities, a Toronto-based mental health charity.

Matthew Conway struggled with his own mental health issues during his decade as a political staffer during Harper’s time, and later as an assistant to Ontario Cabinet Minister Caroline Mulroney. He agreed that improving mental health on the Hill is in the public interest.

“When people are mentally exhausted, it is not a good condition or the right condition to have big political discussions,” he said in a recent interview.

Conway, now a Montreal-based lobbyist for Capital Hill Group, detailed his struggles in a Facebook post in August in federal elections. He has since become an advocate for speaking out about the stress faced by political staff.

“There were times when all of this stress and anxiety was literally crippling to the point that it was almost impossible to get up in the morning,” Conway said.

The stress that Conway and the others interviewed for this article were talking about is not the kind of stress associated with harassment or abuse: the center of Canadian political life, when you are supposed to answer all hours of the night. and of the day to the deputy, the minister or the chief of staff.

“You are literally attached to your phone and you are in a situation where you are always connected. It’s like your brain can never rest, ”said Conway. “And also, you know, you’re just wondering, is my next mistake, is that the one that’s gonna get me fired?” Where am I going to be then?

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Still, Conway and other staff say that any admission of difficulty, any request for a mental health break, is generally not part of Hill’s culture.

“Going to see the Chief of Staff was not an option because in my opinion. It was putting my job or my career on the line, ”said Conway.

This culture is precisely what Kutcher, Saks and others seek to change.

“What I see with my fellow Senate colleagues in the House is the realization that part of what we need to do is move beyond partisanship and support each other as human beings, ”Kutcher said. “Because the bottom line is that human connection is the key to improving the human condition. “

For Saks, the mental health manual for parliamentarians is a way to start this culture change.

For many parliamentarians – on the Hill, in their homes and communities – it is difficult to start conversations about mental health, Saks said.

“We don’t know how to have these conversations. We don’t know how to start them, how to maintain or continue them ”and how to help people with mental health resources.

Kutcher also said the very public nature of politics, including social media which becomes a forum for political attack, increases pressure and anxiety, with the fallout extending to the families and staff of politicians.

For the children of a politician, it could be the comments about their mother or father, he adds.

“This is my mother and this is my father. How can that be? I mean, it must be so, so hard for the kids. I mean, how do you deal with this? You see more and more vitriol directed at parliamentarians. We see a lot of hate speech. We see attacks. We see desecration of offices. It’s a kind of interaction that we just haven’t seen in Canada before. It’s not a good thing, ”Kutcher said.

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The pandemic has brought unique stress. Many political staff, whose working arrangements had also been disrupted, were on the front lines in the face of anxious and distressed voters, said Stephen Yardy, NDP political staff member and chairman of the NDP. United Food and Commercial Workers Local 232, which represents 151 people who work for the New Democrats on Parliament Hill. They are the only political staff in Parliament who are unionized.

“There was a lot of stress, a lot of burnout,” Yardy said. “Parliament, with hybrid sittings, when we sit later and later at night, then the committees. So the hours continued to pile up. It wreaks havoc on you.

As a union representative, Yardy reminded its members to track their overtime and make sure they take time off. But most of the political staff on Parliament Hill does not have the backing of a union. They are essentially free agents. There’s no excuse to miss a 7 a.m. conference call, even after a session that may have ended around midnight.

It is difficult to quantify exactly how many political staff could be affected. Most work on Parliament Hill, but hundreds work from home or in constituency offices across the country. Each of the country’s 338 MPs employs about six people, ranging from a Hill office to a constituency office. Each of the country’s 105 senators probably has two. Each of the 40 cabinet ministers would have up to 10 additional political staff. CPM could have 50 more. There could be 50 other political staff in the offices of party leaders.

Neither the Speaker’s Office, which administers the House of Commons budget, nor the Treasury Board could provide a precise number of current political staff, but those who have worked on the Hill for decades agree that it probably lies between 2,500 and 3,500.

Staff salaries for a small minority at the top can be significant.

The top of the salary scale for a minister’s chief of staff is around $ 190,000 per year, while a press secretary tops out at around $ 120,000 per year. The minimum salary for a full-time ministerial assistant is approximately $ 85,000 per year.

But those who work for MPs – the vast majority of political staff – earn much less. MPs are not allowed to pay any member of their staff more than about $ 90,000 per year, and because the operating budgets of an MP’s office are capped at $ 374,000, few MPs pay anyone the salary. maximum. This allows them to hire more staff in the range of $ 30,000 to $ 50,000 / year.

Ministers and MPs can also allocate part of the salary costs to part-time positions.

With the exception of people who work for senators, the fortunes of about 3,000 people are mainly linked to the political fortunes of their masters. New elections can mean many are unemployed.

“The ups and downs of this life, both in terms of feelings of security and conversations in the public sphere – all of these can be a really, really tough test of resilience,” Saks said.