Alberta-based politicians on toxic politics and what needs to change

Late last month, Government House leader Mark Holland called for a more human approach to politics, saying that there was "something broken" in how Members of Parliament treat each other.

"This place needs to be more human," Holland told a House of Commons committee, speaking about his own personal trauma and the effects politics had on his mental health.

His comments came amid a political climate that has become "highly problematic for democracy," in the view of Lori Williams, an associate professor of political science at Mount Royal University.

"This notion that you can't accept other people's points of view, you call them names like traitor and worse," she said.

"One of the biggest issues here is that we need all of us to take responsibility for doing things differently — not rewarding this kind of behaviour."

With that in mind, CBC News reached out to three current and former politicians at the federal, provincial and local level based in the Calgary area to get their sense on modern politics and what they believe needs to change.

Michelle Rempel Garner, the Conservative member of Parliament for Calgary Nose Hill, says there's a gravity among members of all political stripes when it comes to the importance of maintaining democracy in light of global instabilities. She says it's important for individual politicians to resist taking the low road.

"That is a job for people who are in positions of great political influence. And it's also incumbent upon the electorate to demand that type of behaviour from the people that they elect, so that they respond accordingly," she said.

Heavily rumoured as a front-runner for Alberta's United Conservative Party leadership after the departure of outgoing leader Jason Kenney, Garner declined to enter the race in June, citing internal discord within the party.

Over the years, she's been a vocal critic of workplace harassment rules in Ottawa. In late 2021, she asked the House of Commons to determine if its workplace harassment policy went far enough to end a "culture of sexual misconduct" in Parliament.

She says that since she's started her time in office, she's seen some improvement in that regard, but the work continues.

"If we're not addressing those things in the halls of power of our country, how can we ever hope to address that for other Canadians?" she said. "So it's less about me and more about showing that our democracy is healthy, and that we're setting an example for what workplaces should look like."

Ottawa also has a tendency to yell "at each other over dogmatic purity," in Garner's view, and it prevents actual work from getting done.

"It calcifies our positions, such that we see positive social interaction as only associating with people in a very narrow worldview. And all that serves to do is to divide us into factions."