At the time this article was
written Marc Bosc was a Procedural Clerk in the Journals Branch of the House of
Commons
Imagine Oliver Twist, dress the boy
in an Eton jacket, put him to work fetching glasses of water and delivering messages,
and you have before you a page from the 19th century House of Commons. The
image rightly suggests a workhouse underworld of low pay -- $1.50 daily in 1867
-- long hours and nonexistent job security. Today, although the work of the
pages remains essentially the same, the Dickensian atmosphere is gone, uniforms
have a more modern look, and male and female first-year university students
have replaced the young boys of the Victorian era.
The puzzle of the pages' origin is
not easy to unravel. The principal difficulty arises from the use of different
titles to describe the position. As early as 1834, reference is made to a
sitting of the Upper Canadian Assembly where "...a little boy is running
about bringing [the Members] plates of sandwiches...". In the United
States, said by some to be the source of the use of pages in Canada, the word
"runner" was used beginning in 1827. The title of "page",
meanwhile, first appeared in American records during the 26th Congress
(1839-41). At about the same time, in 1841, the appellation "House
Page" appeared in the Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province
of Canada, although it did not appear the following year. Both before and after
1841, the title "messenger" predominated in the published lists of
employees. It was only in the late 1850s and early 1860s that the title
"page" reappeared regularly in such lists, with some of the lists
indicating pages were appointed as early as 1855. To further muddle the story,
one researcher has claimed that Quebec records show an individual receiving a
pension for past service as a page -- in 1765! Notwithstanding the obscurity of
its true origins however, by 1867 the position of page was well established.
The employment practices of the
House being what they were in those early years of Confederation, it is not
surprising that pages wer patronage appointees. They were chosen by the Speaker
with the help of the Sergeant-at-Arms, no doubt to sort through the many dozens
of applicants seeking positions. More often than not, orphans and the sons of
widows or poor families, some as young as eleven years of age, were employed.
Yet as this 1898 extract about the "nimble pages" written by the then
Speaker J.D. Edgar shows, a basic requirement had to be met:
It is not fine, big boys that are
required, but smart little boys. As several of the best pages outgrow their
usefulness every year, vacancies are continually occurring, and it is sometimes
too amusing to hear the mothers' assurances that their sons are nice and small
for their age. An anxious parent has been discovered placing her offspring
behind a chair, and directing him to bend his legs "with intent to
deceive" the keen eye of the Sergeant-at-Arms as to his height.
For those eventually hired,
particularly the ambitious ones, life in the political vortex could be
rewarding. Not only were there daily opportunities to rub shoulders with the
country's leaders, but the less stringent security arrangements of the time
allowed the pages to plan more imaginative extra-curricular activities in the
House itself.
One observer, Lord Frederic
Hamilton, visiting his brother-in-law, Governor-General Lord Lansdowne in the
mid-1880s, was, for example, impressed with the pages' use of the House during
the daily dinner adjournment, when they held a mock Parliament.
One boy, elected by the others as
Speaker, puts on a gown and seats himself in the Speaker's chair; the
"Prime Minister" and the members of the Government sit on the
Government benches, the Leader of the Opposition with his supporters take their
places opposite and the boys hold regular debates. Many of the members took
great interest in the "Pages' Parliament", and coached the boys for
their debates. I have seen Sir John Macdonald giving the fourteen-year-old
"Premier" points for his speech that evening.
Not surprisingly, some pages
eventually made their way back to the House after having outgrown pagehood. It
is said that at least two former pages were elected Members of Parliament, and
that one of them, Charles Marcil, was Speaker of the House in the closing years
of the Laurier regime, from 1909 to 1911.
Still, boys will be boys, and the
pages were not above a little horseplay. Of course the behaviour of the Members
themselves left much to be desired, and no doubt the pages could be excused on
that basis alone. One particularly striking example may be found in the session
of 1882, when for an entire evening sitting the sound of exploding
firecrackers, apparently launched by Members and pages alike, echoed throughout
the Chamber. The episode not unnaturally led to embarrassing newspaper
articles, two of which, combined and reproduced here, described the scene:
On Saturday night there occurred in
the House of Commons one of the most disgracefulscenes ever witnessed there. A
number of members amused themselves by setting off `torpedoes' or sand-crackers
in the House. For several hours a perfect fusillade was kept up to the great
annoyance of the speakers and all the sensible members of the House. Sir John
Macdonald said that during the forty years he had been in Parliament, he had
never known anything so disgraceful. This remark was greeted with another
volley of crackers.
At the close of the sitting, just
as Sir John and Mr. Plumb were leaving the Chamber together, one of the pages
threw a torpedo at their feet. Sir John turned angrily around, and Mr. Plumb
valiantly caught a youth whom he thought to be the offender, with a `Here is
the boy Sir John'. The chieftain did not say much, and turned and walked away;
but Mr. Plumb gave the boy, who pleaded that he had got the torpedoes from a
member, a very severe lecture, winding up very emphatically with `I will have
you turned out of the House'.
It is not known what became of the
page...
In spite of the changes that
revolutionized the operations of the House as a whole in the years following
the incidents recounted above, the astounding fact about pages in Canada is
that their lot did not materially change until 1968, when at last a minimum
working age of 16 years was adopted. In fact, it was only in 1978, two years
after the appearance of newspaper articles critical of pages' working
conditions, including one in the Wall Street Journal, that the old system was
completely discarded in favour of the present one.
The coming of age of the page
service under its present configuration is due mainly to the efforts of former
Speaker James Jerome, but also to those of countless other Members who saw in
the service an ideal venue to provide a unique "course" in political
science to young men and women from across the country. The old Dickensian
system was, in the final analysis, perhaps merely an example of a tradition
that persisted too long.