The participants of the 19th annual Canada-Ukraine Parliamentary Program have returned to Ukraine, full of positive emotions from their sojourn in Canada and knowledge they acquired while working in Canadian parliament.
Two months are not too long a period. They usually pass quickly and without being noticed in the everyday routine with all the chores, work, studies, constant running about, and everyday problems. It is a different story when you have to change your entire surrounding for two months, try to do something you have not done before, and also learn to live and work in another country with a different culture, mentality, and different kind of people around you.
This kind of opportunity to learn more about life overseas, specifically politics, was given this year to 25 Ukrainian students by the Canada-Ukraine Parliamentary Program, which offered an opportunity to Ukrainian youth to try themselves in political activity and acquire a working experience in a position of a federal MP assistant in the country of maple leaves and hockey.
Each internee – this is how the participants of the parliamentary internship program are called – was attached to a certain Member of Parliament and performed various duties in his office for seven weeks: answering phone calls; collecting information on questions considered within the parliament; accompanying the MP to committee gatherings; analyzing mass media materials, which mentioned the MP; creating databases of voters’ data and analyzing the electoral responses to the MP’s work; drafting short speeches, which were later pronounced by the MP during the so-called question period, when members of opposing political parties do their utmost to put their parliamentary competitors on the spot.
Several participants could even compare the work of two parliamentary houses, since once in a week they had a possibility to work in the office of Senators, who are not elected in Canada but are appointed by the premier. Generally, the Canadian political spectrum was nearly in full represented in the student group, since the internees had worked in the offices of the members of three major federal parties – Conservative, Liberal, and New Democratic.
The only exception was the Bloc Quebecois, a separatist party, which is also represented in the Federal Parliament; its objective is to advocate the interests of the population of the francophone province of Quebec. This year no participant of the parliamentary program had an opportunity to do internship in the offices of the MPs from this political force.
Interestingly, during the program Ukrainians became so imbued with the political ideas of their MPs that they even started to identify themselves in a corresponding way, as conservators, liberals, or new democrats. But after all, one of the goals of big-time politics is to increase the number of adherents, so it is no surprise that the participants embraced certain political ideas of the parties they had worked for.
Office work was not the only thing that made the life of the Ukrainian students during the program. This year the parliamentary internship program in Ottawa appeared to be extremely intensive in terms of official meetings and group projects. In particular, Ukrainian students had a possibility to speak with the Speaker of the House of Commons Peter Milliken and meet with the opposition leader Michael Ignatieff, President of Canada’s Public Service Commission Maria Barrados, numerous MPs, senators, and government employees.
One of the key points in this year’s program was studying the activities of the Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner and the Office of the Auditor General. Both are independent Canadian institutions that monitor the work of particular members of parliament and NGOs. Ukrainian internees had an opportunity to speak with the heads of the abovementioned institutions: Mary Dawson and Sheila Fraser, respectively. Both offices are a kind of instruments of control over the Canadian statesmen and MPs, who are called to protect the state and its citizens from arbitrary political rule and economic corruption.
It was also interesting for the Ukrainian students to compare the specific features and, strange as it may seem, the level of openness of the diplomatic offices of various countries. In particular, the participants of the program visited the embassies of Germany and the US to Canada and made corresponding conclusions about the scale of economic and political cooperation Canada has with these states. (After all, the US is Canada’s largest trade partner and its only continent neighbor, which has determined the intensity and dynamics of centuries-long relations between the two countries.)
Not surprisingly, the program participants had especially fruitful cooperation with the Ukrainian embassy. Owing to the support of the embassy employees and Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine to Canada Ihor Ostash, the internees succeeded in realizing their ambitious projects like a roundtable on the topic of human trafficking, which was attended by the noted Canadian human rights activist MP Joy Smith, a literary soiree dedicated to the birth centennial of the outstanding Ukrainian poet and literary critic Bohdan-Ihor Antonych, and a soccer game between the Ukrainian combined team of students and embassy employees and the team of Canadian members of parliament.
The final chord of the student’s sojourn in Canada’s capital was the official reception held in the Ukrainian embassy that involved Canadian MPs and their assistants, who were the actual coordinators of work of the program participants due to the tight working schedule of the MPs, well-known public workers and politicians who became acquaintances with the internees in the course of the program, as well as members of the Ukrainian diaspora in Ottawa. The number of guests (nearly 100) and their high ranks (10 MPs, Senator David Tkachuk, and Gerda Hnatyshyn, the wife of Canada’s ex-governor Ramon Hnatyshyn were proof of how actively the students “penetrated” into the political life of the Canadian capital in general and the Ottawa Ukrainian community in particular.
It was only at the very end of the program that the participants obtained an opportunity to spend several days in Canada’s biggest megalopolis, Toronto, where apart from tourist attractions they visited the Stock Exchange and learned more about the secrets of the extraordinary financial stability of the Canadian banking system, which felt the consequences of the global financial crisis only indirectly.
Two months are indeed a short term, but the Ukrainian students managed to spend this time overseas in an active, interesting, and educative way, so much so that a question arises: Is it enough to just read books? Aren’t internships of this kind sometimes more instructive than mere information about the political system of another country or the mentality of its citizens?
