Charlie Feldman has put out an unconventional book that every parliamentary nerd ought to read entitled Unparliamentary, relating many of the unusual facts and not quite procedural events over the history of Canada’s national legislature. From dispelling myths about the two sword-length separation between the government and opposition sides to relating to stories of actual fighting between Members and the sordid details of divorce legislation, it is a light-hearted but thoroughly researched bit of essential reading.

Through my years on Parliament Hill, I always took pride in giving tours to anyone visiting. On more than one occasion, I tagged along with a public tour group as they traveled the corridors of Centre Block, always interested in hearing new stories or unexpectedly answering a question from the public.

I took many people to parts of the building that were not normally accessible to explore, and tagged along whenever I could when long-time staffer Kevin Bosch gave what was dubbed the “sex, blood, and guts” tour of the precinct, offering my universal access as a complement to his universal knowledge for an unforgettable experience.

Feldman, who was already a veteran staffer when I started on the Hill, has since had a varied and interesting career in both partisan and non-partisan roles. His work has brought a lot of memories back for me through this book, especially those incidents described for which I was present.

After the Samara Centre for Democracy launched their book Tragedy in the Commons, I asked a member of Samara in the gallery at a committee meeting if they’d consider eventually writing a lighter book called Comedy in the Commons relaying the sillier and more unconventional side of the place. While they did not seem terribly interested in the idea, Charlie’s nailed it with his tome. It’s in that spirit that I share a few of my own off-beat stories from my time there.

Prior to becoming a professional political staffer and then full-blown politician, I worked as a news feed editor and writer for a series of on-line high tech news sites, most notably Linux.com. In that capacity, I traveled to the capital to cover a conference called the Ottawa Linux Symposium every summer. In the many years I attended the conference, I never visited Parliament in spite of being across the street from the Hill for days at a time. It was not from lack of interest — I had been watching CPAC since I was a teenager as about the only interesting thing the television had to offer, and had been participating in election campaigns most of my life. At the time, I stated that I did not want to visit Parliament until I worked there — but never believed I actually would.

During the symposium in the summer of 2008, I finally relented, going on a public tour for the first time — and jinxing my tech-journalism career. A few months after, in the midst of the 2008 crash, I and all of my colleagues were unceremoniously laid off as the news site changed hands without including the personnel, leaving me with an existential question of what to do next with my life. By the summer of 2009, I was working as a constituency assistant to an MP, and in the summer of 2010, freshly divorced and starting over in every way, I arrived on the Hill, more or less unannounced and with no concrete plan of how to turn my physical arrival into a paycheque, much less a career, and started volunteering my way into the place.

Very quickly, I began learning of the culture on the Hill, of the endlessly free food and trinkets offered by lobbyists, of the work ethic required to survive, of the ambition and burnout that affected staffers, of the practical side of Parliament. I learned of the traditions and taboos, of the complexities of numerous security agencies, of the lines between where the public could go, where staffers could go, and where only Members and their accompanying guests could go.

For a long time after I arrived, I heard of a mysterious vending machine, referred to simply as ‘the coke machine.’ But, I was told, I had to find it for myself. I asked many people for information, and was generally sent to generic vending machines in common areas of the building.

Eventually, with some hints, I wandered down a freight elevator to a sub-basement level and was confronted with it: an active, stocked, vintage, Coca-Cola machine with the 1969 logo selling traditional cold glass bottles, clearly actively maintained as it accepted $1 coins. It became a main-stay of my tours.

Through most of my time on the Hill, I worked in suite 672 of the Confederation Building. The Member’s office within the suite was room 666. One winter morning, I was working at my desk when I was greeted with a loud crash in my boss’s office. I went in to investigate, and found the glass of the window by his desk shattered inward with glass scattered all the way to the far wall, and briefly observed a hammer dangling on the end of a rope outside, quickly retreating upward.

Puzzled, I called security at the front desk and inquired as to where to report a broken window. They confirmed that the front desk was in fact the right place, and a few minutes later an officer from House of Commons security showed up, confirmed that the window was indeed broken, and opened a report. Not long after, someone from Public Works and Government Services showed up with a piece of plexiglass and glued it over the remnants of the shattered window without removing the shards.

I inquired as to what happened and learned that, while the window had broken inward into House of Commons security territory, it had been done from outside. With the RCMP responsible for security on the grounds outside the building, that made the investigation their bailiwick. It turned out to have been caused by an ice clearing operation on the roof of the building. At least that cross-jurisdictional investigation was solved relatively quickly.

Some months later, my boss nearly missed a vote in the House of Commons Chamber as we did not hear the bells ringing. Whenever there is a vote in the House, bells referred to as ‘division bells’ ring across the precinct for 30 minutes (with some rare 15 minute exceptions). The bell will ring once every few seconds for 15 minutes, then ring twice every few seconds for the next 10 minutes, then three times every few seconds for the final five minutes, allowing Members to gauge their remaining time by sound. In parts of the precinct such as committee rooms, the bells are muted and supplemented with a strobe light to reduce interruption.

The bell nearest our office was outside the door that opened directly to the building’s main stairwell. That door, helpfully, was sound-proof. Concerned by my boss’s near-miss on the vote, I inquired with the House how to get one of the strobe lights installed in our office so that we would not have a repeat of the experience nor be deafened by its remedy.

Within a few hours, someone from public works showed up with a giant drill and put a hole in the wall over the door between my and my boss’s office. And then a few days later, a team showed up with a clipboard and asked some questions. Then a team came to measure the hole and take some more notes. This repeated several times over the next few weeks as several more departments got involved.

I learned that they could not install the flashing light in our office without also doing so in the offices in the floors above and below ours. The expense of doing so put the cost of the work into contract tender territory. Weeks became months. The drill hole continued to mock me.

Meantime, we were in a meeting one day and could hear a vague noise and commotion out in the hall. We ignored it, wrapping up the meeting without rushing, and opened the door to see our guests out. On doing so, we determined that the grinding noise we were hearing was a decidedly unassertive fire alarm out in the hall. Fire trucks were arriving before we figured out that we supposed to leave, and the alarm was silenced before we started down the stairs.

We were not, apparently, the only ones to notice this failure as within a few weeks a fire alarm — and strobe light — was installed in my office which, we determined fairly quickly, was substantially louder than the original.

With the fire alarm rapidly updated to provide a strobe, 133 days after my initial request for a strobe light for the division bells, that, too, was realised. I came into my office one morning and discovered a strobe light flashing incessantly in my office while no vote was taking place. I requested help with that and several times over the next few weeks a technician came, opened the box containing the flashing light and adjusted it with the help of a screw driver.

The strobe light that would prevent my boss from missing a vote in the House of Commons worked, apparently, by listening to the audio channel for the division bell and activating the light if the sound reached a certain threshold. I rather expected it to be a more boolean signal —either ring or don’t ring — but was learning an awful lot about the structure and operation of government with the help of flashing lights.

In 2013, after observing MPs in action and influenced by all these shenanigans around lights and windows, I came to understand that the bar to public service was lower than I had anticipated. I decided to run in the riding where I grew up and where my permanent address had been since moving back from Ontario in 2010. It was not a safe riding for the Liberals. In 1980, when Pierre Trudeau won 74 out of 75 seats in Quebec, the part of the riding I grew up in was still part of Joliette — the one riding Trudeau senior’s team did not take in the province that year, losing to Roch Lasalle. Through the 90s and 2000s, it was among the safest seats for the Bloc.

I noted, as a Hill staffer running for office that if, in the election, I were sent to Ottawa, I would leave Ottawa, however if I were not sent to Ottawa, I would remain in Ottawa.

When, two years later, I did win, I kept the office at 672 and Scott Simms, who I’d worked for over the previous nearly four years, moved to East Block. Mine was an awkward shaped office roughed into a hallway, but it had its own bathroom and, more importantly, it was already my office. By keeping it, I was up and running within days of winning my election rather than the weeks it normally takes rookies to get started.

Scott, for his part, told anyone who would listen in the weeks that followed that there were two things he did not believe would ever happen: Justin Trudeau winning the boxing match, and David Graham winning Laurentides—Labelle. He was, it is worth noting, proud to have been wrong about both.

Once elected, I started to explore parts of the buildings I could not get to before. The staircase down from the Peace Tower by the carillon and the catwalk around the ceiling of the House of Commons chamber were among my favourites. The catwalk, with a head clearance of about four feet, no significant lighting, and many structures in the floor, was a hazardous walk. Sadly, that item did not stay on the Bosch tour very long — it is the only place I explored that the Sergeant-at-Arms closed even to Members of Parliament upon learning of it.

I avoided the national spotlight as a Member of Parliament, wanting to focus my efforts on my home riding of Laurentides—Labelle, not on myself or on building a profile. I was well known within the bounds of my riding, recognised everywhere I went whether at events or gas stations. The moment I was outside my riding, I was a complete unknown, and I found comfort in that. Going back to Ottawa offered me a degree of anonymity. I saw no personal or political advantage to changing that status quo.

So, in the fall of 2016, when we had a debate required by the Standing Orders on the subject of the Standing Orders, a line I included in my speech resulted in my only national media play of my time in office: about tearing my pants.

I noticed fairly quickly after taking my seat that the seats are physically pointy. The arm-rests are designed with a point rather than a curve at the leading edge. Anyone who sits down with their pockets even slightly flared will find that they will catch on those pointy chairs and rip the pocket right off their suit pants.

In discussing this with colleagues, I learned that this problem crossed party lines. It was both frustrating to visit the Hill seamstress as often as I did, and a bit of a running joke. So I included passing reference to it in a ten minute speech on House procedure.

It was picked up by media outlets across the country. Global, for example, published an article entitled MPs keep ripping their pants in the House of Commons — and aren’t happy about it. Even CBC radio’s flagship program, As-it-Happens, called me for an interview on the topic. I declined interviews with comedy shows on the topic. For months after my speech, any time anyone ripped their pants in the Chamber, they called me over to show me.

Given the nature of the problem, and the institutional embarrassment in actually solving something so goofy, the Chamber has been replaced, but the chairs have not. Nor was the fact that my speech directly resulted in other changes to the Standing Orders nearly as interesting to the public as the prospect of Members of Parliament walking around hiding gaping holes in their trousers.

This is hardly a comprehensive list of anecdotes from my time. With a young child while in office, Halloween offered endless opportunity for antics. And ask this Douglas Adams fan about sitting in the 42nd Parliament!

Parliament, in spite of appearances and reputation, is a deeply human place. The people working there in every capacity are people. I am but one of tens of thousands of people who have worked on the Hill over its history, and each one of those people has stories and anecdotes to share, most of which have never been written, much less compiled.

If you enjoy this kind of story and want to learn of the stranger bits of Parliamentary history, then pick up Unparliamentary and settle in for a completely different perspective on the centre of Canadian government.