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Queen’s role in preparing its graduates for politics has many roots. One of the most vigorous is Queen’s Model Parliament, which was founded in 1947 and is still flourishing.

Since 1858, the Alma Mater Society had invited students to govern their own affairs. The Department of Political and Economic Science ran a Politics Club, which sponsored regular debates over current affairs and political theory in professors’ homes. Other non-partisan public affairs and debating clubs flourished on campus.

After the Second World War, student interest in politics at Queen’s spiked, reflecting a broader Canadian debate over Canada’s post-war policies at the dawn of the Cold War and the welfare state. But when Queen’s students sought to establish campus branches of national political parties, the AMS threw up a roadblock. In the 1930s, any affiliation with off-campus organizations had been banned by referendum. The fear now was that active political parties might fuel division on campus. A student referendum in 1947 revealed that 85 per cent opposed the AMS funding political clubs on campus.

Two political studies students, Kate Macdonnell and Mike Howarth, solved the dilemma. They suggested that Queen’s stage their own version of McGill University’s successful Mock Parliament. Every year students would assemble a mimic parliament on campus, replete with parties, procedures and legislative programs that would be debated and voted upon by would-be student politicos. The parliamentarians would have no active affiliation with Canada’s established parties.

The idea won immediate acceptance. Queen’s first “model parliament,” staged in Grant Hall, debated such issues as whether the CBC should be privatized or whether wartime price controls should be reintroduced.

The parliament was about process as much as it was about ideology. Sometimes the debate was erudite and serious. At other times, it veered into satire.

In the 1990s, the Model Parliament received a welcome favour when Commons Speaker Gilbert Parent invited Queen’s students to stage their annual assembly in the actual House of Commons in Ottawa.

The speaker’s successor, Queen’s graduate Peter Milliken (himself a 1960s participant in the Model Parliament and AMS Speaker), carried on the new tradition where Queen’s “members” occupy the seats of actual MPs and debate legislation they themselves had devised across the floor of the hallowed hall. A speaker, pages and clerks are elected to smooth the parliamentary process. Prominent politicians, keynote speakers and journalists join the would-be young politicians at receptions over the course of the weekend.

In 2011, QMP invited comedian Rick Mercer to join them on the Hill to participate in the Model Parliament tradition

Learn more:

• Heading to the Hill: Queen's Model Parliament celebrates 70 years in Queen's Alumni Review