The Canadian House of Commons Page Program is a student internship program of the House of Commons of Canada. Every year, 40 undergraduate students are selected via national competition to work for the House of Commons as pages. Pages perform both ceremonial and administrative duties, including:
Pages take part in a number of activities throughout the year designed to enrich their experience, including meetings with MPs and government leaders. They also meet frequently with student groups to explain the workings of the House and their duties as pages.
Selection process
Forty graduating high school (or CEGEP in Quebec) students are selected each year to serve as pages in the House of Commons. Applications are open to candidates from across the country. Pages must be fluent in both official languages of Canada (English and French) and pass a security screening by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. They are selected based on a written essay, a second-language interview and a face-to-face interview. Once chosen, one of the first challenges for pages is to learn the names and faces of all 338 MPs in the House. After a week's training, prior to starting their term, pages are sworn in by the Speaker and Clerk of the House of Commons.
History
The Page Program dates back to at least Confederation (1867) though it was quite different at that time. Pages were male only, and boys as young as 11 years old were selected. One of the more unusual requirements was that pages had to be short of stature, in order to be as unobtrusive as possible. They were paid CA$1.50 (equivalent to $29.19 in 2021) per day. Pages were chosen by the Speaker, with help from the Sergeant-at-Arms, and they held the position until they outgrew their uniforms. The term "House Page" was used as far back as 1841 in the Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada.[2]
In 1968, a minimum working age of 16 years was adopted but it is only in 1978, after an article in The Wall Street Journal criticized the pages' working conditions, that the previous system was completely discarded in favour of the current one. It was only in 1978 that women were able to participate in the program, as opposed to the all boys program that existed prior.[3] Some of the pages from the old system were kept on as "senior pages" to supervise the new pages and serve as a form of continuity. Notable among these first senior pages were Andre Frechette and David Lavictoire.
Although officially under the auspices and jurisdiction of the Speaker of the House, the Page Program for the first 20 years was the full-time responsibility of Miss Annette Leger, a former assistant to federal Liberal Cabinet Minister Donald Stovel Macdonald.
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