How Canadian Voters Cope with Crises

Appar­ently, when the going gets tough, Cana­dians turn to law­yers. I have semi-arbitrarily qual­i­fied the two world wars as national crises (yes, we could argue over what other crises may well have faced the nation, but for sake of simple con­jec­ture I will use these), and examined what occu­pa­tions emerge amongst our elec­ted rep­res­ent­at­ives. Dur­ing both world wars, mem­bers of the legal pro­fes­sion end up as the dom­in­ant non-Parliamentary career in the House of Com­mons. There is only one other point at which they are the dom­in­ant occu­pa­tional group… Dur­ing the Depres­sion and the 17th Par­lia­ment from 1931–1935:

In a pre­vi­ous post, I chal­lenged my own belief that law­yers formed the largest group in Cana­dian par­lia­ment. Look­ing at cur­rent com­pos­i­tion I was some­what sur­prised to dis­cover that busi­nessper­son and admin­is­trat­ors make up the bulk of MPs. I sub­sequently pos­ited that maybe this was some­thing that had changed over time and fol­lowed this study with a look at what occu­pa­tions were rep­res­en­ted amongst the first few ses­sions of Cana­dian Par­lia­ment. Although law­yers may in fact rep­res­ent or have rep­res­en­ted the dom­in­ant mem­bers of the house (this might be meas­ured by look­ing at occu­pa­tions of min­is­ters of the crown), busi­ness interests seem to have been dom­in­ant largely through­out the past 160 years.
The excep­tion to this appears to be dur­ing war­time. The occu­pa­tion of mem­bers of the Uni­on­ist gov­ern­ment in the 13th Ses­sion (1917–1921) can be pro­por­tion­ally represented:

In this ses­sion law­yers edged out busi­ness­men and were fol­lowed by farm­ers and by phys­i­cians at their highest pro­por­tion in any ses­sion.
Dur­ing the Second World War, the 19th Ses­sion of Par­lia­ment (1941–45) was also dom­in­ated again by lawyers:

How­ever, teach­ers and pro­fess­ors show a large increase in voter’s con­fid­ence as do mem­bers of the clergy.
As a side note. If you hap­pen to be won­der­ing where those law­yers are com­ing from, its Que­bec. They actu­ally come from across the coun­try, but as pro­por­tion of elec­ted rep­res­ent­at­ives over half of those from Québec are law­yers. To be fair, 100% of the reps from Yukon are law­yers, but there is only a single mem­ber. MPs from Québec dur­ing the 17th Par­lia­ment are com­posed of the fol­low­ing occupations:

This is a rather simplistic ana­lysis of how Cana­dians cast votes, but it does raise the inter­est­ing ques­tion of pos­sibly where cit­izens place their con­fid­ence when faced with national crises and how policy dur­ing these crises may be effected by the per­sonal char­ac­ter­ist­ics of those set­ting policy.

I used the tree chart tool from Many Eyes to cre­ate these visu­al­isa­tions.