The House of Car Salesmen, Lawyers and Journalists

Samuel Kirz compares the trustworthiness of MPs to the trustworthiness of the jobs that MPs used to hold.

A few things stand out. Fewer than a third of the MPs in this sample had a pre-political profession that was deemed trustworthy by more than 50% of Canadians. On its face, that’s a pretty damning evaluation of the people in Ottawa.

However, a closer analysis of the numbers reveals that there’s one profession with a disproportionately large (and negative) effect on the sample. Lawyer is the most common pre-political profession, and 75% of Canadians consider lawyers untrustworthy. If lawyers were removed from the sample, we’d be left with 53 MPs from an untrustworthy profession and 46 MPs from a trustworthy profession. That’s almost a one-to-one ratio of liars to truth tellers. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than our current standing.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey mapped the pre-politics professions of MPs earlier this month.