Jan H
Prince
I don't know what the legal status is here in Canada, but I'd still have a problem with it. Being a mayor for any large-ish city tends to be a big job. Maybe you guys just have much smaller cities, but if the mayor of my million-person-city was also an MP, I'd not be pleased, regardless of the commute.
Like I said, it depends a lot on the size of the cities. We don't have any multi-million cities. Brussels (1 million inhabitants) is divided in several municipalities, each with their own mayor. When I say "smaller cities", I mean up to 50.000 or so. Above that, I can't think of many examples of mayors also being MP. The only one I know of is the mayor of Antwerp that I mentioned before.
It also depends on how the democracy in your country works. In Belgium, a lot of the legislative work is prepared by the coalition government (federal or regional), and the job of the members of parliament, especially the ones from the parties that belong to the coalition majority, is often just to show up and vote in favour of the proposed laws. The power of individual MPs is quite limited because of party discipline...
Executive jobs cannot be combined, for instance government ministers cannot be city mayor at the same time. They can be elected to a city council though, but then they have to get themselves replaced. We have municipal elections coming up in a couple of weeks, and several government ministers are running. I believe even our prime minister is running in his home town of Mons. Some of the minsiters are saying they will be quiting their ministers post when they can become mayor, but others are just running to support the local branches of their parties (ps. our municipal elections are also based on party lists and proportional representation; in Flanders, the mayor is not elected directly, but selected from the council members of the parties that can form a coalition majority)
I'm not saying I approve of all of this, btw...