Newly-retired Progressive Conservative Senator Lowell Murray recently said Canada’s Parliamentary and political institutions are broken, deputy ministers are doing “end-runs around their own ministers,” Cabinet ministers are allowing themselves to be treated like “ciphers,” the permanent voters’ list is “vastly overrated,” the spending estimates process is a sham, “political assistants are running rampant around town,” and the fixed Parliamentary calendar is a problem, but while MPs on the Hill point to their political rivals as the root cause, those watching on the outside see plenty of blame to go around.Mr. Murray, who served as a Progressive Conservative Senator for Ontario and was a member of former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s Cabinet, has leveled several serious criticisms on how Canada’s democracy functions since his retirement at the end of September.
Last month Sen. Murray told CBC Radio’s The Current that Canadians needed to take back their democracy. He cited a litany of problems that have contributed to the erosion of democracy in Canada, beginning with the demise of door-to-door enumeration in maintaining Elections Canada’s permanent voters list. Sen. Murray stressed the need for face-to-face outreach in bolstering Canada’s dismal voter turnout.
In the last federal election, voter turnout was 61.1 per cent, a negligible improvement on the 2008 election’s 58.8 per cent participation.
This fall’s numerous provincial elections have also been lacklustre. Only 49.2 per cent of voters turned out for the Ontario election. In Manitoba, it was 57.5 per cent; and 58 per cent in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Elections Canada spokesperson Diane Benson told The Hill Times that the agency continues to conduct direct enumeration in areas with high population turnover, such as student neighbourhoods concentrated around post-secondary institutions, while it uses advertising and direct mail to notify the general public of upcoming federal elections. She confirmed that Elections Canada is looking at creating an online service for citizens to keep their voter registration up-to-date.
Aside from his criticisms of the current state of voter outreach, Sen. Murray’s most damning observations were saved for how power is exercised in Ottawa.
He described riding associations as being “completely at the mercy of the well-financed and highly professional permanent apparatchiks at party headquarters in the nation’s capital,” with limited input in party policies.
Liberal Democratic Reform critic Stéphane Dion (Saint-Laurent-Cartierville, Que.) denied that such a relationship existed between his own party and its riding associations. “The Liberal Party never had any problem of this kind with my riding association, but it’s a concern that we should always be more bottom-up than top-down,” said Mr. Dion.
Conservative Caucus chair Guy Lauzon (Stormont- Dundas-South Glengarry, Ont.) also cast his party as being driven by its constituents in an interview he did with The Hill Times over the summer. “We’re big on coming from the grassroots, listening to the constituents, so if somebody in some remote part of Canada has a concern, it has to get heard,” Mr. Lauzon said in the lead-up his party’s summer caucus meeting.
Alison Loat, executive director of non-profit organization Samara, which works to promote citizen engagement in Canada’s democratic process, said that her organization’s survey of former MPs found significant problems with political parties and the candidate nomination processes when it comes to civic participation Canada.
“The political party emerged across all the interviews as a source of difficulty or frustration for a lot of members of Parliament,” Ms. Loat noted of the results of Samara’s MP exit interviews. Her organization recently teamed with the Canadian Association of Former Parliamentarians to interview 65 former MPs, 21 of whom served as Cabinet ministers, on their experiences in federal politics. The political party emerged as a vaguely defined entity that made sometimes “arbitrary decisions” focused on achieving “discipline within ranks.”
Many respondents also described their nomination process as “uncomfortable,” even more so than running against other parties’ candidates. No clear nomination process at the constituency level emerged from Samara’s 65 interviews, Ms. Loat observed.
“Another interesting thing that I realized in talking to MPs is the very language that Members of Parliament use to describe themselves actually degrades the very profession that they practice,” she noted, adding that it was rare for former MPs to describe politics as a worthwhile career.
“There was this professed reluctance, and if they talk that way, is it any wonder that a young person doesn’t view this as a valuable way to spend time?”
Parliamentary procedure expert Ned Franks described party leadership’s influence over local candidate nominations as a particularly troubling trend in Canadian democracy.
“The party leaders have the right to refuse a candidate and appoint another one in every riding,” Prof. Franks observed. “What we have are party leaders and the Prime Minister controlling not only his Cabinet and party in Parliament, but even who gets nominated. That’s wrong. It’s all the party leaders, not just the Prime Minister. Candidates represent their ridings, not the party leaders and Prime Minister, who have no business deciding who is a riding’s representative.”
Sen. Murray has also decried the expenditure review process as being backwards, with the review being left to the Auditor General after the money has already been spent. The observation was a reiteration of comments he made at an event honouring political scientist Donald Savoie in June, when he chastised Parliament for failing to reign in executive power and allowing “their most vital power, the power of the purse, to become a dead letter.”
In conversation with The Current’s Anna Maria Tremonti, Sen. Murray harkened back to when committees’ primary role was to examine the budgetary estimates of the departments they were mandated to review.
“That hasn’t happened. Why? Partly I think because the parliamentary committees find that it’s not sexy enough in most cases, politically speaking,” Sen. Murray mused. “Secondly, they are overburdened with legislation or things that they have to do or want to do.” He added that the fixed parliamentary calendar, which allows late-tabled estimates to be approved by default, compounds the problem.
NDP MP David Christopherson (Hamilton Centre, Ont.), who chairs the House Public Accounts Committee and serves as the NDP’s democratic reform critic, declined to comment on what other committees ought to be doing, but said that Public Accounts’ review of the estimates and budget process would produce recommendations that other committees ought to take into consideration.
“Every committee is the master of their own destiny, and I respect that totally,” said Mr. Christopherson.
Sen. Murray, who served as minister of state for Federal-Provincial Relations in the Cabinet of prime minister Brian Mulroney, set aside some of his harshest criticism for the devolution of Cabinet power, not only in the current government, but over the course of successive Liberal and Conservative governments. He cited prime minister Trudeau’s 1978 decision to implement austerity measures over the head of then-finance minister Jean Chrétien as a primary example.
“[C]abinet government is not working, in a nutshell. There’s plenty of evidence of senior public servants, deputy ministers doing end-runs around their own minister, going directly to the Privy Council Office and through Privy Council to the PMO,” Sen. Murray observed. “They’re treating their ministers as ciphers, and unfortunately, the ministers allow themselves to be treated as ciphers.”
Sen. Murray also cited examples of ministerial staffers exercising powers and even doing “end-runs” around their bosses.
When asked to respond to Sen. Murray’s statements on Cabinet’s diminished influence, Treasury Board President Tony Clement (Parry Sound-Muskoka, Ont.) responded: “He’s entitled to his opinions as a private citizen, even if they’re misjudged and completely fallacious.”
Prof. Franks backed Sen. Murray’s account of a Cabinet that has had its power gradually devolve to unelected civil servants and staff members, describing staff as a “black hole in Canadian politics and public administration.”
“They’re lackey’s to the Prime Minister and his staff, with exceptions,” noted Prof. Franks. “I don’t think Flaherty is a lackey to anybody.”
Ultimately, said Sen. Murray, due process has eroded. “It is what makes our electoral democracy work, our parliamentary democracy work, our system of governance work. You must respect due process.”
“I think there’s been a sort of acquiescence over the years that it’s just the way things go,” David Christopherson said. “What we’re hearing from Senator Murray and others is that it’s time that we stop and gave this whole system a good shake. Is this the best democracy that we can provide for Canadians?”
Origin
Source: Hill Times
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