Can the problems be fixed? Again, the consensus is yes. There’s no shortage of proposed remedies, geared to restoring Canadian Westminster-style democracy, or even improving it beyond what the fathers of Confederation imagined. Some are complex: Others are straightforward, and could be inserted into any party’s policy kit.
But do the parties want reform? Here, we enter trickier territory.
Conservative MPs would like to have more sway within the Harper government. In unguarded moments some will grouse aloud (but off the record) about the whippersnappers in the PMO, barely out of short pants. Cabinet ministers can’t much like the fact that, through the Privy Council, this PMO wields influence directly on the senior bureaucracy. Ministers today are spokesmen and women for the government – not decision makers.
There’s nothing cabinet ministers can do about this though without losing their jobs, or worse. Former minister Helena Guergis serves as an abject lesson. The prime minister will stand by most ministers through thick and thin, despite their mistakes: That appears to be the main benefit, for them, of ceding power. But if and when a minister gets ditched, it’s all the way and for good, with no hope of redemption. So, never mind seeking reform from within this government.
Green Party leader Elizabeth May speaks with cogent passion about democratic reform. She also has clear ideas about what she’d change. She’d end the practice of leaders signing off on local candidates’ nominations. She’d give caucus the power to unseat a leader, as famously happened to Margaret Thatcher in the UK in 1990. And she’d restore the firewall between the PMO and the senior bureaucracy. “There’s no longer a clear distinction between the civil-service public-policy side, and the ruthless politics side,” May says. “Ruthless politics is running everything.”
Fair enough. But Elizabeth May will not become prime minister, and she knows it. For now at least, she has no caucus to contend with. She’s denying herself the spoils of power in the abstract.
For NDP leader Tom Mulcair, who could become prime minister in 2015, democratic reform is a tougher proposition: He may be called upon to keep his promises. The opposition leader has spoken with increasing bluntness and fervor recently about the democratic deficit. Wednesday Mulcair gave a lengthy, detailed and acidly articulate speech in the House of Commons in which he demolished, not just the Harper government’s second omnibus budget bill, C-45, but its entire program and approach to governing. It was an impressive performance.
Mulcair’s critic for democratic and parliamentary reform, Craig Scott, is a former Osgoode Hall law professor who clearly has thought a lot about this problem, and is searching for systemic remedies. “I honestly wonder whether Mr. McGuinty (the Ontario premier) would ever have dared do what he just did, in the way that he’s done it, if he hadn’t had Mr. Harper doing two prorogations that were abuses,” Scott asks. “Did that somehow pave the way?”
Most reasonable observers would say, obviously, yes. But asked whether the NDP would support a simple ban on prorogations, absent a 66 per cent majority vote in favour – a fix proposed by University of Victoria scholar Mark D. Jarvis and co-authors Lori Turnbull and the late Peter Aucoin, in their 2011 book Democratizing the Constitution: Reforming Responsible Government, Scott is noncommittal.
And therein lies the rub: Power or even the prospect of power imposes constraints – ungodly imperatives. What’s to prevent a leader, of whatever party, from promising democratic virtue to the moon but then, once in power, pulling a Stephen Harper, consolidating power in the centre? It’s a catch-22: One must have power to effect change. But having power removes the desire to effect it.
That leads to this conclusion: Political parties can’t fix what ails them – not on their own. They have a conflict of interest. Only popular will can drive reform. But before that happens, Main Street – the so-called ‘Tim Hortons’ crowd whose somnolence the Harper government has long taken for granted – must first stop accepting the drip-drip-drip of violations.
Canadians are perhaps just now becoming broadly aware that a centuries-old parliamentary tradition, based on conventions of decency and fairness, mainly self-policed, is being re-written on the fly. Jean Chretien bent the unwritten rule book, in his day. Harper and now Dalton McGuinty have burned it.
“I think violence is being done to the fabric of democracy in Canada but it’s almost invisible,” says May. “Because government still looks like government.” Yes it does. For how long, is the question.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Michael Den Tandt
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