Yes, the Tories are trying to quell the mutiny in their ranks — “mutiny” now being defined as taking up the right to speak in Parliament if you are an MP. To be precise, one of Mr. Harper’s MPs objected publicly to being silenced by his own government.
There is bitter irony in this. After all, the now somewhat lionized member from Langley B.C. sat with the rest of his colleagues barking like a seal while Stephen Harper muzzled government ministers, scientists and bureaucrats. I suppose it comes down to whose ox gets gored.
Still, this is a story worth looking at. What happened to pro-life MP Mark Warawa was the kind of swarming that could only happen in a political party that has allowed itself to be turned into a band of thugs. And MPs can only turn into a band of thugs when the PM himself casts himself as leader of the pack, a title (ahem) not over-used in the Constitution.
There is no question that Warawa’s motion out of committee was votable, though the Praetorian Guard of scribes protecting the PM’s flanks came up with the usual drivel. David Frum bloviated about Canada’s laudable accomplishment of “responsible and accountable government” and scolded the PM’s critics. It was, you see, the PM’s solemn duty to shut up the pipsqueaks sent to Parliament by even pippier pipsqueaks so that he could get on with the serious work of being transparent and accountable.
Actually, Frum’s shrewd colleague at the Post, Andrew Coyne, offered the real skinny on this matter: What the committee had done is equal to saying, “We have the power to declare that day is night …” Or as a fan of Eric Blair might put it, if the Party says two and two are five, five it is.
The truth is that, despite the traditions of Westminster, and the innate privileges conferred on anyone who gets elected to Parliament, MPs have undergone a sea-change. They are now gardener, cook, maid and stable-boy to the Leader. If you don’t mind wearing livery, at least the pay is good.
There is something very odd about all this. As Green Party leader Elizabeth May noted in the House the other day, political parties don’t exist in our Constitution. Yet political parties, and in particular, their leaders, have steadily amassed the sort of power that has taken us to where we are now — the land of bobble-head democracy.
It is remarkable how easily parliamentary traditions can be lost and forgotten. The Warawa Mutiny was based on the right of an MP to make statements in the period preceding the daily Question Period. Conservative Whip Gordon O’Connor lectured Speaker Andrew Sheer that it was strictly the business of the caucus to decide who got to speak. He must have been briefed by that great constitutional expert, the potty-mouthed Conservative House Leader Peter Van Loan. (I still want to see Van Loan and Pat Martin in a cage fight.)
In fact, allowing the parties to choose who will speak is a relatively new development and is not steeped in parliamentary tradition at all. Up until the time of Jeanne Sauve, for example, it was the Speaker who recognized MPs during Question Period. If you look at the old TV footage, you will see that after the leaders of the opposition and the third party finished their questions, a number of members would rise simultaneously to catch the Speaker’s eye.
But Sauve had a problem. The MPs had to be acknowledged by their riding — and Madame Sauve had a terrible time remembering the riding names. Former Pierre Trudeau aide Michael Kirby used to stand beside the Speaker and whisper the names to her as the MPs stood.
That worked until Madame Sauve viewed the TV clips and decided she didn’t like the look of some guy who looked about 15 years old constantly whispering in her ear. So she talked to both House leaders and asked them to provide a list of the MPs who would be speaking. With that practical solution to a purely personal problem, a key power of the Speaker of the House of Commons was handed to the parties — where it has remained. Which is just to say, it’s not always the Grassy Knoll.
Ironically, it is a Conservative MP, Michael Chong, who has introduced legislation into the House aimed at reforming question period, in part by “restoring” the Speaker’s traditional power of recognizing who gets the right to ask questions of the government in question period.
People will remember Chong as the former Harper minister of intergovernmental affairs who resigned over the prime minister’s unilateral decision to grant “nation status” to Quebec without a discussion in caucus or cabinet. But in asking his colleagues on the procedure and House affairs committee to consider his suggestions for reform, Chong made a good point: Don’t personalize Parliament’s eroding power by thinking that the answer to it is to get rid of the current occupant of 24 Sussex.
To a degree, this thoughtful and moderate Conservative is right. The problem is systemic. And the process of parties gathering power around the leader started long before Stephen Harper arrived on the scene. Pierre Trudeau gathered a lot of power around his PMO and famously quipped that backbench MPs were nobodies fifty feet off the Hill.
All party leaders have powers that suggest autocracy rather than democracy: the right to decide who sits in caucus, the right to decide which candidate will run in a particular riding, and the right to grant or withhold the signing of nomination papers. In other words, some of the massive powers that have slid over to the executive branch of the parties must be reclaimed.
But where Michael Chong may be missing something in his scholarly analysis is the extent to which the current prime minister has accelerated the process of seriously diminishing the institutions of Parliament. There is little that Stephen Harper has done that other prime ministers before him have not. But no one has used closure, time allocation, committee secrecy or omnibus legislation to a degree that renders Parliament itself irrelevant.
And he has done some other things that no prime minister ever has. He is the only one to have been found in contempt of Parliament. And has any federal government ever tabled a budget without also tabling the Planning and Priorities report? If the government’s spending details aren’t in the budget speech, aren’t in the omnibus legislation and aren’t in the estimates, isn’t Parliament then voting money without knowing how it will be spent or where cuts will be made?
The prime minister’s solution to the Warawa Mutiny is pure Stephen Harper and shows once again that this man is tone-deaf to his own shortcomings — a proclivity that will soon have him at Lying Brian numbers in the polls.
The PM has magnanimously agreed to create a forum where dissident MPs may yodel their complaints down the well of a “sub-caucus”, a sort of detention room for miscreant Tories, which will probably gather in one of the larger parliamentary bathrooms. Some are calling this a charm offensive by the PM.
The sub-caucus will doubtless be chaired by an impartial robot like Pierre Poilievre.
No surprise there. Remember, this PM is a champion of free speech. Really.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Michael Harris
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