Mr. Lyon, a now-retired political science professor who taught at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., for more than 25 years, told The Hill Times recently that he’s tired of the dogma that political parties are a necessary part of running the country. He posits that with Constituency Parliaments, or groups of informed locals who advise their members of Parliament, the House of Commons can become a place of consensus policymaking that truly reflects the needs of Canadians.
“That’s a dramatic shift in power, revolutionary if you will, but conservative in the sense that it’s not trying to push an idea on citizens, it’s a matter of trying to adopt a system that would incorporate the wishes people already have,” he explained.
The new system would be simple, relatively inexpensive, and wouldn’t require any constitutional amendments, Prof. Lyon said.
The system has mind-bending implications for how Canada’s government would work, and Mr. Lyon said the shift would result in changes to most aspects of Canada’s current system, from the extinction of the parties to a non-partisan prime minister and Cabinet.
A former member of the New Democrats, the Greens and the Liberals, whom he ran for provincially in 1960, Prof. Lyon said he found the party experience unfulfilling.
While he’s devoted a book and several years to advocating for a new system of government, Prof. Lyon points out that Constituency Parliament isn’t the only possible way to reform the system.
“There may be a better idea out there,” he said, but we need to develop it soon.
“The longer we stall on doing this, the more we are going to find people going to the streets in order to try and get representation. Because they know that there’s something not right in the system, and they’re so correct in thinking that,” he said.
This Q&A has been edited for length and style.
How did the book come about?
“I was really quite frustrated that the public seemed to be almost deliberately ignored. Parties, naturally, didn’t talk about an alternative to parties. But academics, in many cases, keep on repeating the old refrain that without parties you can’t have democracy. The media and so on all went along with this and regarded parties as inevitable. I thought, ‘This is silly, there’s always more than one way to do something.’”
How would Constituency Parliaments work?
“The model is a very simple one. You would take constituencies, divide them up into wards of roughly 1,000 people. Those 1,000 people would elect a representative to a Constituency Parliament. The Constituency Parliament would meet annually with its MP and the chair to discuss the major issues before the government, and then the MP would go off to Ottawa with a clear authority behind him or her from the constituents. ‘My constituency wants X and Y and Z’ and there would be no argument with that position because it’s been carefully discussed locally and he would be responsible to his constituents for carrying their issues forward.
“There would be a contest initially between control of the party leaders and the control of constituents. The success of the MPs would depend far more on the relationships that they build up with their Constituency Parliaments than it would on the party Prime Minister. One of the things that would happen if you had a Parliament composed of these members, all empowered by their Constituency Parliaments, that they would set up a managerial committee and a nomination committee and they would take over all the functions of organizing Parliament and choosing a Prime Minister and Cabinet that would normally be done by the party leadership.
“We’d go from a hierarchical system of Parliament to one that was firmly based in the citizenry. The citizens would have a real opportunity to develop policy and see the policies represented in the Commons.”
Do you know if there’s anything similar to your system elsewhere?
“We could look to the north of Canada actually, at Nunavut’s non-party administration.
“There’s a lot of variation among the liberal democracies and many of them are organized in a way that gives people much more participation. You can think of Sweden and the Nordic countries and Switzerland, for example. Canada is kind of unique in the sense that the citizens are so limited in the amount of participation that they now have. They are simply voters and members of a political audience between elections.
“The system cries out for change.”
Where would the resources to run Constituency Parliaments come from?
“If you break down the resources in terms of how much it would cost each Canadian, you’d come to a figure of about $15 a year, which seems to me a very small price to pay for a responsive political system.
“The resources to fund a Constituency Parliament would come from taxpayers. The system wouldn’t work on a voluntary basis any more than Parliament would. I’m proposing that citizens meet for a month a year and that they get paid for that roughly a 12th of what all the MPs in Ottawa would earn, without all the perks and so on.”
Would we have to amend our constitution in order to put this system of government in place?
“That’s one of the beauties of it. It would not require that at all. It could be instituted simply by legislation.
“It’s not really an extra level of government, it’s people meeting with their MP and making sure that their MP is able to represent them properly by developing a constituency position on issues, so that the MP doesn’t have to go to Ottawa and guess how his constituents would respond to something like Canadians getting involved in Afghanistan and so on.”
Parties are obviously invested in keeping a hold on their power, so how would you initially gain enough political support or traction that they would be forced to give it up?
“That’s a crucial question isn’t it? I think there’s two factors. One is that a great many of MPs already want to get out of the constraints of a party, so you have that factor in the background. There are few issues where Canadians are as agreed as on the desirability of constituency representation. So you need to bring these two together.
“What I hope my book will do is show both groups how this could be organized, because one of the reasons this dysfunctional system is in place is because people don’t feel they have any alternative. They are born into a party system and they’ve been told that parties are absolutely essential, which is a myth, a dogma, and so they feel they have to live with it.”
Thinking back to the push to get mixed-member proportional representation in Ontario—are Canadians really open to changing how their democracy works, or are they frightened?
“I think the contradiction really is that people feel so uncomfortable in engaging in political changes, when number one they don’t trust the people who are leading the changes. There is a deep distrust of people who are in politics or are MPs. They have an instinctive hesitation about going along with that.
“The second thing is that I don’t think PR—although I would favour it—that it really meets the basic needs of people. There isn’t very much for people in that new voting system. They’re still just voters, they’re merely voters, they’re still part of the political audience and they’re not empowered.
“What I think would change the attitude of people a lot is that if they understood that were they given Constituency Parliaments or some other mode of representing organized constituency viewpoints that this was to empower them. They would then own their government. It wouldn’t be a we/they situation; they would control the government.”
It’s my understanding from reading the book that Constituency Parliaments would be non-partisan—
“—Let me back up on that. Constituency Parliaments would compete with the parties. If people, who tell pollsters that they dislike and distrust parties, decide that they would rather vote for a party candidate for office rather than for somebody who was nominated by the Constituency Parliament or who was running as a complete independent, that would be fine, we would continue on the present system if everybody showed a preference for party government. I’ve been told that I’m trying to kill parties. I’m not trying to kill parties, we have freedom of speech, freedom of organization. What I’m wanting to do is give people an opportunity to adopt a system of representation that they say they want. If it turns out that they don’t want it, and they vote for parties, then the idea of Constituency Parliaments and so on would not be offered in particular constituencies. This system could be adopted on a constituency-by-constituency basis. It need not be adopted nationally all at once.”
At the Parliamentary level, after MPs have potentially consulted with their Constituency Parliaments and know how they want to be represented, and they’re bringing that to the House of Commons, what happens? How do debates and disagreements at that level get sorted out?
“The Constituency Parliament would have its own agenda and it would only have time to discuss major issues that were of interest to its members. Many other constituency Parliaments would discuss different issues. You would have 308, or 338 with the change, members with very different mandates. They would organize the House of Commons, set up a management committee that would organize the committee structure in the House of Commons, just the way parties do now except that these committees would function as real discussion groups rather than simply yet another opportunity, in many cases, for the parties to battle back and forth.
“The management committee of the House of Commons, working with the Cabinet, would develop the government’s program. This would mean that some of the issues that constituency Parliaments wanted to see raised would not get raised, and that the MP would have to go back and explain to the people back home why they weren’t raised.
“The management committee in the House of Commons, which was elected by the members, would have this crucial role of aggregating the various viewpoints in the House on the basis of committee recommendations, and working with the Cabinet develop the government’s program.”
By extension, could we have a Prime Minister who is not necessarily ideologically motivated but simply motivated by service to the country? Could we possibly have a non-partisan Prime Minister?
“Not only possible but inevitable, I think. … I think the electoral process is being distorted by using it to endorse policies. It can’t do that effectively. It should just be used to select leaders, and then the policy should be determined quite separately through this widespread consultative process. We’re really shifting power dramatically here.”
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: JESSICA BRUNO
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