“I think something really bad has happened to parliamentary democracies all over the world — not just in my country, Canada. What’s happened is increasing power to the prime minister, increasing power to the bureaucracy, and the legislature — parliament — is a kind of empty, pointless debating chamber because it’s all stitched up in advance by party leaders,” Ignatieff said during a weekend panel discussion, aired by the BBC during its annual Free Thinking Festival.
“Honesty requires me to say I was a party leader once,” Ignatieff quickly acknowledged, “and my instincts were always to shut those people [dissenting Liberal MPs] down wherever I could. So I’m completely, flagrantly contradicting what my interests were not two years ago.”
Ignatieff, appearing as part of a public panel alongside former Irish President Mary Robinson and Israeli author and journalist Amos Oz, said: “I do think we’ve got to have more free votes in parliament.”
He conceded that such a change “will make it much more difficult for prime ministers and party leaders,” but better for citizens if they are “represented by MPs who can think and act on their conscience and on your interest.
“And until we can break some of the power of parties in parliament,” he added bluntly, “I think parliament’s going to die.”
Ignatieff told Postmedia News by email that his message at the Free Thinking Festival was that, “what is in a party leader or prime minister’s interest is not always in the interest of democracy.”
He added that a “loosening of the party whips may be necessary to keep our democracy from suffocation.”
Ignatieff was a renowned writer and philosopher before his rocky term as Liberal leader ended in a decisive defeat in the May 2011 election, which left him ousted from his Toronto-area seat and reduced his once-powerful party to third place behind the NDP, led by the late Jack Layton.
Ignatieff had been memorably skewered by Layton during a leaders’ debate when the NDP leader pointed out that his Liberal counterpart had the worst attendance record of any MP in the country when votes were being held in the House of Commons.
Ironically, given Ignatieff’s weekend comments on free votes in parliament, one of his major achievements as Liberal leader came in September 2010 when he “whipped” his caucus to vote en masse to defeat a Conservative MP’s private member’s bill that would have scrapped the federal long-gun registry.
Although the registry has since been dismantled by the majority Conservative government, Ignatieff was widely seen in 2010 to have proven his leadership mettle by forcing eight Liberal MPs to reverse their previous positions on the issue and vote against the bill — despite strong support for it in their ridings.
Ignatieff’s comments, surprisingly, echo those of former Reform leader Preston Manning, who has always cast himself as a champion of MPs’ freedom from party constraints.
At the time of the gun-registry vote, Manning complained that, “as long as you have the extreme partisanship and the combination of tight party discipline in the minority Parliament, I think it just makes for acrimony.”
Ignatieff, now a professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, gave a lecture last month at Stanford University — titled On Partisanship: Enemies and Adversaries in Politics — that similarly explored how party domination of public affairs is undermining democracy in Canada, the U.S. and other countries.
He was exploring that theme again in Britain, where — just days ahead of the U.S. presidential election — he argued that extreme partisanship “alienates the public” and often involves “falsifying the issues” to demonize political opponents.
“In a democracy, I think, we have no enemies,” Ignatieff stated during the BBC broadcast. “We have rivals. We have opponents. But we don’t have enemies. Enemies are people you want to destroy. Enemies threaten you. Adversaries are simply people you compete with.”
Referring to the U.S. election, Ignatieff said: “I’ve got a strong feeling we’ve got a politics of enemies, a politics of mutual destruction. That’s just plain bad for democracy.”
Original Article
Source: national post
Author: Randy Boswell
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