WHO WILL REIN IN PM’S DISREGARD FOR DEMOCRACY? NOT THE NDP
There are few things that make citizens more angry than hypocrisy from preachy politicians.
On June 4, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ventured from Rideau Cottage and said: “I want to be very clear, we’re not out of the woods. The pandemic is still threatening the health and safety of Canadians.” He then went on to remind Canadians to social distance and be vigilant.
One day later, Trudeau did something he has been loath to do — he attended Parliament Hill — not to preside over Parliament but to attend an anti-racism rally with thousands of people in protest of the killing in Minneapolis, Minn., of George Floyd, who died when a police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes.
Video of Trudeau taking a knee shows him wearing a cloth mask — with his ever-present cameras in tow — being pressed on all sides by an enormous crowd.
On June 8, during one of his increasingly irrelevant daily news conferences outside of his cottage, Trudeau said this about breaking his own decrees to Canadians: “I recognize that it is a difficult situation where we are trying to balance very important competing interests.”
What about all those small business owners who have seen their life’s work evaporate because they weren’t allowed to do any balancing of competing interests? What about those people who were not allowed to be with a dying loved one?
Too bad our PM is less concerned about the competing interests of social distancing and Canada’s most precious attribute — our democracy.
A new report by the Macdonald-laurier Institute called COVID’S Collateral Contagion: Why Faking Parliament is No Way to Govern in a Crisis, makes an impassioned case for why Parliament should immediately resume.
Christian Leuprecht, the report’s author and an MLI
Munk Senior Fellow, says the extraordinary measures employed by the minority Liberal government demonstrate “unprecedented disregard for parliamentary convention.”
“The COVID-19 epidemic is the greatest test for the maintenance of Canada’s democratic constitutional order in at least 50 years, certainly since the October crisis of 1970,” writes Leuprecht, referring to when Pierre Trudeau was prime minister.
“Canada’s government has not only capitalized on the virus to limit democratic debate on measures it has implemented, but also effectively put the very ability of Parliament to carry out its functions up for debate wholesale,” says Leuprecht, who is the Eisenhower Fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome.
He likens what has happened to Canada’s Parliament under the younger Trudeau to 17th-century Britain.
“The same could be said of Charles I, a believer in the divine right of kings and an unrepentant absolutist. Infamous for quarrelling with Parliament over its attempt to curb the royal prerogative — over the large fiscal deficit that had built up — the tyranny of his personal reign lasted 11 long years until 1649, when he infamously found out the hard way that Parliament, its functions and parliamentary sovereignty were not up for debate.” Charles I was beheaded. “Respect for constitutional convention made Great Britain the most prosperous and stable political and economic system in the world for over 200 years,” something that continued through two world wars, the Brexit campaign and now COVID -19.
Leuprecht points out that on May 26, Canada’s federal government forced a motion to suspend regular sittings altogether from June 18 to Sept. 21, allowing only four scheduled sittings. On June 17, only four hours were allocated for Parliament to debate total spending of $150 billion.
“For good reason, this has been referred to as the most expensive four hours in Canadian parliamentary history … but not subject to specific debate.”
Never has a Canadian Parliament sat less: only 40 sitting days between July 2019 and June 2020.
“The federal government has become a notable outlier amongst other Westminster parliamentary systems. The United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand continue to have functioning Parliaments despite the pandemic.”
And yet, when it comes to battling COVID-19, New Zealand and Australia, with four deaths per million people each, have vastly outperformed Canada (221 deaths per million people), obliterating Trudeau’s argument that not sitting has helped our federal government act more quickly and with greater flexibility and efficacy.
Duane Bratt, political science professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, agrees with many of the conclusions of the report.
And while he’s critical of Trudeau, his sharpest criticism is reserved for federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh.
“I know a lot of people are blaming Trudeau for this, and rightly so, but I put more blame on Jagmeet Singh,” Bratt said during a telephone interview Monday.
“Typically, governments don’t want to be in Parliament any more than they have to and opposition parties always want them there as much as possible because that’s when they can be held to account, so to see an opposition leader basically say, ‘we don’t need Parliament right now,’ is really, really troublesome,” adds Bratt.
Singh shamefully negotiated away our democracy to have Trudeau make an announcement about additional sick days for employees, which is under provincial jurisdiction.
“That’s all he held out for,” points out Bratt. “I want to play cards with that guy!”
Leuprecht writes: “In unprecedented disregard for parliamentary convention, the government cancelled the budget it had planned to table and refuses to provide a fiscal update. By May 2020, direct federal spending announcements related to the pandemic had amounted to $152.8 billion … while the federal deficit is projected to exceed $250 billion this year. The Government of Canada’s total balance sheet is expected to be $1 trillion in the red, while total public debt in Canada is anticipated to amount to $3.2 trillion, or 166 per cent of GDP.”
In short, “a democracy should reciprocate unprecedented restrictions on individual freedoms and unprecedented levels of spending with unprecedented levels of debate and scrutiny.” Canada is getting the opposite. That’s much worse than hypocrisy — it’s undemocratic. There was a time when Canadians would have protested that.
For good reason, this has been referred to as the most expensive four hours in Canadian parliamentary history … but not subject to specific debate.