MAROIS INVOKES legislative populism

Proposing legislation as a grandstand play, Premier Marois’s PQ government has introduced three of the bills on the anti-corruption agenda she outlined only last week, Don Macpherson writes.

Part of the “Quebec model” of government is a belief in the healing powers of the National Assembly.

It’s a belief that there is no ill in Quebec society that can’t be cured by the mere act of passing a new law.

The issue of the day is corruption, and voters are enraged by testimony before the Charbonneau commission?

Then Something Must Be Done by the Marois government, and done quickly, since it is a minority government that might soon have to face the electorate.

So, only a week after Pre-mier Pauline Marois delivered her Assembly session opening speech, her government had already introduced three of the bills on the anti-corruption agenda she had outlined.

This is legislative populism, the proposing of legislation as a grandstand play to impress the crowd.

One of those Parti Québécois bills, the one to establish fixed-date general elections, doesn’t even have anything to do with corruption.

It was included in Marois’s anti-corruption agenda for no other apparent reason than to pad her government’s record for the next election.

It’s telling that, as with the other two bills, the government wants this one rushed through the Assembly in the four weeks remaining until the winter recess is to begin.

That’s even though the bill on fixed-date elections would have no real effect until 2016.

Another one of the bills, re-quiring companies wanting to bid on public contracts to pass an “integrity audit” first, was “inspired” by measures in effect in the United States, said its sponsor, Treasury Board chair Stéphane Bédard.

Still, the bill appears to have been improvised in the two months between the government’s election and the bill’s introduction. Such proposed legislation wasn’t mentioned in the PQ election platform.

And how effective it will be will depend on whether the government provides adequate resources for the thorough investigation of the 24,000 companies affected; those companies would need to renew their bidding authorizations after three years.

The third bill, to lower the limit on political donations to $100 a year, might be useless — or worse.

(The bill was introduced the day after the PQ launched a “40-day fundraising blitz,” so that the governing party could take advantage of the current $1,000 limit before the lower one would come into effect at the start of next year.)

Testimony before the Charbonneau Commissionas well as experience in recent years suggest that, no matter what the political financing rules are, the chief electoral officer is unable to enforce them effectively.

A former PQ member who drafted the party’s 1977 political-financing reform, André Larocque, said lowering the limit on contributions to $100 “only increases the consumption of brown envelopes” containing illegal cash contributions.

That’s because the cost of waging election campaigns remains unaffected.

Larocque is among a growing number of people calling for the limit on election spending to be lowered, as well as on contributions.

In an interview in the current L’actualité magazine, Federico Varèse, a University of Oxford criminologist specializing in organized crime, said the high cost of campaigns forces politicians to seek contributions from business people, “and a lot of mafiosi pass themselves off as honest business people.”

The Coalition Avenir Québec has proposed a bill that, in addition to limiting contributions to $100, would also lower the limit on party spending to $4 million for a general-election campaign (the limit was about $11.5 million for the Sept. 4 election).

The PQ minister for democratic institutions, Bernard Drainville, said he’s prepared to “look at” spending limits — but only after his bill lowering the limit on contributions is passed. Anyway, that would solve the problem, he said.

For doesn’t legislation solve all problems?