Understanding our Parliament is important for all Canadians, especially the party leaders.
CANADIANS CAN’T BE EXPECTED TO UNDERSTAND GOVERNMENT IF THEIR PARTY LEADERS DON’T
Canadians need to understand parliamentary selfgovernment if we are to keep it from falling to bits. But how can they when politicians like Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, in an excerpt in last Monday’s National Post from her chapter in a book edited by MPs from the Tories, Liberals and NDP, perpetrates a series of howlers on basic issues?
May rightly, if tritely, laments MPs’ loss of independence. But then she blames political parties, which “are not mentioned in our Constitution,” rather than the frightening growth of executive power that has utterly distorted our constitutional order.
America’s Founders including Washington and Jefferson loathed political parties, also not mentioned in their Constitution. Yet parties quickly evolved around both men because those in politics naturally coalesce around a coherent program that gives citizens some sense of what they are voting for.
It apparently eludes May that her position as head of the Green Party is a big help to voters in determining what she stands for. Instead, as though she had invented non- partisanship from this odd perch, she says: “In Westminster parliamentary democracy, political parties are not an essential ingredient. I have often said that if I were to invent democracy from scratch, I would not have invented political parties at all. Their existence is not a necessary — or even desirable — part of responsible government.”
If she feels that way surely she ought not to lead one. But this inconsistency is nothing to her staggering misstatement of what representative government even is. “We hold to a system of responsible government, meaning not that the government behaves responsibly in some normative sense, but rather that individual MPs are elected to be responsible to their constituents. MPs are supposed to work for their constituents by holding government to account.”
Utter bosh. First, “responsible government” does not mean MPs are responsible to their constituents. It means the executive is responsible to the legislature, especially for money to maintain its operations and carry out its program.
Second, a sadly common mistake, she speaks of MPs “holding government to account” as if legislators were not part of the state. But they are. Our Constitution, like the American one, divides the national government into three branches, including the legislative, because MPs are our agents within the state machinery, not a bunch of weirdos outside on the lawn.
Hence our crucial constitutional rule, in Section 54, that no money bill can pass in a session of Parliament that was not first recommended in the throne speech. As soon as Parliament convenes, the executive must tell legislators, and through them the nation, what it plans to do. And it may not subsequently sandbag or pressure MPs into passing anything else that costs even a dime.
May rightly notes that party discipline was much less strict under Sir John A. But she fails to realize that it is the enormous subsequent growth of executive power and ambition that has made it necessary. To pass thousands of regulations a year, take a quarter or more of GDP from citizens, and reshape society requires tight control over the lawmaking process. One could hardly impose a “green” economy on Canadians if MPs were still 19th-century “loose fish.”
She goes on to deplore the fact that party leaders are now elected by their membership not their caucuses. And it is certainly very hard to argue against direct election of party leaders without being called “undemocratic”… unless you understand how Westminster-style democracy depends on that legislative restraint of the executive the Americans deliberately copied in 1789.
Alas, here May flies off the rails into the ravine. She says: “The U. S. Constitution separates the powers of the executive and legislative branches to create checks and balances. Within the Canadian system, a prime minister whose party has a majority of the seats in the House controls both the executive ( prime minister and cabinet) and legislative ( the majority of MPs in the House) branches.”
Yes. But this recent fusion of dominant executive with feeble legislature is not how our system is meant to work. Instead, it’s precisely the deformation that has reduced MPs to ciphers. And her solution is as bizarre as her assessment is confused. Rather than party members choosing a leader, “the House of Commons should instead vote to elect a prime minister after each election. This could take place between the election of the Speaker and the speech from the throne.” Awooooooooooo!
Why on earth does she believe the Commons votes on the throne speech already, if not to determine whether the prime minister or premier on whose behalf it is read — for instance, Christy Clark in B.C. — shall remain in office? That’s exactly how “responsible government” works now.
How can citizens understand their government when party leaders write such nonsense in a national newspaper?