Still no sign of democratic reform
This is what the federal Liberals’ once vaunted democratic reform file has come to: MPs squabbling and swearing over whether the House of Commons should start work at 9 a.m. or 10. Whether the prime minister should answer questions in the House just once a week for a longer period, or more often but in shorter bursts. Whether the House should sit at all on Fridays. Riveting stuff, ain’t it? In a week when the national government of all Canadians handed down only its second budget, opposition MPs have appeared more anxious about an alleged attempt to railroad democratic processes than about why the Liberals are running up a $28-billion-plus deficit or abandoning plans to get debt under control.
Only 12 months ago, headier times prevailed. The prime minister was still pledging that voters would never again be forced to choose governments under the deficient “first past the post” system that had selected him in 2015.
The details of how democratic reform would occur were still a gleam in his eye, but people who earnestly believed proportional representation was superior to the current mechanism felt hope.
Then it all began to fall apart. Tempers frayed over the government’s perceived bully tactics to push through its assisted dying legislation (you’ll recall a contrite PM apologizing after he accidentally whacked a female NDP MP in the House while trying to steer another MP to his seat for a vote).
That same month, the special committee set up to examine democratic reform began its slow crawl to the starting line amid kerfuffling over its makeup. Finally, in the summer, it got under way.
As the committee of MPs worked – diligently, it turns out — the minister in charge pursued her own parallel consultations, and by winter, she was insulting and discounting the work of these earnest MPs while launching a widely panned website that was supposed to tell Canadians what they really valued.
Come January 2017, that minister was out, thoughts of changing how Canadians vote before 2019 were buried, and the replacement body warming the democratic reform portfolio was told to focus on risks to voting from unknown hackers.
Surely some discussion of democratic reform has survived? If so, it is now reduced to a ruling-party proposal to change the hours and days the House sits, limit the ability of opposition parties to filibuster, set rules for so-called “omnibus” bills, and determine whether it’s good enough for the prime minister to answer questions in the Commons one day a week instead of here and there.
Of note, the prime minister didn’t appear in Question Period to defend his own budget Thursday, and doesn’t attend on Fridays. The House is now on break, so there will be no accountability to MPs from Justin Trudeau until at least April 3.
This, more than anything else, speaks to the actual democratic deficit in politics. Most Canadians don’t care if the House alters its hours, and few understand time allocation or omnibus legislation. We want our MPs to understand and act for us on such matters.
The straightforward move, then, is to empower those individual MPs more and whip them less. Former legislator Brent Rathgeber and others have argued that as long as voters (and leaders and MPs themselves) regard MPs as mere ballast, as long as we ignore that their first and highest duty is to hold government to account — including the government of their own party — we’re undercutting democracy.
Political movements are often about personality cults, and many pundits refer to the “Trudeau government” rather than the “Liberal” one, ignoring the purpose of individual MPs. Power nestles in the Prime Minister’s Office despite Trudeau’s early vow to decentralize.
Yes, there can be real democratic reform in Canada. It won’t be about changing the voting system (though the NDP’s Nathan Cullen and others are still trying), and it’s unlikely the current “process wars” will provide inspiration. But explicitly unfettering MPs — demanding they hold government to account as their overarching purpose, beyond party loyalties — would get us a long way toward a healthier form of politics. Even on Fridays.