PM needs to soothe restive backbench
In December, Conservative MP Russ Hiebert’s private member’s bill — C-377 — passed in the House of Commons by a vote of 147 to 135, thanks to the support of all but five Conservative MPs.
The bill would amend the Income Tax Act to force unions to reveal the salaries of union officials above $100,000 and any payments to outside groups above $5,000.
The argument for the bill is that since union members are forced to pay dues, they should be able to see where the money goes.
You can be sure that some union officials are secretly feathering odd nests and funding pet causes. The Public Service Alliance of Canada has endorsed separatist political parties, for example, and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers has funded a Gaza protest boat, which must be infuriating to pro-Israel posties who have to pay their dues.
But however strong the argument for greater union openness, this looks like bad law. The Canadian Bar Association and the federal privacy commissioner warned that it raises privacy concerns, and labour is an area of provincial, not federal jurisdiction.
But the government’s own hypocrisy is what really got in the way of C-377.
Ridiculously, the federal government was trying to force unions to be more open than the federal government is.
In June, the prime minister’s office sent a group of loyal MPs to the ethics committee to gut a private member’s bill from Conservative MP Brent Rathgeber, which would have disclosed the salaries of public servants making more than $188,000. The PMO’s trained seals voted to raise the salary limit to $444,000, prompting Rathgeber to resign from the Conservative caucus.
Conservative Sen. Hugh Segal, the former chief of staff to Brian Mulroney, who was appointed to the Senate by Paul Martin, took note of the hypocrisy, and used it to rally opposition to C-377, which he attacked persuasively as sloppy, unconstitutional and divisive.
Segal was able to convince 16 fellow Conservatives in the Senate to vote to amend the bill, including 13 who were appointed by Harper. They resisted entreaties from their elected colleagues and raised the salary disclosure limit to $444,000, the same trick the PMO played on Rathgeber’s bill.
Sauce for the goose. Sauce for the gander.
It is unlikely that the Tory senators would have done so if the PMO hadn’t gutted Rathgeber’s bill in such a hamhanded and obviously hypocritical fashion.
After C-377 was amended, the bill’s supporters — who tend to be neo-conservatives rather than Red Tories like Segal — cried foul, complaining that unelected senators had thwarted the will of elected MPs, and the PMO promised to reintroduce the bill in the fall.
C-377 is a shoddy piece of legislation proposing radical change, but almost every Conservative in the House of Commons — including those from heavily unionized ridings — voted for it, even though it was a private member’s bill. Why didn’t more of them vote against it? It looks like the PMO was pushing it.
Every prime minister has about 80 jobs he can hand out to MPs in his caucus, many of whom can hardly believe they have been overlooked in favour of the dimwits on the front bench.
There are 27 cabinet ministers, and they get a car and driver, plus $76,700 a year, all on top of their $160,200 MP salary. There are 10 ministers of state, each of whom gets an extra $57,500 a year, and 27 parliamentary secretaries, who get $16,000. Committee chairs get $11,300.
Any MP who doesn’t have one of those jobs wants one. The prime minister doles them out, providing a powerful incentive for MPs to vote as he wishes.
This system of rewards keeps the caucus in line, although over time backbenchers get cranky. This dynamic is what eventually gave Paul Martin the support to force out Jean Chrétien.
There doesn’t seem to be anything like that happening with the Conservative caucus, in part because there is no would-be leader plotting to push Harper out, but the Tories look restive, irritated by the power-drunk junior staffers in the PMO, sensitive about being treated like trained seals, worried about the long honeymoon of Justin Trudeau, rattled by Senategate and prone to dangerous outbreaks of critical thinking.
As a result, the institutions of Parliament are starting to matter again, in a way they haven’t since Harper won his majority two years ago, when it looked like he was going to be able to legislate by fiat, treating our carefully designed parliamentary system like a rubber stamp.
Of course, by the time the MPs come back in the fall, after a big cabinet shuffle, you can bet Harper will have a plan to get his backbenchers singing in harmony again.
It will have to be a good plan, but there’s no reason to think he’s not capable of producing one.