The absurdity of rule changes in parliament
There are legitimate checks on government power, and there are illegitimate ones. Because Canada has so few legitimate checks on government, illegitimate ones have proliferated in their place.
The legitimate check on government power in our system is supposed to be the House of Commons, the legislative branch in which the executive is embedded and to which it is responsible.
The government has legitimacy to rule only so long as it enjoys the confidence of a majority of the members of the House, as the representatives of the people; it cannot pass a bill, likewise, without persuading a majority of its merits.
But that, as everyone knows, is not how our system works.
The responsibility of the government to the Commons is by now a formality at best. The votes are whipped. The debates are routine. Question Period is a joke.
There is no serious question whether a government with a majority can get its legislation passed, because the prime minister holds all the cards. He decides what bills are brought before the House, and when; he can declare any bill a confidence vote, dissolve or prorogue the House at his pleasure, cut off debate when it bores him; to say nothing of his vast powers over individual members of caucus, not only through the prime ministerial powers of appointment, to cabinet and a hundred other offices, but also the power of any party leader to decide whether a member may remain in caucus, or even run at the next election.
The MPs who nominally decide the fate of his legislation are in fact, a majority of them, his creatures — they owe their nominations to his signature, their seats to his popularity and their careers to his continued favour.
And to top it off they are not really a majority, in the sense of representing a majority of the public: the majority rule that is sacrosanct inside the chamber is disregarded utterly in the elections that fill it.
And yet, presumably, that is why it is sacrosanct. It isn’t because a bill has the support of a majority of the people who happen to be standing about in that peculiarly decorated room that we view it as legitimate, but because of who they are thought to represent — because of a vague sense that they stand for a majority of the people as a whole. They don’t, but it doesn’t seem to matter.
While it would be unthinkable for a government to try to pass legislation with the support of 39 per cent of MPs, it is business as usual to do so with the support of MPs representing 39 per cent of the people. And the more conscious we become of this contradiction, the more absurd the whole thing appears.
So we arrive at our present, even more absurd, pass: a government elected with just 39 per cent of the vote, using its “majority” to push through rule changes that would reduce what little remains of the House’s capacity to check its excesses, over the united opposition of the parties representing the other 61 per cent of the public.
And the reason this has aroused so little popular fury is that people long ago ceased to look at the House of Commons as an effective check on arbitrary rule, or at MPs as anything but placeholders. So much so that the prime minister’s principal adviser could publicly reject a suggestion that party leaders be elected by members of their respective parliamentary caucuses, without a hint of awareness, on the grounds that this would leave the choice to a bunch of “people in Ottawa.”
Instead the checks on federal power have increasingly come from elsewhere — for example, the Senate.
The ostensibly more independent Senate (independent from the next government, at least, if not the present) is already attracting more attention: lobbying of Senators, the National Post reports, increased threefold last year.
The outrageousness of allowing a chamber full of unelected appointees to overrule the elected House of Commons is admittedly somewhat attenuated when MPs themselves are viewed as one step from appointees: the Senate may be less legitimate than the Commons, but it is arguably more effective, or about to become so.
Still, the Senate has traditionally been seen as lacking the democratic credentials to effectively represent minority or oppositional views, especially those of the less populous regions. So much of the task of checking federal power has devolved to the provinces.
But this is not how the country was designed to function. The federal and provincial governments were each made largely sovereign in their own sphere, and while there was some provision for the federal government to override the provinces, it was never envisioned the provinces would sit in judgment of the feds, still less set themselves up as some sort of parallel government, à la the ludicrous Council of the Federation.
And beyond the provinces stretch the vast archipelago of aboriginal bands, NGOs and activist groups, sometimes grandly named “civil society,” and the doctrine of “social licence” that has attached itself to it — the common-sense observation that politicians should keep one eye on popular opinion, elevated into a blanket permit for street-level obstructionism, within the law or without.
The result: a popular prime minister can declare, following regulatory approval of a proposed twinning of an existing oil pipeline through British Columbia, his wholehearted support for the project, yet the odds of it actually being built are, what, 5 to 1? 10?
This is the paradox of Canadian politics. The lack of legitimate checks on federal authority has rendered it not more effective, but less.
The more powerful the Prime Minister has become within the precincts of Parliament Hill, the less power he has off it.