After all the hysteria, it’s time to debate Reform Act

Can’t be done. Too risky. Goes too far. Doesn’t go far enough. Whenever and wherever someone actually makes some concrete proposal to repair our damaged democracy, the forces of inertia almost instantly gather to ensure it never happens. Of course, everyone agrees that something should be done. Just not, you know, this.

So it is with the Reform Act, on which Conservative MP Michael Chong has been toiling for most of the past 15 years. Before the bill was unveiled Tuesday, a flourish of pundits had written its epitaph — even as they complained of others “rushing to judgment” in advance of a final text.

The bill, it was said, would never pass. Or if it did, would make no difference. Worse, it might. Parliament would be destabilized, said some, by a series of democratic “palace coups” against party leaders by their faithless caucuses — the same caucuses who, others maintained, had shown no interest in using their existing power to do the same, and thus had demonstrated it was unwanted. Or rather they had, many times — and thus had proved its superfluity.

Remove the power of the leader to decide who may run under the party banner, warned some, and it would lead to a wave of neo-Nazis hijacking nomination meetings.

At best, it would empower tiny parliamentary factions to divide and disrupt the party’s business. No, claimed others: giving a majority of caucus the power to expel a member would inevitably give rise to mob rule, and the suppression of unpopular opinions.

All of this, as I say, before anyone had so much as seen the bill, let alone thought about it. All anyone needs to know in this country is that a reform or innovation of some kind has been proposed to come up with a hundred reasons to reject it, on the principle made famous by F.M. Cornford: that nothing should ever be done for the first time.

Well. Broadly speaking, we can divide the opposition into two groups: the Sophisticated Yawners and the Unbridled Hysterics. The first hold, variously, that the bill is unnecessary, ineffective, or unlikely; the second are united by the belief that it is actively harmful, even if they cannot agree what those harms are.

It is the model on which this country was founded, and under which it grew to maturity, but from which we have strayed. It is to that system — the system of Macdonald and Laurier — that the bill would return us, nothing more.

The first group is perhaps easiest to dispatch. If it is indeed the case that MPs already possess the power to remove their leader, as an unwritten convention, it can hardly do any harm to put it in writing: to clarify the rules, to remove any uncertainty, to telescope what has often been a long, ugly, divisive brawl into a quick and orderly judgment. It took a year to remove Stockwell Day, two years to dislodge Jean Chrétien. Margaret Thatcher was gone in a matter of days.

As for the dismissive handwaving about the bill’s chances, so much in view in the first hours after it came to light, this seems to have receded as more and more MPs and other influential voices, from James Rajotte to Bob Rae to Hugh Segal, have come out in its favour. In any case, this is less an objection than a pose. No one knows whether the bill will pass, in a vote that is still many months away — the Minister of Democratic Reform, for one, seems to have positioned himself squarely against it — and we would all be best advised to spend the interval considering its strengths and weaknesses, rather than handicapping its odds.

What of the case for hysterics? It is easy, of course, to conjure up all manner of devils from the unknown. But in this case the unknown is well known. The proposal before us is merely to replicate the model already in place in the other Westminster democracies: the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. It is, indeed, the model on which this country was founded, and under which it grew to maturity, but from which we have strayed in recent decades. It is to that system — the system of Macdonald and Laurier — that the bill would return us, nothing more.

So those who would menace us with visions of endless parliamentary bloodletting or Hitlers on the hustings should explain why this has not occurred in any of the other Westminster systems — as earlier they did not in this country. The current provision of the Elections Act requiring a candidate to obtain the party leader’s signature, which the Chong bill would remove, dates to 1970. Were the parties beset by fringe candidates before then? Have they been free of them since?

And even if it would mean the odd crackpot slips through, is the chance of such an occasional nuisance worth the extremity of the remedy — handing the leader the power of life or death, career-wise, over every single member of the party? Are we that paralyzed by fear of a little democratic unruliness, that abject in our longing for a strongman to protect us from ourselves?

Still, there are always risks in any reform. But let me propose to you another set of risks. There is a risk that we might allow our elected representatives to become meaningless ciphers, with no role other than to cheerlead for the party leader. There is a risk that Parliament might cease to perform any useful function: not debating policy, not scrutinizing bills, not holding governments to account. There is a risk that our system of parliamentary democracy might become neither parliamentary nor democratic. But no, that is not a risk: It is very much the reality, under the status quo. We have an opportunity before us to change that. Let us now debate it in the appropriate spirit.