“There are two rules at the
centre of Parliamentary democracy. First, any politician given actual
responsibility must have an elected mandate. Second, government is
accountable to all politicians with an elected mandate. “ So
says The Fifth Estate in a rebuttal to a recent article by John
Ivisin. In doing so he make
a number of important observations about how our parliament is
supposed to work and how it is being increasingly subverted into a
meaningless & dysfunctional shadow of its former self.
I agree with everything said and
have therefore re=posted this article in full (My bold):-
A few days ago, I suggested that the
main
achievement of the Harper regime
was something few people had noticed yet: a new style of democracy, à
la George Bush and Hugo Chavez, where only the election results
matter: once you’re elected, the rule of law no longer applies.
Now John
Ivison of the National Post has taken up the same point.
Well, sort of. You see, Ivison is an
irredeemably moronic pro-big-government flake
(a journalist?) without an apparent shred of critical
thinking ability or even basic knowledge of how Westminster democracy
works.
There are two rules at the centre of
Parliamentary democracy. First, any politician given actual
responsibility must have an elected mandate. Second, government is
accountable to all politicians with an elected mandate. Now, all
majority governments skirt with violating this principle, all the
time. They break laws. They stonewall investigations. They lie to
journalists. And occasionally they close down debate in Parliament in
order to ram a bill through.
According to Ivison, that’s
fine and dandy. He says the government has a “right” to
pass legislation, because it won the election. This “right”
trumps the whining crybabies in Parliament who want to debate the
bill. According to Ivison, in other words, Parliament is an
irrelevant talk shop. Now, certainly the vast majority of MPs agree
with him that there is no need for maturity, intelligence, or any
remotest shred of independent thinking in their workplace. But they
are wrong. And so is he.
It will probably come as a great
surprise to people as apparently oblivious and ignorant to basic
concepts of representative democracy as national newspaper
columnists, and Post
ones in particular, but no government has the
“right” to pass a law. It actually has no rights. You can
check, in the Constitution. What the Prime Minister has is the
responsibility to ensure the consent of Parliament to pass the laws
he wants to pass. Today, all political
parties claim the right to command this consent whenever they want it
from their members, and those members agree, and almost nobody calls
them on their bullshit. I challenge anyone to
explain how democracy could be anything but
dysfunctional when party discipline reigns supreme.
But what we are talking about now
goes beyond party discipline. The Conservative government has stated
in practice, if not by policy just yet, that Parliamentary discussion
is no longer relevant. They have done this by demonstrating that any
time the opposition parties make some token opposition in Parliament,
they will invoke closure on the debate and hurry the bill through.
Their supporters, like Ivison, cheer them on as they do this.
I’ll be the first to admit that
Parliament has become a rather sad spectacle, but the solution from
authoritarians like Stephen Harper and quisling tools like Ivison is
to do away with the instituion entirely and say that Parliament just
doesn’t matter: what matters is Ivison’s totally
fictitious, bogus, trumped-up “government rights” to do
whatever they want in between election campaigns. I’m not sure
they’ve thought through the long-term consequences of this.
Because the major consequence is to take Parliament out of the
equation entirely and simply agree that the prime minister can do
whatever he likes.
Here’s how Parliamentary
democracy is supposed to work: the prime minister is any person who
can get a majority of MPs to agree to accept his leadership. That’s
it. Political parties and all their ilk are
traitorous leeches who corrupt this process and turn Parliament into
mere showmanship. In this, the NDP and the Liberals are no less
guilty than the Conservatives. But just the same, right now it is a
Conservative
government which is going one further step and suggesting that
Parliament has no role in debating legislation except to meekly stand
by while the Prime Minister’s Office dictates legislation.
People like Ivison presumably feel
this doesn’t matter because the all-powerful leaders in the PMO
will always return to the ballot box every four years or so, and then
if voters have been too harassed by the government, they can get
their revenge. But in an age of declining election turnouts, it’s
worth asking how long it will be before a Prime Minister given the
sort of pre-eminent power Ivison thinks he should have decides that
it’s not really worth going back to the ballot box anyways.
That future autocrat won’t be
Harper, despite some particularly upset leftist bloggers saying last
May that we’d just seen Canada’s last election. It likely
won’t even come during Ivison’s chosen career as
apologist for authoritarianism. But so long as we accept that
Parliament is subordinate to the Prime Minister’s Office rather
than the other way around, that day is coming.
I’m very sorry that these plain
facts about democracy will no doubt be unwelcome to those
anti-democratic forces who insist that we have to shut down debate so
that we can pass the laws now, now, now, fast, fast, fast, and “get
things done” and “bring change” and so on and so
forth ad nauseam.
That’s not how democracy works. Democracy
is not about making sure the leader can act quickly and without
opposition. If that’s the sort of government you think is
superior, there are plenty of them in the world, and you’re
welcome to move to whichever one you think will make you happiest.
Personally, I suggest this
one.
Origionaly
posted at http://sixthestate.net/?p=2718
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