Parliamentary
reform
There are basically three things that
govern the procedures in the House of Commons, House Committees and
the Senate - Parliamentary Tradition, the House Standing Orders and
the current PMs willingness to recognize that the powers that he and
cabinet have been trusted with are not a license to dictate
governance by decree. The latter depends entirely upon whom we elect
and as we have seen when using the current electoral system (not that
an alternative system would necessarily change this aspect) can lead
to a highly centralized and authoritative governance. Parliamentary
Tradition is subject to much the same limitation, it depends upon the
willingness of the participants to abide by those traditions for they
are not written 'rules' and often are not even clearly understood.
That leaves the Standing Orders which govern the way the actual
business of the House is carried out, unfortunately said Orders as
they now stand leave a great deal of room for abuse of the
“traditions” of free and open debate should the government of the
day (particularly a majority government) wish to limit debate in
either the House or Committee, limit the public’s accessibility to
such debate or otherwise short circuit the democratic process.
According to the House Standing Orders,
MPs must examine the Commons rules each time a new Parliament begins
between the 60th and 90th sitting day. Recently parliament debated
this in the House and a number of MPs called
for changes to better control the actions of highly partisan
individuals during question period and in committee. As Liberal House
Leader Marc
Garneau said during debate on Friday. “I ask
myself sometimes, as I’m sure many Canadians do, why this place
often seems to grind to a complete halt. Is it because of the rules,
or is it brought about by an abuse of the rules? I don’t mean to
sound cynical, but the hyper-partisan nature of this place in recent
years makes me wonder sometimes what needs to be changed.”
Green Party Leader Elizabeth May went
further and said
the rules need to be reviewed and potentially
changed in order to have a check on powerful prime ministers with no
self restraint.
“The health of democracy in really
large ways has always depended on the prime minister … having self
restraint, recognizing ‘I could prorogue Parliament to avoid a vote
I’m going to lose but no one would do that because it would be
wrong.’ When you have a Prime Minister who doesn’t care or
respect the traditions and has no sense of self restraint in the
exercise of power, then we have to as individual MPs figure out how
to enforce some sort of checks and balances against a Prime Minister
who behaves
in unilateral and dictatorial ways.”
That sums it up quite well, things were
moving along reasonably well whilst those in power 'respected the
traditions' but the current rules are insufficient to reign in those
that do not. We now have a number of MPs wishing to review and
possibly change those rules but there are a few problems in that
regard, not the least being that MPs are the ones that must propose
and debate the rules that govern their own behavior and that a
majority of MPs must agree to those changes in what is currently an
institution dominated by one particular party who seem to have little
regard for democratic process. It can also be seen that with a
majority in both the House and Committee the Conservatives could
force through changes that have not been fully debated or even some
that actually reduce democratic practices. Add to that the fact that
much of the checks and balances that usually place some limits upon
is 'tradition' and not even clearly defined and most certainly not
defined as 'rule of law' and it can be seen that this is not an easy
fix. The need for and difficulty of instituting changes was
previously
discussed by many observers when Mr Harper
prorogued parliament to avoid a vote of confidence in the House, at
that time several
constitutional scholars said that the hitherto
unwritten customs and practices needed to be codified (written down,
formalized).
This brings me to the next problem as I
see it and that is the lack of clear penalties should the 'rules' be
broken. As far as I can tell it is up to the speaker to decide if the
rules have been broken, if the matter should be brought before the
house for further action and then if fault be found to decide upon
what action to be taken. Once again a case of more or less self
policing of actions within the house, however when it comes to other
matters such as the rules around proroguing for instance as we have
seen not only is nobody clear what the rules are but there seem to be
no penalties for abusing them other than public outrage and the
possibility that voter will remember such things next time they vote.
Hardly a very effective restraint as we have seen in the past, is it
time for a committee of citizens constitutional scholars to be formed
to consider such changes or is this a job for a Senate committee?
As Ms. May said, while changing the
Standing Orders won’t single handedly change the culture in
Parliament, they’re an important first step.
“We don’t have the votes to make it change. I think over time it
will change because we’ll reach the breaking point. In order for it
to change it will have to be a lot of Conservatives who also agree
they’ve reached the breaking point”
I believe we have already reached the
breaking point, it remains to be seen how many MPs also see that and
how many are willing to stand up and be counted as being in favor of
limiting the ever increasing power of the PM and the ever increasing
diminishment of our democracy.
NOTE - Please see my Elections
Malfeasance page for updated links to some of the many news and
blogs following the ongoing Robo-Scam revelations.
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