The Mark 2010

There is too much party discipline and not enough real debate in the House of Commons.

The House of Commons is the most visible chamber of Canada’s Parliament, and most Canadians would conclude that it is a house in disarray.

Prorogation, absence, obfuscation, and nastiness seem to be its truck and trade today. If one merely went by accounts in the media, it seems dominated by opposition games of “gotcha” and government games of “keep away.”

Stephen Harper, who brought national attention to the House with two rounds of prorogation, clearly sought to avoid difficult situations for his minority government. It seemed okay with him, and probably many Canadians, for the House not to meet, perhaps a trick he learned from Ralph Klein in Alberta who had the legislature meet as little as possible. Clearly Canadians don’t see Parliament as a necessity.

There are problems with the way the House functions. There is very little vibrant debate, although it is possible to tune in and hear some interesting speeches in the wee hours, when the chamber is virtually vacant. There are, in those nether hours, MPs who have bothered to become knowledgeable about a matter of public concern, and who are contributing to the national discussion. Only watchers of the parliamentary channel (I confess) or readers of Hansard would know about them.

Instead of debate, we get question period, the staged performance of outrage and umbrage where even important questions like the fate of Afghan detainees are reduced to political fodder. Opposition parties cull the list of issues to find the most sordid, salacious, or scandalous, and then work them like rented mules until they die of servitude and overuse.

Every vote in the House is “whipped,” subjected to party discipline, so that individual members have no choice but to vote with their party. The recent straying by some Liberal MPs was an exception, and revealed dysfunction in the Liberal exercise of party discipline. Penalties can be severe, including expulsion and the resulting disconnection from the party teat. Even in committees members are scripted and disciplined, particularly recently, which puts a severe crimp in the discussions which in the past have produced some of the best work of Parliament.

Power is clearly centred in the Prime Minister’s Office and flows from there to Cabinet and then to caucus. The system is so leader-oriented that a senior advisor to a prime minister has more power than a senior cabinet minister, without any public accountability.

In our House today politics trumps policy, and the short-term (defined by the daily news cycle) trumps the long-term. In effect, it is now OK to leave a mess for someone else to clean up.

Somehow, our 308 Members of Parliament have ceded power to fewer than 20 of their colleagues. Most of the 20 are members of the government, the prime minister and the senior cabinet ministers, and the others are the opposition party leaders and a few of their senior colleagues.

You can blame the prime minister and party leaders for this. But you should also blame those other almost 300 MPs who have let this happen with barely a squeak. They’ve allowed this truck to run them over, and most of them have barely tried to jump to the side of the road. They haven’t defended the most important element of our democracy for fear they damage their career. Is this acceptable behaviour in defence of the very democracy people have died for over the centuries?

One of the problems our MPs have with being braver is the fact that their careers aren’t very long anyway. Canadian MPs spend less than five years in the House on average, either being defeated or deciding not to run again. This is far less than in other parliaments around the world. Canada has a relatively large number of ridings that swing between parties, perhaps 25 per cent, so many members are just getting their feet under them when it is time to leave. This doesn’t allow them to master either the parliamentary process or the substance of a key public issue before they go back to private life.

One solution that has been suggested over the years is to increase the size of the House of Commons, perhaps even doubling it. This would allow a riding like Toronto Centre, which is likely NDP in the south end and Conservative in the north end, but elects either Liberals or left-leaning Progressive Conservatives (in the old days), to return one NDP and perhaps one Conservative member who might have considerable longevity.

The bias of this argument, of course, is that longevity is good, which runs counter to the current affection for term limits and hair shirts for politicians. In other parliaments with longer average tenures, MPs tend to become experts. One U.K. MP I knew was an expert in rail transport and played a strong role in the creation of transportation policy whether his party was in power or not. He was in parliament for three decades.

In order to make longevity a virtue, it would help to change some other current conventions of the House. Fewer whipped votes would help, which could be achieved by having confidence votes only on fiscal bills or matters of national security, not merely political disagreement. Parliament could agree to do this now. How hard parties whip votes is their choice, a matter of the convention they choose.

Strengthening the role of the Speaker with stronger censure powers, as Peter McLeod has suggested here in The Mark, would help. This could be enabled by making the Speaker less prone to replacement by requiring large supermajorities for removal.

It might also serve us well to have minimum sitting days per year, as well as minimum attendance requirements for the party leaders to be in the House together. These minimums should be set at high levels to make sure that more debate occurs in the House, rather than on what now seems to be a never-ending stump.

The House was never perfect. From its early days it was a lively political arena with such sharp wits as MacDonald, Diefenbaker, and Mulroney cutting up their opponents. During such high times as the Pacific Scandal, the House seemed to fall apart in disarray, but it always returned to deal with the issues of the day. It likely will again.

But Canada cannot afford to have the House diminished. We need a central place where the discussion of the national project returns, back from the stump or the news clip, back from the private mansions or the barricades. We need those 308 Members to reclaim the House for Canadians and to rebuild our democracy by reclaiming the national discourse.