Six Birthday Wishes For Canada

The federal political parties would earn more respect from voters if they co-operated in Parliament.

Looking ahead to Canada’s 144th year, I hope we will see less self-serving partisanship from all of the political parties at the federal level. Now that might sound like a pipe dream, but it isn’t.

We have a minority government and all the polls indicate this won’t change in the next year. It’s time for our elected representatives to put Canadians first. They have an opportunity to do so as clearly no one will win a decisive victory if an election were called today and a potentially ugly fate awaits any party that comes up short.

For the Conservatives, another minority government could mean being replaced by a coalition, and would almost certainly lead to calls for a new leader. For the Liberals, a defeat would see attempts to replace Ignatieff and the renewed nastiness of a leadership fight while the party tries to rebuild.

With the two main parties having more to lose than gain by forcing an election, they should be sitting down and looking at how they can earn some respect from the voters. An obvious way of doing this would be by co-operating on legislation.

We have seen how this can work with the immigration legislation introduced by Jason Kenney and with the recent pardon legislation. While it does take more time and work to sit with the other parties to work out a compromise on legislation, its passage without a lot of rancour in the House is assured.

The same holds true for committee work. Rather than using committees as bear pits to trump your opponents, put MPs on them who are willing to work together. There are plenty of them around, except right now they are being drowned out by the party mouth pieces and attack dogs.

There is nothing wrong with opposition parties holding the government to account in question period. But the antics of question period should not be carried over to the rest of the parliamentary work day. If Canadians could only get our MPs to adopt Michel Chong’s question period reforms, even that 45 minute period of political theatre and mayhem might prove useful.

Canadians deserve a government that functions in the best interests of all of us. Since no one party has a majority now or in the foreseeable future, let’s see some cooperation on the Hill and maybe in our country’s 144th year, our politicians will earn back some of the respect they once had from voters.