Sad Stories and the Death of Parliament

Oh, look! It's Iggy again:

“I think something really bad has happened to parliamentary democracies all over the world — not just in my country, Canada. What’s happened is increasing power to the prime minister, increasing power to the bureaucracy, and the legislature — parliament — is a kind of empty, pointless debating chamber because it’s all stitched up in advance by party leaders,” Ignatieff said during a weekend panel discussion, aired by the BBC during its annual Free Thinking Festival.

Hmmm. Say what you will about the man, and I've said quite a lot, he is pretty honest:

“Honesty requires me to say I was a party leader once,” Ignatieff quickly acknowledged, “and my instincts were always to shut those people [dissenting Liberal MPs] down wherever I could. So I’m completely, flagrantly contradicting what my interests were not two years ago.”

Among Iggy's many flaws as a party leader was his horrible inability to lie. This is odd in a professional politician and almost unheard of when talking about a Liberal. It used to be that you had pass a lie detector test while reading out the party platform. If you could fool the machine, it was believed, it wouldn't be too difficult to fool the Ottawa Press Gallery. I guess they chucked the machine before Iggy joined the party.

It has been the working thesis at this blog that Michael Ignatieff is a smart guy. Too smart really to have entered politics. Certainly Stephen Harper is hardly deficient when it comes to intellect, but having spent decades in the game he knows when to give a slightly evasive answer. Poor Iggy. Having spent most of his adult life saying whatever came to mind, and being applauded for it, he was turned into mincemeat by the Harper-Layton Tag Team. In politics there is no substitute for professionalism and Iggy, whatever his virtues, was not a professional.

Despite his failure as a pol we should take his views as an intellectual seriously. The topic here is the "Death of Parliament." This is not a new issue. People have been complaining about the Prime Minister having too much power since the days of Robert Walpole. That was about 1722. Three hundred years later and there is still the same complaint about the powers of the PM and the subservience of parliament. The jokes about backbenchers being trained seals date back almost as long. The Victorian-era hit makers Gilbert and Sullivan even had a song about pliant MPs.

There has always been a natural tension between the legislative and executive branches in a liberal democracies. In an American style congressional system this tension isn't a bug, it's a feature included to prevent either side from becoming too powerful. The British Parliamentary system was not planned out, it was improvised as the centuries went on, a medieval institution being adapted to modern needs. One of the downsides of this approach is that the relationship between the executive and legislative branches was never formally worked out.

From Walpole up until about the First World War the parliamentary system, both in Canada and Britain, worked by having Cabinet (the executive) accountable to Parliament (the legislative). This was a bit tricky since the cabinet was also sitting in Parliament. While tricky it wasn't impossible. MPs were sufficiently independent that they could hold their own party leaders to account. From time to time governments would be thrown out by their own backbenchers. Governments could and did fall between election.

None of this would work today. Political systems exist as much in the minds of the participants as on paper. We may have a parliamentary system, however most of the electorate perceives it as a presidential system, an impression not aided by the constant bombardment of American media on Canadian voters. The Cult of the Presidency has spilled over and helped undermine the principle of responsible government.

While we cannot, even if we wished, block out American media, we can make changes to how parliament works. Calls for more free votes are essentially meaningless. No party leader is seriously going to risk losing an important vote, so any free votes will be on irrelevant or symbolic issues. Party leaders cannot risk losing important votes because it will make them appear weak. Why? Because the electorate perceives a presidential system rather than a parliamentary one.

The one thing politicians fear above all else is losing power. The only way you can control a politician is by placing real and enforceable qualifications on their power. If party leaders are too powerful it is because that power is unaccountable. The spectacle of party leadership campaigns where the candidate who sells the most memberships wins the nomination has undermined our parliamentary system. It is the MPs who should be selecting their leader, not some ephemeral collection of instant liberals or instant conservatives. A party leader who could be dethroned by their backbenchers would think twice about defying their will.

The obvious criticism is that such a system is not democratic. Why should a small clutch of MPs choose their leader? Heck even the Prime Minister should the party be in power. The simplest answer to that question is that MPs are engaged in the political process. A citizen who purchased a party membership will likely not be there to hold their favoured candidate to account. The MP will be there because that's his job. If you don't like the job your MP is doing, then vote for another one. The voter holds the MP to account and it's the MP's job to hold the party leadership to account.

The question is what party leader will be brave enough to abandon the system that made them leader in the first place?

Comments

[nomdeblog]

Iggy was a good Prof. Tenure was originally supposed to allow audacious musings without getting fired. Iggy in action at the University Club a decade ago had the chattering class squirming in their dinner table seats as he walked them through his book The Lesser of Evils which essentially supported the Iraq War.

To answer what is wrong with our Party system and Parliament you have to start with how do people get informed and the problem is that images play a big role and that means TV and that means since it is dominated by progressives the slant of images will be polar bears on melting ice bergs with a backdrop of an oil refinery when we talk about climate change…nothing else needs to be said, the images tell the story and ergo we need a carbon tax…according to the TV networks.

Then there is Party branding. Wouldn’t it have been nice if Mitt had the power of PMSH to squelch a couple of Senators talking about God wanted those raped women to have a baby? When those insane statements were shown on TV coupled with Sandra Fluke calling for free contraceptives you got the juxtaposition of Democrats are friendly to Women and the GOP has started a War on Women. We have similar examples to that with some rednecks having to be gagged by PMSH.

Also, there are simply far too many issues that Parliament looks at to find any kind of consensus without strong party branding. The sheer number of MPs , 308 going to 338?, means that you have way too many opinions to get anything done . So the solution is to decentralize out of Parliament more and more to the Provincial and municipal level. Particularly the culture war type issues. Because there is no way to get a consensus of Newfoundland with Quebec with Alberta and so on. Decentralize Parliament and only let it look after a very short list of tasks…Defence, Trade Agreements, The Bank of Canada.. maybe a couple more…that’s it. Shrink Ottawa.

[copinacus]

I don't think it is all that rosie in the Prime Minister's office.
The members of a caucus will only act as trained seals as long as they have the confidence that a PM can reasonably ensure they will be re-elected. Once the PM loses that then it's everyone for himself.
That's why opposition leaders go a lot faster than government ones. They're the losers.
But in my lifetime government caucuses turned on Dief, Joe Who, the Libs leaders after Chretien because there was the sense that they had become a liability to their re-election.