Good Sunday Morning! And Fourth Day of Christmas—Fifth day of Hanukkah!
Despite the adjournment of Parliament, the political news keeps coming. Dominic Leblanc and Melanie Joly were off on another pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, Pierre Poilievre announced another scheme to bring down the government, and it seems no one but Justin Trudeau has gone on a Christmas break.
In case you missed it, this is a brief summary from the National Post on Pierre Poilievre’s latest ploy:
‘The Conservatives have a new plan to bring down the government quickly’
“The Conservatives are going to reconvene the public accounts committee on Jan. 7 and use it to ship a motion of non-confidence to the House of Commons when the holiday break ends on Jan. 27.
“The party believes MPs will be able to vote on the motion by the end of January.”
I may be the only one who thinks Poilievre’s new gambit violates parliamentary rules. It is a much repeated tenet of parliamentary committees that they are the masters of their own proceedings. It should not be the case that the leader of any party, nor the PMO, can dictate what a committee must do.
(cutting and pasting below a standard extract from the Procedure and Practice bible for Parliament)
“Masters of Their Procedures and Proceedings”
“The idea that committees are ‘masters of their proceedings’ is frequently invoked in committee debates or the House. The concept refers to the freedom committees normally have to organize their work as they see fit and the option they have of defining, on their own, certain rules of procedure that facilitate their proceedings.” https://www.ourcommons.ca/
But as is the case for so many parliamentary rules, the expanding top-down power of political party leaders is eroding this rule. Back in 2012, I discovered MPs in small parties had the power to do something MPs in larger parties did not—to put forward substantive amendments to legislation after the bills had been amended at committee, at Report Stage. When Harper’s 2012 omnibus budget bill, C-38, took aim at over 70 laws, including the Fisheries Act, repealing the Environmental Assessment Act, the National Round Table, the Kyoto Implementation Act and more, I put forward 432 substantive amendments to repair the damage. The goal was not to cause a parliamentary voting marathon, although that it did. The goal was to gain bargaining power to gain passage of even a few amendments. But Harper was unyielding. C-38 passed without a single change from First Reading to Royal Assent.
My amendments caused a 24-hour period of non-stop voting. While other parties created voting rosters so no one MP had to stay in their seat the whole time, I was the sole Green MP and never left my seat, nor slept, nor ate, for 24 hours straight. That event angered Harper’s PMO. The Speaker shot down a few ideas from Conservative House leader Peter van Loan to stop me from ever doing that again. Van Loan wanted to create a new practice where one or two of any group of amendments I ever tabled would be put to a test vote. If they failed, all my amendments would die. The Speaker, and future Conservative Party leader, Andrew Scheer, pointed out that it is fundamental that MPs have the right and duty to improve legislation. By practice, but not under any rule, no MP whose party does not have at least 12 MPs in the House is allowed to sit on Standing Committees. So long as I could not sit on committees where legislation gets amended in the stage called “clause by clause,” I had to have the right to make amendments at Report Stage. Harper’s PMO found an ingenious work-around, without going to all the trouble of changing the rules. It drafted identical motions for every committee to pass. The motion created an “opportunity” for Green MPs and other smaller parties (at that time including the Bloc Quebecois and independents) to be given a 24-hour notice to send in amendments to be “deemed” moved by the committee. This “opportunity” allowed the smaller party MP about a minute per amendment to speak to it, but not to vote nor table any further amendments during the study of the bill. This motion has been a royal pain and a ton of extra work. Every time there is an election, every committee is asked by every PMO to pass the motion again. I am sure most MPs have no idea why they pass this motion. Many may even think they are doing smaller parties a favour. No question it has resulted in dozens of Green amendments being passed and ending up in law.
I try to set out before every committee that this is a breach of the principle that they are the masters of their own process, and I would appreciate it if they told PMO to stuff it—or more polite words to that effect.
Ah well. Such adherence and respect for our traditions is what makes me a better parliamentarian than politician.
With Poilievre’s use of the Public Accounts Committee to boot-strap his way to an early election—a ploy that may or may not work—yet another shovel of disrespect for the antiquated notion that the party leaders are not leading their MPs around by the nose bites the dust.
I wonder if anyone would care about Poilievre’s latest sneaky move.
And then Bob MacKie, stalwart Salt Spring Green, happened to send me this great column from Andrew Coyne. I think Coyne will care, but I doubt it will be raised as an issue in the media that the not-yet-PM will clearly do what predecessors have done and increase and centralise his powers. Like me, Coyne is a fierce critic of the cancer-like growth of PMO power. Thanks to Bob for sharing, and I include it in its entirety and thank Bob for taking it outside its paywall, but if we all do this how will the tiny bit of Canadian print journalism we still have survive? A dilemma for another day. For now, read and know I agree with every syllable.
The problem isn’t Trudeau; it’s that prime ministers have too much power
Andrew Coyne
One way of looking at the crisis to which the Prime Minister has led his party, the government and the country – the country adrift, effectively leaderless in the face of a historic threat from without and growing divisions within; the government in chaos, with ministers rushing for the exits and the Prime Minister’s own survival in doubt; the party hurtling toward electoral oblivion – is as a testament to the personal failings of one man.
And indeed, Justin Trudeau has all the qualities needed to produce such a fiasco: vain, self-involved, arrogant and increasingly out-of-touch – “delusional,” is Liberal MP Wayne Long’s frank description – loathed by much of the public, abandoned by his most loyal retainers, yet deaf even to the pleas of his own party to step down, believing, still, not only that he can come back to win but that only he can.
But before Justin Trudeau there was Stephen Harper, and before Mr. Harper there was Jean Chrétien, and before Mr. Chrétien there was Brian Mulroney, and before Mr. Mulroney there was Pierre Trudeau: prime ministers who, like the incumbent, became more and more isolated, out of step with the public, cut off from reality and ultimately drove their governments onto the rocks.
Perhaps, then, this is simply a function of long tenure, something we should just accept as inevitable. Or maybe, just maybe, there’s something wrong with the system. If power has consistently corrupted our prime ministers – and scandals of one kind or another eventually consumed them all – the explanation may be that our prime ministers have too much power.
Heads of government are powerful in any system. But ours have amassed powers that are without equal, if not without limit. A president of the United States controls the executive but not the legislative branch. He cannot be assured of passage of his legislation, even where one or both houses of Congress are controlled by his party.
A prime minister in a European parliament, meanwhile, must typically share power with the other parties in his governing coalition, rather than the single-party majority governments more typical of Westminster-based parliaments, such as ours.
Yet even among Westminster systems, the powers of a Canadian prime minister stand out. Not only is party discipline enforced much more strictly here, but many of the conventions that still constrain prime ministers in Britain, Australia and New Zealand have been allowed to lapse in Canada.
Control of the legislature is only the start. A Canadian prime minister has unrivalled power over the executive branch, as well, not least through his extensive and largely unsupervised powers of personal appointment: judges, senior bureaucrats, police, army, the works.
Notoriously, and perhaps most pertinent to our present discussion, the prime minister has all but eclipsed cabinet as the centrepiece of our system of government. Again, prime ministers have always been powerful – there never was a PM who was “first among equals” – but in Canada of late it has been taken to unprecedented extremes.
Partly that has to do with the expansion of cabinet, from a dozen ministers under Sir John A. Macdonald to 20 under Mackenzie King to nearly 40 today – the largest cabinet in the democratic world (and it’s not even close). With so many ministers crowded around the table, not only is the power of any individual member of cabinet diminished but so is that of cabinet collectively. It’s simply not an effective deliberative body.
And part of it has been the attendant expansion of the Prime Minister’s Office – with more than 120 staffers, all of them political appointees, it, too, is among the largest of its kind. Power has become more and more concentrated among the prime minister’s personal advisers, at the expense of members of cabinet, to the point that ministers no longer even appoint their own chiefs of staff: they are appointed by, and report to, the PMO.
Chrystia Freeland’s experience, of having policies imposed upon her, unilaterally and without consultation, will be familiar to other ministers, in this as in previous governments. It is a recurring feature of the memoirs of three former Trudeau ministers, Bill Morneau, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Marc Garneau. If that is what a minister of finance, or justice or foreign affairs has been reduced to, imagine what molecules the other ministers have become.
Political scientists have been banging on about this for eons, but it is in moments like the one we are in now that we might begin to connect the dots, to understand that this is not just an academic issue – that there are real-world consequences to this concentration of power, and that the longer we allow it to continue, the worse it is likely to get.
Conventional management theory teaches that, the greater the size of the operation, the more important it becomes to delegate authority to subordinates. Instead, Canada has gone the other way. The growing complexity of government has led to ever more elaborate attempts to run everything from the centre: either the Prime Minister’s Office itself, or the other great centralizing agencies of government, notably the Privy Council Office.
The result is the kind of disarray we see now. It is not possible to manage an institution of this size, or that has taken on so many responsibilities, with so few people. Even the attempt is bound to wear down and overwhelm the participants, with many more resulting mistakes.
It is all too easy, moreover, for those inside the bubble to become cut off from new ideas, alternative points of view or differing experiences. When there is no one, in effect, to say no, there is very little incentive to examine assumptions, to test theories against evidence or to learn from mistakes. Everything comes to depend on the judgment of one person, and the longer it goes on, the frailer that judgment inevitably becomes.
This is why cabinet, and cabinet government – genuine cabinet government – is so important. Cabinet, though it is a part of the executive, is at the same time a kind of check on it. Ministers are unlike ordinary prime ministerial advisers, in as much as they are elected officials, people with their own standing in the community and inside the party; as important, they are also people who have to get re-elected. Not only do they bring a raft of different perspectives to the table, but they keep the prime minister grounded, in touch with the outside world, in contact with reality.
When, by contrast, cabinet government devolves into something approaching one-man (or one-woman) rule – well, we have seen the consequences. And that is hardly the only flaw in our democratic firmament. Indeed, recent weeks and months have yielded example after example of the practical real-world harms that arise from “abstract” failures of democratic process.
The Prime Minister, for example, is at a net -43 per cent in the latest personal-approval poll. The Liberals are headed for obliteration under his leadership. Yet, unlike in other jurisdictions, and other parties, members of caucus have no formal power to remove him, and very little power to organize informally – not while he holds absolute power over their nominations.
Even if they do succeed in forcing him out, they will only be condemning the party to months of uncertainty and division while it grinds through the costly, elephantine process for electing a new leader Canada’s parties have saddled us with. Meanwhile the country will be on auto-pilot, during what may turn out to be one of the worst economic and foreign-policy crises in its history.
And what have we learned awaits us in that eventual leadership race? Not only the routine scandals that inevitably attend a system based on selling as many memberships as you can as fast as you can, but the strong likelihood that many of those new memberships will have been purchased by hostile foreign powers, in an attempt to tilt the pitch in favour of their preferred candidate.
These are not “process stories.” They go to the heart of whether we are, or will continue to be, a self-governing people.
And then, at some point, we will be into a general election, in which the Conservatives will probably sweep the country – sweep the country, that is, with 43 per cent of the vote, which in a winner-take-all electoral system such as ours translates into 60 to 65 per cent of the seats, depending on how the vote splits.
Worse, the Conservative government may well face an Official Opposition in the form of the Bloc Québécois, a party dedicated to the destruction of Canada – though it will get no more than 7 or 8 per cent of the vote nationwide, or a third as much as the Liberals or NDP. It will pose as the Voice of Quebec, though it will likely receive barely a third of the vote there, just in time for the Parti Québécois, with scarcely more of the vote – enough for a majority, in Quebec’s crowded political landscape – to call a referendum. Fun!
The Conservatives will take their 43 per cent vote share as a mandate to impose sweeping changes on the 57 per cent of the country that stand opposed. They will stack all the committees of the House with their most partisan members, which will make it even less likely than it is now that these committees will exercise any proper oversight role, or that the government would heed their demands if they did. So when, as it always does, power corrupts again, you may be sure nothing will be done about it. Again.
Oh, and we are probably also headed for a constitutional crisis in the Senate. The Conservative Leader having vowed to use the notwithstanding clause to pass a clutch of plainly unconstitutional crime bills, Senate Liberals – sorry, members of the Progressive Senate Group – are threatening to veto the legislation when it gets to the upper house.
They will probably have the numbers, Mr. Trudeau having appointed, if he can hang on until October, more than 80 per cent of the current Senate. At that point the issue of Senate reform may start to get real for a lot of people.
Or will it? Does anyone care any more? Or has the decline of democratic government in this country become a negative feedback loop, self-reinforcing and irreversible? Turnout in last week’s B.C. by-election was 16 per cent; in the last Ontario provincial election, 43.5 per cent; in recent federal elections, about 63 per cent – all at or near historic lows.
The issue is not how well Canada’s democracy performs against some unrealizable benchmark of perfection. Democratic dysfunction has reached the stage where it is materially affecting how we are governed – where it is demonstrably harming people. At some point it may put the very survival of the country in doubt.
(published in The Globe & Mail December 19, 2024)
So, in the face of Coyne’s prescient critique, how do I stay hopeful?
Democracy is a remarkable system. And if we have a ton of hugely lucky breaks, like people who are disgusted with politics deciding to get out and vote in 2025, a big turn out of youth voting and people who used to vote Progressive Conservative having a careful look at what Pierre Poilievre is really about, things will change. Polls are not prophesy. Nothing is pre-ordained. We could have a complete surprise. Not necessarily a Green majority (even my optimism has its limits…) We certainly could have a minority Parliament with Greens holding a balance of responsibility. Remember in Australia that happened once with Adam Bandt’s one seat in Melbourne. Staying hopeful and engaged is the first essential step. The next ones are a bit harder.
Speaking of which, if you can, before singing Auld Lang Syne, please make year end donation so we can be ready for the next election—likely sooner than later. Donate at greenparty.ca or (for the old school) write a cheque dated in December 2024 and mail to Green Party of Canada PO Box 997, Station B Ottawa, ON K1P 5R1.
Happy New Year!
Love and good wishes, and a big thank you!
Elizabeth