Canada’s Federal Parliament is Performing Badly – The Need for Reform is Urgent
Peter H. Russell
A report card on the performance of Canada’s federal parliament in recent years would have to give it a very low mark. With both majority parliaments and minority parliaments, Canada’s system of parliamentary democracy has been failing to provide the accountable and effective government that most Canadians want and expect.
Majority Parliament Failures
From 1980 to 2004, federal elections resulted in giving either the Conservatives or Liberals a majority of seats in the House of Canada. The governments based on these majority parliaments – Trudeau’s, Mulroney’s and Chretien’s – were stable and functional. But during this period there was a centralization of power in the office of Prime Minister that tended to render parliament irrelevant.
Despite changes in the rules aimed at giving a larger role to parliamentary committees, governments used their majority position to control the work of committees. Party discipline became very strict. Backbenchers on both sides of the house found themselves side-lined. Parliamentary debate came to focus on adversarial question periods rather than the discussion of legislation and the great issues of the day.
In 2001, Jeffrey Simpson published a widely read book whose title captured the esssence of what parliamentary government had come to mean in Canada – The Friendly Dictatorship.
Minority Parliament Failures
Since 2004, Canadians have elected three minority parliaments in which no political party has a majority of House of Commons seats. This has resulted in three minority governments – a Liberal minority government led by Paul Martin, and two Conservative governments led by Stephen Harper.
While parliament has certainly been livelier during this period of minority government, and potentially more relevant, for much of the time parliament has been unable to settle down and deal with a legislative agenda. In a House of Commons in which no party has a majority, nothing can be accomplished without co-operation among the parties. But that kind of co-operation has not been forthcoming, particularly in the present parliament, by either the Conservatives or the Liberals. Canada’s parliament has been in a constant state of election fever. Parliament has been shut down twice, in just over a year, by the Governor General acceding to the Prime Minister’s requests for prorogation. These prorogations have resulted in heated public controversy about fundamental questions of parliamentary democracy.
The next session of parliament may open on March 4 in a crisis atmosphere. The speech from the throne is likely to contain a budget on which, unlike the budget which opened a new session of parliament a year ago, there has been no consultation with opposition parties. This may result in the government losing a confidence vote, plunging Canada into its fourth election in six years.
No wonder a recent study by the Institute for Government in the United Kingdom, Making Minority Government Work contains a chapter on Canada entitled “Canada’s Dysfunctional Parliament.” Canada’s parliament has become a model for how not to live with minority parliaments.
To sum up, when Canadians elect majority parliaments they are irrelevant and when they elect minority parliaments they are dysfunctional. Surely we can do better.
Priority Issues
The immediate need is to see what can be done to make parliament less dysfunctional and crisis-prone when we have minority parliaments and more relevant and less government dominated when we have majority parliaments. Larger structural changes such as Senate reform and electoral reform, may have merit, but they are longer term projects. The problems that immediately confront us must be dealt with by making the existing parliamentary structure work better. This can only be done by the parliamentarians themselves. We the people can push and prod our MPs, but in the end they themselves will have to make the changes. What are some of the priority issues we should urge them to address?
1) Prorogation:
In the debate over the prime minister’s requests for prorogation, citizens are often startled to learn that there are no written rules governing the conditions under which the Prime Minister may request prorogation or when the Governor General should decline such a request. Closing down any institution and terminating all of its on-going activities is clearly an extremely important act that should be subject to some ground rules. Parliament itself needs to determine what procedures and principles should govern decisions to close it down.
2) Dissolution:
A dissolution ends the life of a parliament and triggers an election to create a new parliament. Our constitution is clear that the power to dissolve parliament rests with the Governor General. The unwritten conventions of our constitution are also clear that it is the Prime Minister who asks the Governor General to dissolve parliament and call an election. What is not clear is whether there any circumstances in which the Governor General should decline such a request.
For instance, what if a government whose party wins the most seats in an election is defeated on a confidence vote soon after the election and the Leader of the Opposition appears to be able to form a government supported by a majority in the House of Commons? In that situation could the Governor General deny the Prime Minister’s request for a dissolution and call on the Leader of the Opposition to form a government? And would it make a difference if the Leader of the Opposition was to head a government based on a coalition which has not been approved by the electorate?
That is the situation which very nearly confronted the Governor General a year ago. The Governor General in making her decision is supposed to be guided by unwritten constitutional conventions agreed upon by the political leaders of the day. But a year ago there was not a consensus among the political leaders on these questions. The Governor General would have been in the position of refereeing a game in which the players did not agree on the rules, just as she was when the Prime Minister made his prorogation requests.
History seldom repeats itself. But if there is an election in 2010, it might well result in an outcome similar to the 2008 election. It would be foolish not to be better prepared for such an outcome. The leaders of our parliamentary parties should be urged to reach an agreement on the considerations that should guide the Governor General in responding to a prime minister’s request for a dissolution of parliament.
3) Non-Confidence Votes
In our parliamentary tradition, it has long been agreed that when the government loses a confidence vote in the House of Commons the prime minister must either resign or ask for a dissolution of parliament. But what is a confidence vote? There is no doubt that a defeat of the government on the speech from the throne or on its budget is a vote of non-confidence. But beyond that the water is very murky. In 2005, the Martin Liberal government was defeated on what the opposition parties thought was a confidence vote but the government thought otherwise, and refused to resign or ask for a dissolution. Who decides whether the government has lost the confidence of the House of Commons? A majority of MPs? The Prime Minister? The Speaker? The Governor General?
There is not a clear consensus on this question among the politicians and officials involved in operating our parliamentary system. This is no small matter. The license to govern in parliamentary democracy is commanding the confidence of the House of Commons. Our parliamentarians should be urged to try to reach agreement on what constitutes a vote of non-confidence and how the decision is made that the government has lost the confidence of the House of Commons.
While they are at it, there is another matter relating to non-confidence votes that they should attend to. In 2007, with all party support parliament passed legislation fixing October 19, 2009 as the date for the next election and providing that elections take place every four years thereafter. At the time the legislation was passed, there seemed to be a consensus ruling out “snap elections” called whenever it seemed politically advantageous to the government to do so. Governments would only request dissolutions earlier than the dates prescribed by law if they were defeated on a non-confidence vote. But all this seemed to go out the window when Prime Minister Harper without any defeat in the House of Commons and without any complaint from the Opposition parties asked the Governor General to dissolve parliament and call an election in October 2008, a year earlier than the date fixed by legislation. If our parliamentarians have changed their minds about the merits of fixed date elections, they owe it to us to tell us why. Alternatively, they might agree that governments that have not been defeated in the House will not request dissolutions.
The fact that since 2004 Canada’s parliament seems to be operating on a two-year election cycle rather than a four-year cycle suggests that some thought be given to how to make the fixed-date election law more meaningful. One possibility here is to consider the requirement of “constructive non-confidence” votes adopted in other countries where minority parliaments are frequent. In these countries movers of non-confidence in the government must indicate the prime minister they will support if their motion carries.
4) Parliamentary Committees
Parliamentary committees have long been seen as crucial vehicles for giving MPs a significant role in the legislative process and enhancing government accountability. In minority parliaments they are the forums where the inter-party cooperation required to make parliament effective must take place. Since the 1970s the role of committees has been enhanced but they still lack the status and independence needed to make parliament relevant under majority parliaments and functional under minority parliaments.
Of the many recommendations that have been made to strengthen parliamentary committees, perhaps the most important is to give their chairs more status and independence. At the very least, committee chairs should be elected by secret ballot by their members.
In 2008, Queen’s University’s Centre for the Study of Democracy published a comprehensive in-depth analysis of parliamentary reform entitled Everything Old is New Again: Observations on Parliamentary Reform. The reforms recommended in that study were designed to enhance the role of committees without undermining the government of the day’s capacity for leading the legislative agenda. That study was well received by all parties and provides a good starting point for parliamentarians to consider the steps needed to enable parliamentary committees to fulfill their potential.
A Joint Parliamentary Committee on Parliamentary Reform
A committee of parliamentarians from both houses may be a useful vehicle for addressing the priority issues of parliamentary reform identified above. A special joint parliamentary committee played a valuable role in considering patriation and other constitutional reforms in 1980-81. A joint parliamentary committee on parliamentary reform could invite submissions from the public and from experts on parliamentary democracy.
Whatever process or instrument is used it must achieve a cross-party consensus on the priority issues. The parliamentary process cannot operate on the basis of Conservative rules or Liberal rules or NDP rules or Bloc Quebecois rules. However much the parties may disagree on policy they must agree on the fundamental principles and rules of parliamentary government. If they fail to agree, Canadian political life will reel from crisis to crisis and our country will become the basket-case of the parliamentary world.
A Change of Political Culture?
The UK Institute for Government in its report on Making Minority Government Work concludes its chapter on Canada with the following comment, “For minority government to work in Canada there needs to be a dramatic shift in political culture which emphasizes cooperation and accommodation rather than conflict and partisanship.”
Such a dramatic transformation of political culture may be too much to expect in the short term. But it is not too much to expect our political leaders to accept three points:
1) that at the federal level parliamentary government in Canada is not performing well
2) that they should try to do something about this now
3) that whatever is done must be done on a consensus basis
Our number one job as citizens is to get our parliamentarians to accept those three points. Cynics will tell us the politicians won’t do it. They may be right. But cynicism becomes our greatest enemy when it stops us from trying to make parliamentary democracy work well in Canada.
Peter Russell is University Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Principal of Senior College at the University of Toronto. His book co-edited with Lorne Sossin, Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis, University of Toronto Press, provides a full account and analysis of last year’s prorogation of parliament.