Perspective, Prorogation and Parliamentary Reform
Senator Hugh Segal
Perspective, as any historian will certify, is what matters most in making sound public policy decisions. And it is perspective, as any observer of the House of Commons will testify, that is most often missing from the way Parliament debates and decides. In the House, all parties have been profoundly guilty of lacking perspective when placing the ‘urgent’ before the ‘important’, and there is no partisan ‘beggar thy neighbour’ gains here for either side. As the ‘urgent’ has often been defined by the morning paper (itself often lacking in balance with a preference for the one, out-of-context, controversial quote), one can see how the cult of urgency, sustained by Parliamentarians who choose ‘shrill’ over ‘considered’ every time, feeds a spiral of sustained histrionic excess. This devalues the House of Commons, makes it a suspect source of wisdom and guidance and creates the impression of a democratic institution in need of management as opposed to a crucible of democratic deliberation. This means reforms are necessary; it also means that the recent prorogation controversy is not, in and of itself, the reason why.
Voters have the absolute right to assess any government decision however small, procedural or temporal, with any level of importance they choose. As do newspapers, networks and the other media that make parliamentary minutiae central to their view of what matters in the larger picture. Voters are the ultimate accountability mechanism, stop gap and arbiters – which is as it should be. But the notion that a delay in proceedings of as much as twenty-two days (or as little as fifteen, if one counts the week taken every month for constituency work) as the core reason for reforms, is to once again let the peripheral shape the raison d’etre of more fundamental obligations. And to let the controversy over the detainees be the sustaining rationale for the prorogation histrionics is to belittle the former with the artifice of the latter, and dilutes the importance of the reforms that are necessary.
The detainees question goes back to Mr. Chretien’s time in office and to that of Mr. Martin. It has taken many forms: the role or non-role of JTF forces in transferring detainees to American forces; the role or non-roll of the Red Cross in monitoring conditions in Afghan prisons; the capacity or incapacity of the Afghan Human Rights Commission etc…. None of this is either unimportant or new. But to suggest that fifteen to twenty-two days postponement of what an opposition majority Parliament chooses to do on this issue or any other, in this particular round, and claiming it constitutes a weakening of parliamentary democracy or even the Constitution, is surely to overstate reality, if not create it artificially from pure histrionics. And if parliamentarians, some of whom are former first Ministers in our larger provinces, choose the histrionics path, it is hard to blame the media for joining in. They too have the right to their own views, which at least the Globe and Star had the decency to pre-sage openly and eloquently with editorial positions opposing the government’s adjourning of one session and setting the date of the next. The CBC, without stating in advance its own editorial decision and its opposition to prorogation up front, created and broadened a news cycle that advanced its own view. It absolutely has the right to its own view, that’s what democracy is about after all. But perhaps stating it openly at the outset so viewers could assess the news coverage in that context would have spoken to its integrity. Media preferences have consequences, as do Parliamentary incivilities on both sides of the aisle. That over a hundred academics, who have not signed petitions on Sharia law, the growing gap between rich and poor, or the Third World prospects for many of our First Nations brother and sisters, felt moved to do so on prorogation and insert ads with their signatures, speaks to their interesting sense of proportionality and priority. If previous Prime Ministers had rarely used prorogation, that would be one thing. But if, as is the case, Messrs Trudeau, Mulroney and Chretien used it far more often than Prime Minister Harper, that surely begs the rationale for heightened hysteria.
All that being said, Peter Russell is absolutely right about the need for parliamentary reform. And to his credit, has been on that page for many years before the prorogation issue.
The first premise for parliamentary reforms however, should be the Hippocratic premise of doing no harm.
The Hon. Michael Chong, MP, a co-founder of the Dominion Institute, who perhaps made a singular gesture to parliamentary traditions when he resigned his Minister’s post because he disagreed with a government decision (I agreed with the government’s decision but admire his integrity), recently wrote a piece for a parliamentary journal where he proposed seriously constructive reforms. He pointed out that the ninety second rule leading to short questions and short answers reduced question period to sloganeering taunts and re-taunts as opposed to a forum for perspective and rational, even, reasoned exchange. Add to that the media’s seeming profound disinterest in reporting rational, reasoned and thoughtful exchanges and one can see how this one rule could be so systemically destructive. There are others. The “deemed” rule which, back in the early seventies deemed all estimates approved and forwarded to the Chamber, whether or not the Committee had finished its deliberations or questions, had the effect of neutering parliamentarians in the elected House from their core Magna Carta role of approving (or withholding approval for) expenditures before they happen. When parliamentarians cannot perform the central role Parliament is to have and has always had in defence of the taxpayers’ interests, the notion that the dystopic trivia of who knew what when will, along with other “urgent” distractions, expand and occupy all the available rhetorical space and should surprise no-one. We can learn here from Westminster as Michael Chong has suggested. A formal Prime Minister’s questions, once or twice a week, with written questions submitted in advance and unpredictable supplementaries, would, along with doing away with the ninety second childishness, go a long way to upping the seriousness of content and reduce the dominance of the “cheap shot” on either side.
A further change, for which I have campaigned with parliamentarians on all sides, provincial and federal and citizen activists, relates to the electoral process itself. As long as we remain the only major democracy with a pure first-past-the-post system, where a minority of votes elects a majority of seats, where regional divisions are amplified beyond any voter intent and where parties working together is both counter-intuitive and politically unrewarded, our Parliament will be dysfunctional in majority or minority whomever Canadians choose to elect. The Europeans, Australians and New Zealanders have been into a more proportional system for years; the UK has established proportionality in the Welsh, Northern Irish and Scottish Assemblies and Parliaments and even the Americans, by having elections every two years, create incentives for bipartisan cooperation. Our system has none. Those who think the present mood is toxic in Parliament are too young to remember the Diefenbaker-Pearson era of the late fifties and sixties. Mr. Ignatieff and the Prime Minister are bowling buddies by comparison. So rule changes and electoral reform, all within the purview of elected Parliamentarians in the House, would help a lot. Meddling with the Vice Regal prerogative and the Prime Minister’s unique right to advise her Excellency, (she can have but one First Minister at a time) is not.
History may well decide that Michael Ignatieff’s decision to swim away from the coalition proposal and Bob Rae’s support of it may have been a key part of how the brokerage process in the Liberal Party saw Mr. Ignatieff emerge as Liberal leader without an open convention. I don’t know enough about modern Canadian Liberalism or Liberals to know. But the notion that Her Excellency’s prerogative of either accepting or rejecting advice should be prescribed or limited by a Parliamentary Committee is itself a serious dilution of constitutional practice and precedent. As has been reported at the end of 2008, when faced with opposition parties seeking to cobble together a government, not one of whom campaigned to form a coalition at election time, Prime Minister Harper was within his rights to seek an early prorogation, giving all a cooling off period and producing a budget and Throne Speech the opposition might support – which he subsequently did. Her Excellency sought independent constitutional advice and considered it, reportedly probing the Prime Minister’s intentions before granting prorogation. All in, with an election having just occurred and a Prime Minister who had both a plurality of votes and seats and opposition parties who had not sought a coalition mandate from the voters a few weeks earlier, the Governor General of Canada made the decision for stability, surely an appropriate choice for the Crown to prefer. (Recently, I asked Canada’s longest serving House Speaker Peter Milliken, why he would always vote with the government in a tied confidence motion as he did when Paul Martin was Prime Minister. He replied that the Speaker’s duty as presiding officer is always to keep the House sitting and the debate on-going.) As the ultimate presiding officer in our Constitutional parliamentary democracy, the Governor General surely has a similar obligation. There were excesses on both sides that led to the advice she had to accept or reject at the end of 2008.
When Parliament comes back in March, there will be a Throne Speech and budget and both sides will have a chance to try and make Parliament work. This is not about, as Mr. Clark found out, governing as if you had a majority in the House or the Senate, because there will be no majority in either. Nor can it be about obstruct here, there and everywhere because that will hurt that strategy’s purveyors as much as the intended targets. A spirit of cooperation should be offered; if rejected or insincere, public disconnect from the relevance of Parliament will deepen and democracy in Canada will weaken as a result. There is enough opportunity on both sides to find a little high road for the way ahead.
Senator Hugh Segal (Kingston-Frontenac-Leeds) is a former President of the Institute for Research on Public Policy and former member of the Special Committee on Senate Reform.