Gotta say I kinda love this blast of contempt from Ottawa journalist Dale Smith at self-pitying MPs whining about being bullied by the PMO. Sure they are, but as he says, it's only because they lie down for it -- until they retire and start working on their self-justifying memoirs.
They don’t have to take the orders from the PMO if they think it’s humiliating or degrading. They don’t have to ask the questions prepared for them by PMO for QP – they can ask their own. The key is that they need their fellow backbenchers to back them up, and behave similarly. If you think the prime minister is going to throw a tantrum and threaten to not sign the nominations of his whole backbench, well, you’d be mistaken. They have this power.That last italicized sentence is the key. In a parliamentary democracy, prime ministerial (and party-leader) autocracy is an entirely fixable problem, one that can be remedied anytime MPs throw off their learned helplessness.
I do wish Smith would extent his rant to all the political scientists who share and shore up the political journalists in supporting and enabling leadership autocracy. What is in it for all of them?
