[I've been slow to post this while trying to sort out my thoughts on this important book. For those not so taken with the minutiae of Canadian parliamentary politics, I've put in a page break. Click at the break to continue reading if you wish.]
Andrew Coyne’s The Crisis of Canadian Democracy is the book we really need right now. And rather disappointing at the same time.
Coyne, political columnist at the Globe and Mail and CBC
commentator, starts with the blunt declaration that “our parliamentary system
is a state of advanced disrepair – so advanced that it is debatable whether it
should be called a democracy.” And he makes it so plain that I wonder why so
few of our other pundits even notice – except perhaps when blathering
about electoral reform once in a while. Coyne: “If we had the most flawless
electoral system imaginable, we would still be a long way from a fully
functioning democracy.”
I like how he starts out. Not least because by page 6 he is quoting me
by name – from a piece I wrote in 2002 AD, no less – but more because of how
powerfully he sets out parliament’s comprehensive failure to hold government to
account, an issue I was going on about even before 2002. He considers how
caucuses have abdicated their role in holding leaders accountable, and why
cabinet ministers have let themselves been reduced to a thoroughly peripheral
role. That’s more than a hundred of the book’s 250 pages, and if you have
followed (or endured) endless blog postings here on these topic (talk about
blathering on!), you know why I’m glad to see it laid out so comprehensively.
He has more. How both the Senate
and the Supreme Court, neither of which is elected, overstep their proper roles
in the affairs of the nation. (Well, maybe.) And a great scream of fury and
contempt at: the inane spectacle presented by the political parties’ national
election campaigns; the sleaziness of their direct mail campaigns; the collapse
of parties into perpetual campaign machines running corrupt leadership sales;
the lack “of a sensible of coherent system of campaign finance regulation,” the
failure of televised debates to serve our needs. Kinda everything about our parties
and our elections, in fact. (Yes!)
There’s a long and detailed critique of “first past the post” elections
and the need for a better system, with most of the alternatives laid out in
great detail. At 60 pages, it’s the longest single part of the book, and he
comes out endorsing proportional representation (particularly of the
multi-member constituency variant) and mandatory voting too. (Another maybe. And -- see quote at the start
of this post -- he’s for PR mostly as one last desperate chance to slow the
rot, not as a serious solution to the general crisis.)
It's a bracing read. All in all, he sees an almost complete collapse of accountability:
the idea that in a working democracy voters have real influence on those who
represent them, and those representatives are able to judge the performance of
governments – and able to punish, change, or improve governments that resist accountability.
The disappointing part is his conviction that such changes are not even
remotely possible. He’s not very
optimistic about electoral reform, but it’s almost the only change he can
imagine actually happening. He practically dismisses the possibility that
cabinet ministers will ever regain some measure of parity with the prime
minister, or that MPs ever resist the orders of their own leaders.
This is the part of the book that Coyne has not thought through
sufficiently. He takes too seriously the shallow assertion that MPs will never
disagree with their leaders -- because they all want to get into cabinet. And he
has to bring up that clause buried in the Elections Act that supposedly kills
any chance at caucus power. He accepts these as insuperable obstacles to accountability
within parliament without reflecting deeply on them. He is almost signalling to
cabinet ministers and backbenchers that they need not bother – they’ll never have
any control over the prime minister.
MPs submit for the chance at a cabinet seat? Well, sure they do, but
surely that carrot is rotting away. Coyne’s already shown that a seat in
cabinet has become a joke. Must all backbenchers really be so universally
desperate to become one? – only to face being bounced out if they speak their
minds or if the PMO needs a scapegoat or a new look. The lure of a cabinet seat
must be fading when cabinet ministers are just flunkies and PR shills.
And need he accept so blindly that the Elections Act clause that empowers
the party leader to sign (or not sign) every party candidate’s nomination
papers is really a death sentence for backbench independence.
When passed in 1970, that clause was intended to prevent rogue
candidates from upturning a party’s platform. Not a bad law, in fact: parties
should have an emergency lever to free themselves of bigots and hate-speakers
as well as frauds and subversives.* The
law was inspired by the case of Leonard Jones, a virulently anti-Acadian and
anti-French mayor of Moncton, who exploited local divisions to become a
Conservative candidate just when the Conservative Party was committed to shaking
its anti-French image.
Now imagine a party leader threatening to abuse that power simply to
drive from parliament an insufficiently deferential MP or to open a seat for a more
obsequious flunky – the threat constantly cited by pundits as an insuperable
barrier to independence in caucus.
It’s a paper tiger. In a real parliament, in a real parliamentary caucus
of MPs, a leader’s arbitrary power can easily be nullified by MPs alert to the
danger of being targeted to this abuse of the Elections Act.
They simply have to declare – and stand by their declaration -- that the
power to discipline members belongs to caucus, not to the leader, and therefore
can be used against the leader as against any other caucus member. If he
threatens to fire them arbitrarily, they will discipline him. And where
the power in the Elections Act is illusory, the power of MPs is very real, They can enforce their will upon the leader --
because in parliamentary warfare, they control a nuclear weapon. All they need do
is say, Leader, if you abuse your caucus in that way, caucus will decline to
vote for any measure you bring to the house until you change your ways. If
necessary, caucus will even discuss whether to replace you with a leader more
accepting of caucus’s inherent authority.
MPs are MPs, after all. The moment they cease to vote for the measures
the leader brings to the House of Commons, the leader is finished. Caucus
members may have acted like nobodies for years, but they hold the inherent
power to become somebodies the moment they want to – simply because they are
Members of Parliament. They are the duly elected representatives of the
Canadian people. Their constitutional status is profound. Laws like the
Elections Act clause or the fine print of the Reform Act 2014 (which sets out
elaborate rules for leadership reviews) can bind parliamentarians in the
exercise of their powers no more than “Fixed Election Date” laws can bind a
parliament when it chooses to dissolve itself early. (It happens all the time –
last April most recently.)
Coyne does know this, at some level. Around page 69, he does note that
MPs cannot imagine taking independent action because “they have absorbed the
idea that they are… the leader’s employees.” But it’s as if he too has absorbed
the idea that leadership tyranny is inescapable: on the very next page he surrenders,
declaring that change in the rules and laws can only come with the leader’s
consent?
Coyne’s theme is the crisis of parliament, and a solution to the crisis lies
with parliament itself. A parliamentary democracy cannot function without
parliamentarians. We have tried to do
without them for a century and more, but they are still there. And the basis of their authority – the power
to give ore withhold assent to what government want to do -- is still there.
They will start to use it when we start telling them to. Andrew Coyne has told
a lot of truths in this book, but he and all his colleagues in the commentariat
need to saying this one it much more loudly.
