Tragedy in the Commons (23 page)

Some pundits regard the 1919 Liberal Party convention, which saw William Lyon Mackenzie King elected leader, as the beginning of the transfer of power from individual MPs to the head of their party. Before that convention, the parliamentary caucus of Liberal MPs elected the leader. At the 1919 convention, it was the party members in attendance as delegates who elected the leader. This change was designed to encourage greater participation in politics on the part of the party membership and ushered in a dramatic change in a leader’s accountability. King’s predecessor as Liberal leader, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, had been accountable to his MPs, and required their trust and approval to govern. King, elected by the will of a larger sample of party members, was accountable not to the MPs but rather to a hazier and less well-defined group, the party at large. The effect was a decrease in the leader’s accountability and a corresponding increase in the leader’s power.

But it was during the Pierre Trudeau years, scholars and pundits say, that power really surged toward the PMO, thanks to a number of steps, some planned, some unintended. Trudeau had served in predecessor Lester B. Pearson’s Cabinet as both justice minister and parliamentary secretary to the prime minister. He found the power structure too flat, and thought the system lacked discipline. So when he assumed the leadership he moved to consolidate the power of the PMO by expanding it and by holding more frequent Cabinet meetings. “Pierre Trudeau and his key advisors are generally held responsible for inaugurating the ever-expanding and centralizing
power of the PMO,” according to historian Allan Levine. “The change was inevitable. In the late sixties, government in Canada got bigger and more bureaucratic, and some semblance of order and efficiency had to be maintained.”

The most recent legislative change in this direction came in the 1970 Election Act amendments, which added the requirement that the party leader approve of each candidate running for the party, previously the job of the local constituency association that organized and oversaw the nomination race. From that day forward, the party leader had the prerogative, albeit rarely exercised, to refuse to sign nomination papers, even if that candidate won the local nomination race. The new regulation changed the power dynamics inherent in an MP’s job. Even if rarely acted on, the threat of unsigned nomination papers suddenly hung over MPs’ heads and made them think twice about speaking out. MPs had until then been accountable to their constituents; from that point on they were accountable also to the party, and to the leader specifically.

Another change that brought power to the leader’s office happened in the early ’80s, again under Trudeau, when Liberal MP Jeanne Sauvé was Speaker of the House. As a time-saving measure, Sauvé asked the parties to begin providing in advance the names of MPs who would be standing up to speak in the Members’ Statements. On the face of it, this seemed a purely administrative request. Rather than Sauvé having to solicit the names of MPs who wished to address the House during the Members’ Statements, the responsibility would now fall to the party, which presumably had a better sense of who wished to speak and when. But in practical terms, the step handed additional power to the party apparatus. It gave
the leader’s office de facto approval over whether and which individual MPs could issue Members’ Statements.

Each successive majority PM has continued Trudeau’s trend of consolidating power in the PMO. Brian Mulroney was considered a master at keeping his caucus too busy and too buttered up to engage in the petty machinations that might otherwise have sapped his power. Jean Chrétien perpetuated the trend. In September 2002, for example, he committed to vote on the Kyoto Accord without first informing his Cabinet of his decision (although he did inform his environment minister, David Anderson). Chrétien’s decision underscored to many political outsiders the increasing irrelevance of individual MPs, as well as Cabinet ministers—everyone, in short, but the prime minister. “The minister learned about it the same way other Canadians learned about it, and that was by reading the headlines in the newspaper the next day,” confided an aide to one minister. “There was no previous discussion, indication, suggestion, heads-up in any way that the announcement was going to be made.”

“Our concentration of power is greater than in any other government with a federal Cabinet system,” said Gordon Robertson, former clerk of the Privy Council, the professionally staffed body of public servants whose role it is to advise the prime minister on important matters. “With the lack of checks and balances, the prime minister in Canada is perhaps the most unchecked head of government among the democracies.”

When Chrétien was criticized for his autocratic methods, the political observers around him guessed that he would represent the apex of the power that accrued to the PMO. “Mr. Savoie and Mr. Robertson believe the centralization of power
in the PMO has gone as far as it can go,” concluded one newspaper story from 2002 on the topic of prime-ministerial power. And, for a time, Chrétien’s successor, Paul Martin, did ease the hammerlock from his MPs’ necks with his six-point plan to correct what he called Parliament’s “democratic deficit,” including the three-line whipping that eased party discipline in the House of Commons.

But the accrual of executive power continued under Martin’s Conservative successor, Stephen Harper. Some MPs who served under Harper portrayed him as someone who occasionally eased the bonds of party discipline, at least while he was in opposition. Jim Gouk recalled Harper being flexible. “If there was a piece of legislation, I went to Stephen and I would say, ‘I’ve got a serious problem with this,’ and I’d explain why and he [would say], ‘Okay, I understand that. You know, you are going to have to look to your conscience on this. There will be no repercussions [if you] vote the other way.’ ”

Nevertheless, Harper displayed autocratic tendencies even as the prime minister of a minority government. During his first year as prime minister he presented a motion recognizing Quebec as a “nation” inside a united Canada. The motion passed 266 to 16. But he had presented the motion without first consulting Michael Chong, his minister of intergovernmental affairs. Chong resigned from Cabinet in protest. In the wake of the October 2008 federal election that left Harper’s Conservatives 12 seats shy of a majority government, the Conservatives’ post-election economic update included two major acts of policy. The first would end the per-vote public subsidies that required the federal government to provide political parties with funding based on the number of
election votes received—a measure instituted by Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government in 2004. The second would ban strikes by public service unions.

What emerged in the wake of the update was the extent to which these measures had been unilateral decisions made by Harper himself, without the support of caucus. Neither measure had been discussed at a recent Conservative policy convention. The
Globe
’s Jeffrey Simpson suggested the policy measures were mistakes that stemmed from the autocratic nature of PMO policy making. “Mr. Harper makes decisions himself, or in an exceptionally closed circle. When his worst instincts are on the loose, there are inadequate checks in the system he has created around him, and few people willing or able to curb those instincts,” Simpson wrote.

“That’s why at the very last minute, the Prime Minister’s Office sent over to the Finance Department those political zingers to include in the statement, without ministers or deputies knowing. And that procedure illustrates wider truths about this government: the centralization of power in Mr. Harper’s hands, his office’s fundamental distrust of most ministers and their staffs, and the Prime Minister’s insistence that politics should drive decisions.”

Harper eventually prorogued Parliament to avoid an early December 2008 non-confidence vote, and when MPs returned nearly two months later in January, the legislation was off the table. Ottawa observers interpreted the episode as a reflection on the limits of prime-ministerial power. But Harper’s gambit backfired only because he had a minority government. Had he enjoyed the majority he’s had since the 2011 election, the legislation almost certainly would have passed.

“Prime ministers currently dominate the machinery of government to an extent that was not possible forty years ago,” writes Donald Savoie, one of the country’s leading academics studying Parliament. Many have outlined the vast number of ways the prime minister is able to exercise power in Ottawa. The PM can exert influence over thousands of appointments, committee positions and plum Cabinet posts. And as leader of the party, the prime minister exercises a tremendous amount of control over the MPs in Parliament, dictating how they vote, when they speak in Parliament, and what they say when they do stand up to speak—as well as any number of other potential levers of coercion. “In short, the prime minister is head of government with limited checks on his or her power inside government or in Parliament if the PM’s party holds a majority of seats,” writes Savoie.

Fast-forward nearly five years to a majority Harper government. Now enjoying virtually unchecked power to enact legislative measures, Harper ended up scrapping the per-vote public party subsidy. He’s also exercised his power over occasionally rebellious MPs. Take Conservative backbencher MP Mark Warawa’s private member’s motion to condemn sex-selective abortion. The Warawa motion contradicted Prime Minister Harper’s campaign promise to avoid bringing up the matter of abortion during his term in government. In March 2013, the multipartisan subcommittee of MPs that oversees private members’ business prevented Warawa from putting forward the motion, so he attempted to address the issue as a one-minute Members’ Statement—but party leadership once again prevented him from addressing the House.

Harper’s moves to silence Warawa attracted censure from the press and other MPs, even in his own caucus, who regarded the matter as an issue of free speech as well as MP agency. The Warawa affair became a symbol of the extent that party leadership controlled its Members of Parliament. Warawa was avowedly pro-life. Many of the people who protested his silencing were avowedly pro-choice, but nonetheless defended the British Columbia MP’s attempt to put forward the motion. “This isn’t a team,” observed Andrew Coyne in the
National Post
, with the Conservative Party of Canada in mind. “It’s a mob: mindless, frightened, without purpose or direction except what the leader decides, and unquestioning in its acceptance of whatever the leader decrees.… This is what has become of MPs, then—the people we elect to represent us, the ones who are supposed to give voice to our beliefs and stand up for our interests. They may not vote, in the vast majority of cases, except as the leader tells them. They may no longer, as of this week, bring private member’s bills or motions, except those the leader accepts. They may not even speak in the House, unless the leader allows.” The House of Commons speaker Andrew Scheer later ruled that nothing prevented MPs from standing to be recognized, bringing home the difference between the rules and their application in a party-dominated Parliament.

All of this is to the detriment of anyone who might look to Ottawa to see how our national affairs play out. Long gone are the days when Question Period involved a genuine exchange of questions and answers. Today, as any observer will tell you, it’s forty-five minutes of political marketing. Private members’ business, where individual MPs were once free to vote as they
wished, is now increasingly used by all parties to test prospective legislation. All that remains free of party scripting is a small sliver of time during Members’ Statements—fifteen minutes in each parliamentary day for MPs to speak in the House on items they deem of interest to their constituents or to themselves. And if present trends continue, this too may soon be gone.

WHY HAVE
MPs allowed their power to be siphoned away as they have? Why don’t MPs exercise the remaining freedom they still possess? Why don’t they shrug off the shackles of the leadership? According to former Conservative MP Inky Mark, there’s one very good reason: “They’re scared—they’re scared of the leader, scared of the caucus officers,” he said, referring to the MPs in party leadership positions, such as the whip. “They are scared; they are just bullied.… Do you know what they’re afraid of? They are afraid of not climbing the ladder. They are afraid of not getting the plum jobs.”

“One of the things that has concerned me over my time in Ottawa is the powers that the party leaders have taken in respect of candidates,” said Peter Milliken, former Liberal MP for Kingston and the Islands and Speaker of the House for a decade. In our interview with him, Milliken made some direct and striking comments about the ways political parties have drifted in recent years. He mentioned the fact that policy conventions aren’t as substantive as they used to be. He mentioned the stipulation that required candidates for political office to have the approval of their party leader. “So if the leader does not like the candidate, he says I am not signing this certificate,” Milliken says. “In my view, that is completely contrary to a system of democratic representation, where it’s
the constituency that chooses the candidate, not the leader. And we have moved away from that. Some of the party constitutions allow the leader to appoint [candidates]. I think that is wrong. If anybody should do the appointment it should be the riding president, who is elected by the riding association. But they do not want to do that anymore, and I just find that offensive and contrary to a parliamentary democracy.”

MPs’ irrelevance to the election of political leaders also troubled Milliken, referring to the Liberal Party’s move to make the leadership vote far more populist by extending eligibility to vote, not simply to convention delegates but to any valid party member registered to vote (Milliken’s interview took place before the creation of the Liberals’ “supporter” category, which expands the pool of those eligible to vote for the leader even further).

For his part, Milliken believes the caucus should choose the party leader. “This is a parliamentary democracy,” says the former Speaker. “The leader shouldn’t be imposed by a vote now of all the party members across the country. The caucus should have a veto on that choice, in my view, if we are going to have a properly functioning parliamentary democracy. The Members of Parliament are the ones who ought to be choosing the person who is going to be their spokesperson or leader or whatever, in the Chamber, not some outside forces who elect somebody who is not an MP, and then demand that one of them resign to let the person take the safe seat and become an MP. It’s totally wrong in my view.