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and downplay his or her failures in between. MPs have transformed themselves into servants of the leader rather than serving as a check on the leader’s authority and a constructive critic of his or her policies.
This eventually becomes a vicious circle: with MPs indistinguishable from their party leadership, it is natural that the electorate will make a voting decision based almost exclusively on their feelings regarding the party leader.
It is perhaps because many Canadians erroneously believe that they directly elect the prime minister that they are so tolerant of the consolidation of near ultimate power inside that office. But in a functional democracy, we would not witness such an increasing concentration of power and control. Nor should we tolerate such limited accountability or lack of transparency.
Power and control are increasingly concentrated, and accountability is practised more often in theory than in reality. Pierre Trudeau once famously referred to Members of Parliament as nobodies and Stephen Harper told the National Post in 1998 that “the average backbench MP is little more than a benchwarmer for his or her political party.”[3] That level of condescension would more appropriately be found in monarchs than in democratic leaders.
In the last half century, successive prime ministers have gradually, but inexorably, consolidated power in the “centre.” They have freed themselves from the restraints that once bound them to the voters, Parliament, cabinet, and even their political parties. All institutional checks on prime ministerial power are compromised, strained, and breaking, if not broken.
This situation is a long way from what was envisioned by the democratic reformers who fought for responsible government in the 1830s and 1840s. They rejected the idea of a Family Compact or ruling aristocratic elite. Similarly, the Fathers of Confederation rejected a presidential system of government. Instead, they opted for a Westminster model, where the prime minister would be accountable to a democratically elected legislature, not the lord over it. The degeneration of that system to one where the prime minister is subject to no effective checks or balances has been a slow process, and it is one that will be difficult to reverse.
It is clearly easy, as many MPs do, to support the status quo and ignore the system’s obvious deficiencies. However, others recognize that our democracy is at a precipice and have taken measures to try to redress the imbalance between the power of the party leaders and their parties, and between appointed prime ministers and elected Parliaments.
An important initiative to rebalance the relationship between a party leader and his or her political party, and by logical extension the relationship between the prime minister and Parliament, was tabled on December 3, 2013. The Reform Act 2013,[4] if adopted, will be a game changer. It will, to some extent, restore an appropriate balance to the Westminster model of Parliament as it exists in Canada. It will promote responsible government by making the prime minister accountable to a parliamentary caucus, not the master over it.
The Reform Act 2013, if passed, will establish three mechanisms common in the British parliamentary system of government, but conspicuously absent from the current Canadian adaptation.
The bill, introduced by Wellington-Halton Hills MP Michael Chong, will amend the Elections Act to take away the much maligned section of the act that mandates that a party leader sign the nomination papers of prospective candidates. This early Trudeau-era amendment to our election laws fundamentally altered the relationship between riding associations and their candidates or representatives, and, more damaging to our democratic institutions, the relationship between a party leader and his or her caucus.
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