Peter Russell, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Toronto, has written an important and timely book: Two Cheers for Minority Government (2008).
Published just before the simpering tempest of our very own prorogued parliament (brought on by none other than our rogue prime minister), Russell makes it very clear, in his first page, what all Canadians should know and understand by heart: “We don’t elect a government; we elect a representative assembly.” And his concluding remarks about our “Educational Deficit” strikes at the heart of our faltering democracy: “the vast majority of Canadians know very little about the nature of parliamentary government and its virtues.” (p. 162). We need to read his book. The lackadaisical attitude with which most Canadians approached their prorogued parliament speaks volumes about the lack of adequate political discourse in this country. We not only do not have an Obama; we are now missing in a political culture.
Canadians, at least those who can afford to, are so busy amusing themselves by means of television, internet, ipod, and Nintendo game, that they are not taking the time to be informed and critical citizens, which is a responsibility, not just a right. We are all members of this vast, diverse community called Canada, and I implore (as does Russell) that every intelligent adult take part – and certainly newcomers, as well. Remember (and it cannot be said too often) there once was a man, democratically elected to power, named Hitler, who closed the Reichstag and demonized the Jews. What’s so different about Harper effectively closing parliament (upon request) and demonizing the separatist vote?
Reading Russell one gets the sense of how much Harper oddly mimics Trudeau (and his expanded PMO), only without the charisma. Trudeau’s War Measure’s Act maybe even compares with the unconstitutionality of the Prorogued Parliament – only the latter is far worse, because there was no crisis. (Coalitions exist elsewhere, why not Canada, asks Russell in a central thesis.) Both Trudeau and Harper showed disdain for parliament; and both prefer, in terms borrowed from Richard Gwyn, plebiscitary type leadership. In terms of party discipline, mass advertising and “public management”, Harper excels, especially when the PMO, overriding the Finance Department, “leaks” budget details to Bay Street (as well as to mainstream Canada).
By seeking popular approval from the people and the TSE, Harper undermines parliament, and it underscores why his cabinet ministers, whose names and faces one keeps forgetting, still do not matter in the public’s eye. For modern politics television matters most, not, it appears, the august political institutions themselves, and it explains why the federal subsidy for the shift from analogue to digital TV remains so important to presidential politics in the USA. But deliberately leaking the budget is ruinous towards the House of Commons. First of all, as the great British Liberal thinker L.T. Hobhouse explained a century ago (in a footnote): “financial measures are entirely unsuited to a referendum.” Secondly, Harper is taking financial control away from the House of Commons, which is why control is there in the first place, for those of us interested in history. Harper’s moves were not “reforms” or “new rules”; rather these manoeuvres can be seen as on the slippery slope of parliamentary destruction, by the PMO’s duping of the media – and we must be made aware of this abuse.
The increase in prime ministerial power is more marked in Canada than in any other parliamentary democracy, Russell explains, and I am not surprised at the revelation. Jean Chrétien was our Louis XIV, and Stephen Harper that other seventeenth century figure: Cromwell, our Lord Protector. Canadians should read Two Cheers, before they have nothing to cheer about.
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