Foundation for Economic Education
Published on 26 Jul 2018The brutal and cruel transatlantic slave trade lasted for more than 300 hundred years. In 1785, Thomas Clarkson, a man you’ve probably never heard of, firmly held to his belief that no man can rightly claim ownership over another. That year he vowed to end the transatlantic slave trade. This is his story.
August 17, 2018
Thomas Clarkson: The First Abolitionist
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August 1, 2018
British Labour Party continues to sideline pro-Brexit MPs
Fraser Myers on the most recent pro-Brexit Labour MP deselected by local party activists:
Labour Party activists have passed votes of no confidence in two of Labour’s Brexit-backing MPs, and called for their deselection. Frank Field and Kate Hoey were censured by their local parties for voting with the government against an amendment that would have kept the UK in a customs union with the EU after Brexit. If passed, it would have killed off any prospect of Britain having an independent trade policy after Brexit, and would have kept us under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. Recognising this as a betrayal of the Leave vote, Labour Brexiteers had no other choice but to vote with the government to defeat the amendment. Now, for defending the democratic choice of 17.4million voters, Field and Hoey stand accused of ‘betraying’ the Labour movement and ‘siding with the reactionary Tory establishment’.
This sends a disastrous message to voters and pits Labour against the Leave vote, the largest democratic mandate in British history. Labour’s better-than-expected result at the 2017 General Election depended on retaining Brexit-voting seats. Two thirds of Labour MPs represent Leave-backing constituencies, with some of the largest Leave votes in Labour-held seats. Labour needs to win 64 seats at the next election to form a majority government, 42 of which are dotted around blue-collar, Leave-voting England. To attack the few Labour MPs who are on the side of the Leave majority is an astonishing act of self-harm for a party that claims to represent ordinary people.
While some Blairite MPs have long feared the prospect of deselection campaigns launched by the Corbyn-backing Momentum, the no-confidence motion against Kate Hoey was initiated by members of the Blairite pressure group, Progress. And rather than stand up for Hoey, a defender of Corbyn’s leadership, Momentum sided with its erstwhile rivals against the Brexiteer MP. As Owen Jones revealingly writes in the Guardian: ‘Self-professed Blairites, soft lefties and Corbynites were united in this vote.’ While the Blairite and Corbynite wings of the party claim to agree on very little, they appear to be united in their contempt for the electorate and for democracy.
These activists seem to forget that Labour has a long history of Euroscepticism. Labour’s much-celebrated postwar prime minister, Clement Attlee, and the architect of the NHS, Nye Bevan, were against Britain joining the EU’s predecessor, the European Economic Community (EEC). When the left-winger Michael Foot led Labour into the 1983 General Election, the party’s manifesto pledged to withdraw Britain from the EEC. Tony Benn – Corbyn’s hero – opposed the anti-democratic tendencies of the EU all his life. Would Benn, Foot and Bevan face a similar fate to Hoey and Field in Labour today?
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July 20, 2018
“Trudeau becomes the first prime minister I’ve ever covered who has demoted himself”
In Maclean’s, Paul Wells analyzes Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent federal cabinet shuffle:
So much has changed, culminating — for now — with the burial of Ontario provincial Liberalism at the hands of Doug Ford. Alberta and Quebec could next fall to Jason Kenney and François Legault. Certainly that’s the way to bet it. Even normally sunshiny New Brunswick, Newfoundland and PEI are refusing to file carbon reduction plans in line with what Catherine McKenna expects.
So the cabinet Trudeau shuffled on Wednesday isn’t a pre-election cabinet, in the sense of one that’s sweet and shiny to attract distracted voters, so much as it’s a survive-until-the-election cabinet. If this cabinet were a movie, it’d be Walter Hill’s 1979 classic The Warriors. A bunch of street fighters, just trying to make it from the Bronx to Brooklyn in one piece. Doug Ford calling to them from an abandoned car, clinking empty bottles together. Or to use another, perhaps less obscure, movie analogy, it’s farewell to Hope and Hard Work, hello to Horse’s Head/ In Your Bed.
The stars of this partially-refurbished cabinet are two bad cops, in one case quite literally: Bill Blair and Dominic LeBlanc. Blair’s job on the border-crossing file isn’t only to get up Doug Ford’s nose, though that’s a handy bonus. It’s to do more or less what he did as the Liberals’ back-bench pilot of cannabis legalization: to steward a controversial file as humourlessly as humanly possible, to convey with every flinty word and steely grimace that the government is not even remotely interested in messing around.
It’s interesting that Ahmed Hussen, a personable and diligent minister who was also obviously appointed so he could incarnate Liberal branding of openness and diversity, keeps every part of the immigration file except those elements that scare some voters: the people walking across the border. Those parts have been assigned to Sgt. Rock over here.
LeBlanc, an irrepressible rogue whose dad was Pierre Trudeau’s fisheries minister and who has known Justin Trudeau all his life, is not by nature a political bone-crusher, although that’s certainly within his vocabulary. He doesn’t even like when people like me emphasize that part of his personality. He will prefer to get along. But he has the job Trudeau had because Trudeau noticed that, even though his intergovernmental minister was Justin Trudeau, the intergovernmental mood out there was getting noticeably chippy. So Trudeau stripped Trudeau of that portfolio and handed it to someone who could concentrate on it. It’s traditional to view a smaller ministerial portfolio as evidence of a demotion. Trudeau becomes the first prime minister I’ve ever covered who has demoted himself.
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May 18, 2018
Missing the entire point of the capitalist system
At the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall tried to explain why the UK Commons committee looking into the Carillion collapse appear to misunderstand the current economic system in a big way:
Frank Field and his mates on the Commons work and pensions committee really do have some ‘splainin’ to do here. For they’ve entirely missed the structure of our current society and the reasons why that structure both exists and works. They go on about the greed at Carillion, the corporate vanity, the bad management. Then they complain that it’s gone bust. Finally, that we need a management system to prevent corporate greed and vanity from bankrupting companies.
No you fools, that Carillion went bust is the very point and purpose of the system. This is how we leach corporate vanity and greed out of the system, those who practise it leave the system.
[…]
What’s being missed is that this is good. Not the greed, obviously, for that’s something ever present in human nature. But what happens to those who act it out, bankruptcy.
[…]
And haven’t they come up with a likely candidate for making things worse? That a committee of bureaucrats should be making commercial decisions for companies instead of the directors and management. Really, that’ll work wonders, won’t it?
[…]
People who screw up, for whatever reason, disappear from the economic stage. Which is what we want of course, those who screw up to leave said economic stage. We have actually tried bureaucracy as a method of managing this and as the persistence of the National Coal Board, the very existence of British Leyland, show, that’s a system which doesn’t work. Either of those organisations would have disappeared at least a decade before they did without bureaucratic interference. Indeed, that’s how the bureaucracy’s actions were justified, to “save” them. That is, markets are more ruthless at weeding out failures than bureaucracies are.
What have we here? A complaint that markets weeded out a failure and to stop this we must have bureaucracy?
Carillion going bust is the very point of our having a market based economic system. Sure, they screwed up – bye bye Carillion. See, it works!
So why the hell are Frank Field and friends complaining? We already have a system which ensures that failures go kablooie – bankruptcy in our market economy.
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May 9, 2018
Freedom of the Press … except where prohibited by (British) law
Wednesday is a critical day in the history of Britain, in the sense that a long-established freedom is at risk of being curtailed:
Press freedom is hanging by a thread in Britain. Tomorrow, the House of Commons will vote on the Data Protection Bill, and Labour MPs have added amendments to it that would effectively end 300 years of press freedom in this country.
That this profound affront to liberty had almost passed under the radar, until spiked and others began making noise about it over the weekend, shouldn’t surprise us. This vote is the culmination of a slow and covert war on the press that has been waged for the best part of a decade.
This story begins with the Leveson Inquiry, an effective showtrial of the press that sparked dozens of spurious trials of journalists and barely any convictions. Since then, press-regulation campaigners have had to find new and underhand ways to push their agenda on an industry and a public who clearly see right through it.
In the wake of Leveson, a new regulator, Impress, was established and given official recognition. It was an historic moment, in the worst possible sense: this was Britain’s first state-backed regulator since the days of Crown licensing. But it was also a stunningly bad bit of PR for the press-regulation lobby, in that Impress was staffed by tabloid-loathing hackademics and funded by tabloid-loathing millionaire Max Mosley.
No national newspaper signed up to it. And so the Hacked Off brigade has been pushing over the past few years for Section 40, a law that would force publications to sign up to a state-approved regulator, which at the moment means signing up to Impress. Those publications, like spiked, who would refuse on principle, would be required to pay the legal costs of any case brought against them, even if they win.
As such, Section 40 would be a gift to the powerful and the begrudged. It would enable anyone to launch lawsuits aimed at shutting down publications they dislike. This is an opportunity that people who have been exposed by the press would take in a heartbeat. It would undermine not only press freedom, but also natural justice.
And it isn’t just the press who are concerned about this. In 2016, the government opened a public consultation into press freedom, asking members of the public if it should implement Section 40 and commence the second part of the Leveson Inquiry. Out of a huge 174,730 responses, 79 per cent said No to Section 40 and 66 per cent said No to Leveson 2.
Update, 10 May: The vote was too damned close, but it was defeated by a nine-vote margin. Guido has the list of MPs voting in favour of muzzling the press here.
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April 3, 2018
Governments are like diapers – they need to be changed regularly and for the same reason
Paraphrasing an old joke in the headline, but as Andrew Coyne points out, it’s close enough to observed federal reality to qualify:
Is it inevitable that every government becomes what it once despised — a matter of the realities of power overtaking the dreams of opposition? Or do their broken promises, ethical lapses and abuses of power remain, in the end, choices, for which they can be held to account? Do governments turn to seed, or were they that way before they took office? Or is the problem not of any particular party at any particular time, but of a larger culture of cynicism and deceit, in which all parties share?
I do not know the answers to these questions. I only see the same pattern repeated in every government over the last several decades. The Mulroney government came to power promising to clean up the sodden mess left by the Trudeau Liberals (“you had an option, sir — you could have said no!”), only to indulge in its own orgy of patronage appointments and dubious ethics.
The Chretien Liberals were elected to clean up the mess left by the Mulroney Conservatives. Instead they ramped up a massive kickback scheme overseen by a parallel government of party officials and Liberal-friendly advertising executives — to say nothing of their shameless pork-barreling, habitual disdain for Parliament or the prime minister’s personal portfolio of shame.
The Harper government ran and won on a promise to break this pattern, even including the passage of a Federal Accountability Act among their “five priorities.” In power, they invented whole new ways to evade accountability and step on Parliament, while going back on nearly every principle they had ever held or promise they had ever made. Unsurprisingly, compromises on principle ended up begetting compromises on ethics, if only because, in the blur, people forgot which was which.
And now the Trudeau Liberals, again, dynastic succession being the surest sign of the democratic health of a polity. But then, Trudeau fils went to unusual lengths to stress how different he was, not only from his father but from pretty much every leader who went before.
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March 1, 2018
Churchill: The Man Who Saved the Free World
PragerU
Published on 26 Feb 2018The West is free today thanks in large part to one man – Winston Churchill. Historian and bestselling author Andrew Roberts explains how Churchill saved the world from Nazi Germany.
Script:
In May 1940, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi war machine were sweeping across the European continent.
The future of the free world hung in the balance. An isolationist-leaning United States was an ocean away. There was one man who stood between Hitler’s seemingly invincible army and crushing defeat.
That one man was Winston Churchill.
He was born on November 30, 1874. Though we think of him as the quintessential Englishman, he was actually half American.
His mother, Jennie, was the daughter of a wealthy New York stock speculator. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was of English nobility and a major political figure.
From his early school days, Churchill recognized the power of words. Throughout his life, he used them with consummate skill. They never let him down.
He first made a name for himself as a war correspondent in the 1890s, covering conflicts in Cuba, Northern India, the Sudan, and South Africa. Though he never abandoned journalism, and became one the greatest historians of his age, Churchill used his family connections and his own fame to launch himself into politics. His confident manner and matchless oratory marked him as a natural leader.
1914 and World War I found him in the key position of First Lord of the Admiralty where he did much to modernize Britain’s navy. In 1915, Churchill thought he could bring a speedy end to the war by opening a new front in Turkey, which he perceived as the weak link in the German alliance against the allies.
This led to the infamous Gallipoli campaign.
Badly underestimating the fighting strength of the Turks, thousands of British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers were killed in battles that proved to be every bit as indecisive and bloody as the campaigns on Europe’s Western front.
Churchill took the blame.
This was perhaps the low point of his life. Dismissed from the war cabinet, five months later he enlisted in the army, where he saw action in France.
He rose again in British politics throughout the 1920s, making money — as he always did — through his writing and speaking. As Adolph Hitler took power in Germany in the 1930s, Churchill was one of the first and certainly the loudest voice in England sounding the alarm. But it was an alarm few in England wanted to hear.
The English had been traumatized, as had all of Europe, by the shocking amount of death and destruction of the First World War. No one wanted to face the possibility that it could happen again.
Churchill, however, saw that a new confrontation with Germany was inevitable. And when the inevitable arrived with the stunning German attack on France in May 1940, a desperate nation turned to him. He was ready.
His weapons were his pen, his voice and his words. “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,” he told the House of Commons in his first speech as Prime Minister.
Things quickly turned from bad to worse. France collapsed, Belgium surrendered, and a quarter of a million British soldiers barely managed to escape from Dunkirk. Even as the war news moved from dangerous to desperate to disastrous, Churchill never wavered. In speech after speech, he infused the British with the spirit to fight on against Hitler’s monstrous tyranny.
“We shall not flag or fail,” he said after Dunkirk. “We shall go on to the end. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be…we shall never surrender.”
For the complete script, visit https://www.prageru.com/videos/churchill-man-who-saved-free-world
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February 9, 2018
QotD: Canadian versus American forms of government
Canada does not bother with palaces; the closest thing we have is Rideau Hall, whose history, appearance, and location all serve to confirm the point. In Canada we pay relatively little heed to social class — a legacy of having been a colony, with its ultimate rulers (and, until 1949, its literal court of last resort) conveniently offshore. We have left formal titles mostly in the dust while Americans resurrect them frantically: the newspapers bow and scrape to “Sen. Clinton” and “Gov. Palin” long after their brief periods in office.
We manage not to admire displays of wealth in the whimpering, craving way that Americans do; our old money avoids ostentation, and our bankers are practically Spartan. (We have a few literal lords, but I suspect even my colleague Conrad Black would resist being addressed as anything but “Mr. Black” by a fellow Canadian in Canada.) We accept higher taxes in exchange for state provision of medical care, but when it comes to welfare we honour the Protestant work ethic more earnestly than the republic to the south does, with its food stamps and its endless disability rolls.
This all emerges partly from having an expatriate monarchy that we can drag onto the scene as needed, and can worship and scrutinize from afar. We get the best of both worlds. If we adopted a real republic, the long-term path to union with the U.S. would be that much shorter; how long could a squeal of “But we’re so much nicer than they are,” a bare assertion of mystical innate superiority, provide a moral basis for independence?
The Romans and the Tudors would perceive the Canadian genius quickly: they would discern more clearly than ourselves that we have pioneered a truly novel political system — an ultra-practical, constitutionally successful version of the old Jewish temple, with its invisible god secreted in a hidden sanctum. Our domestic political leaders can never be glory-hunting priest-emperor types, as long as there is someone above them, far away, who is called “Majesty” and possesses the regalia of state. This is why, when someone refers to the prime minister’s wife as “first lady,” they are really threatening the basis of our political existence, and should be chastised — even if, I hasten to add, they are writers or editors for other Postmedia newspapers.
Colby Cosh, “Why Canadians are better republicans”, National Post, 2016-05-30.
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January 29, 2018
QotD: Churchill’s drinking habits
In the not so distant past around the sodden precincts of Westminster you were as likely to spot a yeti as a sober politician. The level of drinking that went on among MPs and their leeches for most of the last century was prodigious and was by and large expected. It was, as Ben Wright describes in his breezy, anecdote-rich and instructive survey of booze and politics, part of a culture which was tolerated and, to a degree, encouraged.
It was not without justification, for instance, that Adolf Hitler, who might have been a nicer fellow had he not been a teetotaller, described Winston Churchill as an “insane drunkard”, a “garrulous drunkard”, and “whisky-happy”.
If Order, Order! has a star it is undoubtedly Churchill who rarely let a day go by able to pass a breathalyser test. On occasion he would have a glass of wine at breakfast followed by a liquid lunch which invariably included Champagne and brandy. At tea-time he would progress to whisky. Then he would wash down dinner with more Champagne and brandy after which he had at least another whisky. According to one loyal aide who may have been sight impaired he was never the worse for wear for this intake and he “never felt the slightest ill-effects in the morning”.
Alan Taylor, “Lush tales of our political classes’ drinking exploits”, The National, 2016-06-20.
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January 26, 2018
QotD: Britain’s boozy parliamentarians
It is Wright’s contention [in his book Order! Order!] that alcohol has as many benefits as it does drawbacks. Not only does it help loosen ties and tongues it also boosts confidence and dilutes stress. Most prime ministers drank, many to excess. Herbert Asquith went by the nickname “Squiffy Asquith” and regularly appeared in the Commons three sheets to the wind. Margaret Thatcher did her best to promote the whisky industry, the uncapping of a bottle of Bell’s marking the end of the working day. She believed that whisky rather than gin was good for you because “it will give you energy”, which I fear could be a hard fact to prove scientifically.
Tony Blair, whose reign ushered in an era of 24-hour drinking, thought his relatively modest drinking was getting out of control because he calculated it exceeded the government’s weekly recommended limit. This did not impress Dr John Reid, Bellshill’s finest, who once drank like a navvy. “Where I come from,” Reid told GMTV, “a gin and tonic, two glasses of wine, you wouldn’t give that to a budgie.” Blair, of course, did not have to look further than next door to find an explanation why his consumption increased over the years. Gordon Brown, his nemesis, was fond of Champagne – Möet & Chandon no less – which he did not nurse but washed down in a gulp. “He was like the cookie monster,” recalled one aide. “Down in one, whoosh!” Drinking is of course one of those areas in which we Scots have long punched above our weight and Wright’s pages are replete with examples of intoxicated Jocks carousing nights away and causing mayhem. Former Labour leader John Smith was one such. Occasionally I encountered him on the overnight train that carried Scottish MPs home from Westminster on a Thursday night. Known as “the sleeper of death”, it was a mobile pub that never closed until it reached Waverley, whereupon politicians were disgorged red-eyed and pie-eyed among bemused early morning commuters.
Alan Taylor, “Lush tales of our political classes’ drinking exploits”, The National, 2016-06-20.
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October 31, 2017
Yes Minister — The Five Standard Excuses
Hostis Humani Generis
Published on 26 Sep 2015Humphrey Appleby’s five standard excuses from S02E07.
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October 16, 2017
Otto von Bismarck – I: The Wildman Bismarck – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 13 Oct 2017Otto von Bismarck became the greatest statesman of a generation, but he began as an intransigent and irresponsible youth. He coasted through college, got himself thrown out of an early political appointment, and caused havoc with his divisive opinions during a meeting of parliament.
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September 23, 2017
The end of Andrew Scheer’s brief political honeymoon
Being the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition isn’t quite the easy job some people seem to think it is. Paul Wells explains why Andrew Scheer’s brief time in office is already becoming much more of a grind than he may have anticipated:
There comes a time in every new opposition leader’s career when he discovers it’s a horrible job. This usually happens early.
The reasons why it seems like it shouldn’t be a horrible job are: (a) all you have to do is make fun of the government; (b) being an opposition leader, and therefore hating the government to your bones already, for reasons of ideology or team allegiance or both, it seems to you that everyone in the country will want to join you in making fun of the government; (c) it’s a nice job in general, with a suite of offices and an excellent seat in the House of Commons.
The reasons why it turns out to be a bad job anyway are: (a) you’re probably in opposition because your party has lost an election, and many Canadians haven’t yet forgotten why they wanted that to happen; (b) the rotten press corps will insist on poking and prodding the opposition’s behaviour, rather than focussing its wrath entirely on the government; (c) the job carries all of the perils of government — gaffes, caucus management, infighting — with none of the institutional clout.
And so hello to Andrew Scheer, who’s having a bit of a week.
Scheer (and his supporters) may have thought that just being not-Harper would be enough. It’s clearly not enough:
I don’t think Scheer’s performance on these files is determined solely by his temperament, either. It’s also structural. He sold himself to his party as a specific kind of cure to Harperism. It’s not clear he has the luxury to be that kind of cure.
By the time Scheer became Conservative leader, many Conservatives, probably most, were heartily sick of the Harper party’s oppressive message-control mechanisms. The forms you had to fill out, the layers of approval. Opinions diverged on whether the party needed to change its policy direction, but in its day-to-day communications and caucus management, the overwhelming consensus was that it needed a lighter touch.
Scheer’s selling proposition to Conservatives was that he could appeal to moderates by being a nicer guy than Harper, but that he could mollify the activist base by letting it act up a bit, without fear of reprisal. Blow off some steam. Have a few debates. The driving assumption seems to be that Harper brought the hammer down on his own people because Harper is the kind of guy who enjoys bringing the hammer down. And there’s some truth to that!
But there’s also the absolutely brutal purgatory the Canadian Alliance went through for two years before Harper became that party’s leader. Plummeting in the polls. Constant MP defections from caucus. Mockery in the news coverage. To some extent, this continued through the 2004 election, which Harper believed he lost because he could not trust his own candidates not to sound crazy. That’s why he clamped down.
Scheer will soon have to decide whether he can afford to let his caucus members say what they want. Until he does, the emerging pattern of his management style — laissez faire, followed by hasty backtracking — will come to define him.
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September 21, 2017
TV and Parliament
It’s an old visual joke: two photos of Parliament (Canadian, British, Australian, etc.) or Congress, one showing the attendance for debate on a bill the poster believes to be of utmost importance … with a bare dozen or so on either side of the aisle contrasted with a photo of a jam-packed chamber said to be a debate on politicians’ salaries. The joke works because very few of us have ever been (or wanted to be) in the visitor’s gallery during a session. Our impressions of what actually happens in Parliament are informed by the still photos in the newspapers and the incredibly misleading snippets of TV coverage on TV or on Youtube. In the National Post, Andrew Coyne calls for the TV camera to be allowed to record a non-stage-managed version of what actually happens in the chamber:
A great many things have contributed to Parliament’s decline, but I wonder if it is entirely coincidental that the age in which the Commons mattered, when a good speech could turn a debate and debates were of consequence and giants walked the Earth, predates its televisation.
Look at it from the point of view of a member of Parliament asking a question or giving a speech in the Commons. Before the television cameras were introduced in 1977, who was your audience? Who were you trying to persuade, or impress? Who graded you on your performance? It was the people within its walls — your fellow MPs, mostly, plus the press. That was your world: people who were committed to Parliament, and knowledgeable about its traditions, and who themselves believed in its importance. For it was their world, too.
Perhaps they were wrong to believe this. Perhaps it was no more important, objectively, than it is now. Except that they believed it was, and believing it to be so, acted accordingly. And as it was important to its participants, so that importance was communicated to the country, which after all had no evidence to the contrary. If it was a delusion, it was a shared delusion.
[…]
Worse, the world outside is not even watching. It would be one thing if there were millions of Canadians tuning in. But as in fact the audience is largely limited to journalists and other shut-ins, the effect is simply to reinforce the sense of pointlessness and insignificance. All of that posturing for the cameras, all that canned outrage, and for what? Maybe a few hundred views on YouTube, if you’re lucky.
But of course no one’s watching. Have you watched Parliament? It would be unexciting enough, without the help of the rules governing the parliamentary television service, which allow only a single, fixed camera on a speaker at a time — no cutaways or reaction shots. Not only does this drain the proceedings of any drama, but it presents a stilted, distorted version of what goes on. Witness the little charade wherein a platoon of a speaker’s colleagues are assigned to occupy what would otherwise be the empty chairs around him. The public has been given the pretence of a direct, unfiltered view of Parliament, one that is vastly less interesting than the real thing.
Should you decide to watch the bear pit live, you are not allowed to use a camera or recording device of any kind, and you’re explicitly not allowed to take notes during the session. Those privileges are reserved to the official representatives of the media alone (see the “Live Debates” section of the Parliamentary website.
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May 3, 2017
Reforming Canada’s parliament
In the National Post, Andrew Coyne pours scorn on the “reforms” being put forward by Justin Trudeau’s government and suggests some alternatives that might help make the institution more democratic and less like the Prime Minister’s personal court, by scaling back the power of the PM and other party leaders in the house:
What would a package of reforms look like that was genuinely intended to make the government more accountable to Parliament? It would start, reasonably enough, by reducing the powers of the government over Parliament. Rather than allow government to decide when debate had gone on long enough, for example, it would assign that power to the Speaker — as the Speaker, in the best of the government’s current proposals, would be empowered to divide omnibus bills into separate parts, to be voted on separately. (Perhaps it will be applied to the current such exercise, the budget bill.)
Rather than give the government sole power to decide when to prorogue the House, it would make such decisions subject to a vote of the Commons, with a supermajority required to ensure bipartisan support. (The current proposal is merely that the government should be required to declare its reasons.) A similar constraint might be imposed on its power to dissolve the House. We might also place limits on the confidence convention, under which the government can designate any bill it likes as a confidence measure — the gun at the head by which governments ultimately ensure compliance.
I say government, but of course I mean the prime minister, whose control over any government is near absolute. So a genuine reform plan would also reduce some of his personal prerogatives, beginning with the number and range of offices that are his sole purview to appoint, to be doled out as rewards for obedience: notably, it would halve the size of the cabinet, and with it the number of parliamentary secretaries assigned to each minister.
It would likewise seek to reduce the powers of party leaders over ordinary MPs: by restoring the convention that leaders are elected by caucus, and removable by them; by eliminating the power of the leader (or “designate”) to veto the nominations of party candidates, in favour perhaps of a vote of the caucus or riding association presidents. MPs thus liberated, it would be possible to have more genuinely free votes — on everything. (There would still be confidence votes, of course, but MPs are capable of deciding for themselves whether a matter is worth the fall of the government; MPs who go back on a platform promise can likewise answer to their constituents, not the party whip.)
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