Parliamentarians need to start acting like adults and hold the government to account or risk becoming completely irrelevant, say MPs and political observers who see the decline of Parliament as detrimental to Canadian democracy.

In his recently-released book, Power: Where Is It?, University of Moncton professor Donald Savoie writes that Parliament today is "no longer able to perform its most important function: making the executive steamroller behave and holding it accountable. The best it can do is heckle the steamroller as it rolls by."

Liberal MP Glen Pearson (London North Centre, Ont.) said he dislikes this part of Parliament. Prior to entering politics in a 2006 byelection, Mr. Pearson was a firefighter and director of the local food bank. He said he came from a culture of cooperation to one of self-interest. "It's not my nature," Mr. Pearson told The Hill Times last week. "You come here after a 30-year career doing those kinds of things, and you think people will do that here, but they won't. They don't want you to have an advantage. The problem is, the single mother is struggling and there are people in slavery in Sudan and we don't give a shit publicly."

Mr. Pearson said Parliament is "broken" because the two most important aspects of Parliament, Question Period and committees, are also broken. "The stuff you see in Question Period or in public, that's just crap right now. It doesn't mean anything. Questions never get answered. It's terrible," he said. "But the other thing that mattered really was committees. Committees are really where the legislation was done and everything else. Those committees are now broken as well, so it's my view that Parliament is broken. It's dysfunctional. The answer to that is not an election. The answer to that is to behave as adults."

Liberal MP Keith Martin (Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca, B.C.) agreed that Parliamentary committees have become dysfunctional, citing the recent House Government Operations Committee meeting at which tempers flared over whether Transport Minister John Baird (Ottawa West-Nepean, Ont.) could speak as a witness. In addition, Mr. Martin said, the House Environment Committee has been seized with process and filibuster rather than moving forward with studies on legislation and important public policy.

"You have a lot of very smart people who are listening to very smart people who are called as witnesses, to produce documents that have no effect on public policy and no effect on people's lives. Taxpayer money is being used to fund a bit of a sham. MPs go because they're told to go because it's part of the system, but the activities, you have to ask yourself are these activities actually creating a rate of return for the Canadian people? The answer is a big no," Mr. Martin said.

"I think it's a symptom of the partisanship that has poisoned the environment in Parliament. It used to be, it's always been strongest in the Chamber, but now that partisanship has infected the committee and as a result, the cancer of rabid partisanship has not only eaten away the soul of Parliament and the House of Commons, but it is also extended to the committee rooms. Committees have just become an extension of the boxing ring that is the House now. The serious problems and serious challenges that our nation faces are not being dealt with in a serious and in an effective way."

Conservative MP Michael Chong (Wellington-Halton Hills, Ont.), a proponent of Parliamentary reform who introduced a motion in the House on May 27 to change the Standing Orders, or rules, to make Parliament effective again, said he doesn't fault the current MPs for the situation that Parliamentarians find themselves in. Parliament's decline has been a problem for 40 years, he told The Hill Times recently. He said if MPs want Parliament to be respected again, individual MPs must reassert their own power. Parliament can start by empowering backbench MPs and reforming Question Period.

"It's about ensuring that the representative of Canadians in each and every one of those 308 ridings has an effective voice in our House of Commons," Mr. Chong said of his motion, M-517. "As it presently stands, it's not possible for a Member of Parliament to ask a question in Question Period unless they receive the approval of their parties, normally it's the party House leader and whips. That is a change from past practice in Canada. It used to be the case that after the first two or three rounds of questions which were the leaders' rounds and their leaders' designates, it used to be individual backbench Members of Parliament could rise in the House, catch the eye of the Speaker and ask a question that was relevant to their constituents. What I'm proposing is to go back to that sort of system."

Mr. Chong noted that the change came as recently as the early 1990s when there were five parties represented in the House. He said there was a lot of discussion around how to ensure that four opposition parties would receive a fair voice during QP which produced unintended consequences. "It stripped away the power of the individual backbench Member of Parliament to ask a question in question period without receiving approval of the party," he said.

The motion was debated for one hour, and will be debated for another hour before being voted on. It aims to instruct the Procedure and House Affairs Committee to look at making recommendations to change standing orders in order to "elevate decorum and fortify the use of discipline by the Speaker," making the times for asking and answering questions longer so that they're more substantive, making sure that ministers who are asked questions are the ones who answer, and setting aside Wednesdays specifically for questions to the Prime Minister, similar to the British House of Commons. "I think it's a very small, but important step toward Parliamentary reform. I don't think it's going to address some of the deeper problems we have, but I do think it's a small step in the right direction," Mr. Chong said.

Former Liberal MP Joe Jordan, now a lobbyist with the Capital Hill Group, said the Procedure and House Affairs Committee should strike a subcommittee to examine rewriting the standing orders to reflect minority governments because they're currently written for majority governments. He said because there have been three back to back minority governments and there will be more for the foreseeable future, the atmosphere in the House has deteriorated because MPs are always in election mode. One example of changing standing orders would be to explicitly state that Standing Order 31, which allows MPs to make a one-minute statement about anything they want, be restricted to comments about their ridings or special occasions, rather than being used to attack other MPs.

"People can't say anything without taking a shot at their enemy, their political enemy. It's just nauseating, but it's understandable. And that feeds itself. It happens, and people do it, and other people are the target of it, and they do it, and on and on and on, until we've reached a ridiculous level of this," he said. "That needs to be stopped. And that can only be stopped if members decide they want to put a stop to it. I mean, I would like to see 15 minutes before Question Period, people talking about their ridings, things that are positive that are happening in their ridings, set a tone. The tone that's set out by the Standing Orders 31 that are before Question Period now are a preamble to school yard brawl. It's ridiculous. It's embarrassing."

Tom Flanagan, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) former national campaign director, recently told a conference in Montreal that the last 10 years and minority Parliaments have "deeply affected" government and political culture and that there is a permanent election campaign underway, according to The Toronto Star.

Conservative MP Tom Lukiwski (Regina-Lumsden-Lake Centre, Sask.), Parliamentary secretary to the government House leader who sits on the Procedure and House Affairs Committee, said last week that it's incumbent upon all Parliamentarians to raise the level of debate and decorum in the House to show respect.

"I think Parliamentarians do believe that decorum needs to be addressed. The important thing is, from time to time, this is a partisan place and that will never change and when we get close to the end of a session, each and every year, it seems that the temperature rises, the language gets a little bit heated and decorum suffers, but I don't think that's indicative of how individual members feel," he said last week. "It's up to the individual members and individual parties to ensure that their own decorum is reflective of how Parliament should act, collectively. I think if we did that as a group of 308 Parliamentarians, monitor ourselves on the decorum front, I think Parliament would be a better place for it."

Prof. Savoie points out in his book, published by McGill-Queen's University Press, that the decline of Parliament can be seen in the adversarial, and hyper partisan House of Commons as well as in the fact that governments are now more often ignoring Parliament when it comes to major announcements. "Interest groups or special gatherings of one kind or another provide an ideal backdrop and also guarantee favourable reactions on the national evening news, where representatives of opposition parties are often not in attendance to add a negative spin," he writes. "Contrast this development with the days when announcements were made in the Commons, giving opposition parties the opportunity to react immediately and point to flaws, real or contrived. In short, the prime minister and his or her courtiers can now ignore Parliament, even when making important announcements."

For NDP MP Joe Comartin (Windsor-Tecumseh, Ont.) there are several issues that need to be addressed—from electing committee chairs, having more free votes, improving decorum, and clearly defining what constitutes a confidence motion rather than allowing the government of the day to make issues confidence matters when it suits them—but he sees hope that Parliament is reasserting itself because of the recent ruling which House Speaker Peter Milliken (Kingston and the Islands, Ont.) made regarding the Afghan detainee documents.

"I was very happy with the Speaker's ruling because I think it was a real shot in the arm," Mr. Comartin said last week. He noted, however that the Conservative government has not adhered to the ruling that Parliament is "supreme" as evidenced by the Conservatives' order to political staffers not to appear as witnesses at committee meetings. "There are absolute things that Parliament controls, not the government. And that's another one. So, I'm cautiously optimistic that by that win ... the battle's not over, but I think the ruling gave Parliamentarians, backbench all the way to the front bench in all parties, a sense that we should be exercising the reason we're here which is to govern, and whether you're in government or opposition, that we play the proper role."

Prof. Savoie told The Hill Times, however, that although the ruling was "very wise," it was the only ruling that Mr. Milliken could have made. "Any other ruling would send the message to Parliament that you've lost all relevance and so that was a minimum of rulings," he said. "Certainly it's a very wise ruling, but in many ways it was the only ruling he could've come up with. Anything short would've turned Parliament truly into a relic of democracy."

Parliament has been incrementally declining for decades and reforms would also have to be incremental, but he's confident that it's a fight that "Parliamentarians are determined to win," Mr. Comartin said.

"Probably for almost 10 years since I've been here, that ruling was the first time that I felt we were in fact going to see some movement. I think it really behooves all Parliamentarians on both sides of the House to continue to push that," he said. "I think you have to see this as another step that Parliament and Parliamentarians are reasserting themselves. It's certainly not over."

bvongdou@hilltimes.com

The Hill Times