Parliament is a gong-show, MPs care more about their political parties

OTTAWA—Multiple surveys have confirmed that Canadians are not pleased with the current state of federal politics. Lack of propriety by the party leaders, spineless rulings by the House Speaker, and imperceptive debates offer one explanation. Jacques Rancière, professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School, says there is something deeply systemic to the structure of representative democracy. There exists, as Rancière claims, a sub-culture created by and catering only to elected officials. It is their own little self-indulgent world: unaccountable, devoid of responsibility to the voting public, and narrow in scope. It becomes prominent when governments lose their political capital, thus creating a vacuum of opportunity for others to jostle for power. With Prime Minister Justin Trudeau trailing in the polls, that is precisely what is going on in Parliament right now, and it is costing Canadian taxpayers an estimated $70,000 an hour. Some call this phenomenon 'parliamentarism'. It renders politicians oblivious to the social reality outside Parliament. They lose sight of why they are there. Instead of serving democracy with decorum, they serve their insular interests. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is a good case in point. Since the start of the fall session, he has filibustered privilege motions and attempted to defeat the government. He has not engaged in any debates on bills, or grilled the administration on serious matters other than the usual 'gotcha' lines. He has brought the business of democratic representation to a standstill. But Poilievre is not alone. Conservative MP Arnold Viersen has followed suit by refusing to act on his own private member’s bill C-270 to stop online sexual exploitation. The bill has received unanimous support of all political parties as well as child protection groups. In any other line of work, Viersen would be long fired for slacking off. These improprieties have not gone unnoticed. On Oct. 22, Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet said he could end Poilievre’s obstructive behaviour if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau guaranteed the passage of seniors' pensions and supply management private members' bills. Blanchet, too, has fallen into the pitfall of parliamentarism. He could have shamed both Trudeau and Poilievre by making a public case for the merits of his favoured bills. Blanchett resorted to political extortion instead. That’s what parliamentarism does. It blinds otherwise altruistic politicians, reducing them to chess-pieces in a crazy Machiavellian manoeuvres of party politics. The menace is perhaps best illustrated by Liberals MPs who wanted to oust Trudeau as their party leader. The reason to ditch Trudeau was never articulated as either policy differences, or inability to represent their local constituents. Their argument was that Trudeau limited their individual chances to win at the ballot box. They could have followed the lead of Liberal MP Anthony Housefather who disagreed with Trudeau’s posture on Israel, and threatened to quit the caucus unless he got his policy concessions. His stance is contestable, but Housefather staked out a position and used the tools of political representation to defend it. The dissenting Liberal MPs were neither so bold, nor principled. This is sadly becoming the norm in today’s Parliament. Policies are not designed by politicians with conviction about the social good. They are determined by one-off deals behind closed doors, and horse-trading with corporate lobbyists where the ethos of democratic representation becomes an archaic after-thought. The polity often gets seen as a burden. Politicians forget that they are given time-limited provisional authorities—not custodianship—of the democratic process. The same voters who gave those authorities can just as easily yank them away. Trudeau will not change things. By his own admissions, he long abandoned the idea to reform Canada’s political system. It’s not too late for Poilievre, however. If the polls are correct, he will become the next prime minister. He could shift gears, and, at a bare minimum, start to champion the integrity of Parliament. It could add an element of statesmanship to his otherwise uneven political profile. For inspiration, he could read the works of Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, winners of 2024’s Nobel prize for economics. Their research, detailed in the book Why Nations Fail, underlines the need for well-functioning public institutions. Nations fail, they argue, parliamentary cultures deteriorate from inclusive and considered debates on shared social wealth to political tribalism. The instinct in Canada will be to tinker around the edges with new codes of ethics, legislation, watchdogs, oversight mechanisms, and possibly more severe sanctions against those who play fast and loose with its parliamentary guardrails. That may not suffice. Things are too far gone. What’s needed is a radical transformation of how politics itself is done, and how parliamentary business is conceived. Poilievre could easily own this agenda. Unfortunately, he has shown no inclination to reform anything. He’d rather dismantle public institutions like the CBC, fire the non-partisan functionaries like the governor of the Bank of Canada, and he openly ridicules and flaunts the rulings by the Speaker of the House. Real change will occur only if parliamentary reform becomes an election issue. It will force party leaders to unite to address emergent crises, like they just did by bonding together to appeal the British Columbia provincial court decision restricting them from using our personal data for—among other things—political fundraising. Bhagwant Sandhu is a retired director general from the federal government. Between 2002-21 he held senior roles in several departments, including Fisheries and Ocean Canada, Infrastructure Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat, and Public Works Canada. He has also held executive positions in the governments of Ontario and British Columbia. The Hill Times