Tragedy in the Commons (24 page)

“And then the person gets dictatorial powers in the House, with the members, by saying, ‘If you don’t vote
this
way you are out of the caucus.’ It should be the caucus that
decides whether the member is out, not the leader. And yet the leader can do it because they can say, ‘I am not going to sign your paper—in the next election you’re not eligible.’ I would argue that should not be the case.

“It is something that has really gotten under my skin a bit about the way things have drifted,” Milliken concludes. “In my view the party should be demanding some restriction on the powers of the leader, as part of their constitution, to make sure that we don’t have this kind of dictatorship, really, arising—because the party leader becomes a dictator within the party. If he becomes prime minister, the powers are extraordinary—and that was not the way it was intended when we started our democracy in 1867.”

Keith Martin is one of the few MPs who witnessed the exercising of the party leader’s power on both the Conservative and Liberal sides of the House. An emergency room physician, he began his political career as a Reform MP in 1993 and then, when the Canadian Alliance amalgamated with the Progressive Conservatives, transferred his allegiance to the Liberal Party, serving there for another seven years, from 2004 to 2011. In his view, party policy is driven less by MPs responding to constituent needs and more by leaders, who are in turn pushed by pollsters. “It’s poll-driven politics, and it’s also driven by advisors, many of whom are quite young, highly radicalized, and driven by partisan interests as opposed to the public good,” said Martin. “They have the power but don’t have the responsibility or the accountability to the electorate. So they’re severing [the relationship] between the elected officials and the public. The job of an MP now is to show up for the party, not for their constituents.… A lot of MPs feel disempowered.”

Many former MPs’ comments illustrated a conviction that the leader’s tight control of their parties is stifling the propagation of creative solutions to legislative problems. But few expressed the idea with Martin’s eloquence and forcefulness. He believes the leaders have consolidated control to the point that any expression of independent thought marks the idea holder as a potentially dangerous influence. “Even in doing positive things, [you] marginalize yourself because the leadership says, ‘What the hell is he doing going off on landmines, or conflict prevention … or on Headstart programs for kids, or on Afghanistan—how dare he do that?’

“So the MP knows actually that if they start to innovate, they’re marked down,” Martin said. “The currency to success is to be able to do what you’re told, and be partisan. And so, the MP is faced with a dilemma: innovate and represent your constituents on one hand, and on the other, you destroy your ability to advance.… The system works against innovation, works against independent thought, works against representing the constituents. When MPs are asked to [act according to] the public’s expectation, the public’s essentially asking them to do something that is going to be political harakiri within their own party. And MPs know that.”

Like Milliken, Keith Martin believes the leader should not be empowered to decide who runs as a candidate in a given riding—because use of that power prevents the engagement of party members in the riding’s political process. “Ridings have to be able to decide who their candidates are going to be,” Martin says. “[Candidates] cannot be appointed from the leadership of the party. You have to engage the members of a party through a process that enables them to contribute to policies
and things they’d like to see the party pursue, but there must be a feedback loop to the party. And caucus [must respond] to constituents. You’re not going to do everything that they ask, but you need to have a transparent system where you’re voicing the ideas that came in—‘and here’s what we’ve done with them.’ So there’s an accountability loop. We’re not giving people any reason to join a political party.”

Martin is also critical of a leader having influence over such appointments as who serves as whip, House leader, deputy House leader and other leadership positions in caucus: “They should be chosen by the caucus and not by the leader.” He figures the public would be shocked if they discovered how undemocratic and punitive are the conditions imposed on MPs by the leader. The public, says Martin, “know something is deeply amiss in Parliament, and they think that MPs are there just to pad and line their pockets, they’re full of power, they just are in it for themselves—which is not true. Most MPs, the vast majority, are not.… The way MPs and caucuses are managed is utterly toxic, by any measure of what good management practices are.… So, the management of caucus is done in such a way [as] to create a highly toxic environment that crimps and destroys the ability of caucus to work productively. And it’s designed that way. Leaders choose to hobble their own caucus, but complain when caucus is not doing what they should be doing. It’s just the management of caucus. Leaders need a course in management, basically.”

SOME OF THE
MPs we interviewed were less troubled by the power wielded by the party leader’s office. Leaders have power, these MPs insist. But much of it does not get exercised in practice. Ed Broadbent acknowledged, for example, that as
NDP leader, he did have the power to hand-pick candidates who ran under the banner of his party. But he never did. “I strongly believe our constituencies—as long as we have our first-past-the-post system—the local constituency ought to be able to select their candidates democratically. The leadership of the party—nationally or provincially, or party executives outside the riding—should not have a role in it … it’s just through public pressure that all the parties eventually, including the other parties, now get rid of this process where the leader can hand-pick a candidate and parachute him or her into the riding.” It does not happen in the NDP, Broadbent said. “And I’m quite happy it doesn’t.”

We’re accustomed to hearing about party whips and the application of party discipline from below, from the resentful people to whom it’s applied. But Marlene Catterall, who served as the Liberals’ whip and deputy whip, offers a different view of party discipline, one that reflects her conception of the job as more accommodating than most see it. “I always thought that my job was to make sure that, when legislation got to the House, any concerns about it among caucus members had been ironed out. And that often meant [making] substantial changes in the [proposed] legislation.” Rather than the threats or any sense of the corporal punishment implied by the job title, Catterall portrays her “whipping” as more persuasive than punitive. Take, for instance, her anecdote about persuading fellow Liberal caucus members to pass legislation to protect Canada’s endangered species.

The legislation was controversial. It embarrassed Canadian environmentalists that the United States had passed a law designed to protect endangered species in 1973. Yet
Canada’s first real federal commitment along the same lines didn’t come until nearly two decades later, with the Mulroney government’s signing of the international Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992—which required federal passage of legislation. The next attempt followed after Jean Chrétien was elected as prime minister in 1993. The following year, the environment committee committed to enacting legislation, leading to the 1996 introduction of Bill C-65, an act “respecting the protection of wildlife species in Canada from extirpation or extinction.” But environmentalists criticized the act as toothless; it protected migratory birds, fish and creatures on federal lands—and that was it. Certain creatures unlucky enough to have habitats on privately owned land were unprotected. And the process to incorporate new species into the legislation was seen as overly bureaucratic. The bill died with the 1997 federal election call, and stayed dead until Chrétien named David Anderson his environment minister in 1999. Anderson committed to enacting legislation designed to protect biological diversity. He tweaked the old Bill C-65 to ensure that it protected endangered species habitats regardless of whether they were on public or private land. The tweaks also bolstered the legislation’s punitive power.

Still, there were holdouts. One of them was Charles Caccia, the Liberal chair of the Environment Committee. Anderson attempted to mollify Caccia and the other holdouts by describing the lengthy process that led to the act, the prolonged discussions, the negotiations, the balancing of this factor and that. One Parliament passed, then another, and still Caccia held up the legislation. Then his friend Marlene Catterall became whip in 2001. She talked to Anderson about
what changes to the legislation he could accept in order to accommodate the likes of Caccia. Then she called Caccia into her office. “Charles,” Catterall inquired, “tell me something: Is this legislation better than what we have now?”

“Yes, it is,” Caccia said.

“Then why don’t we pass it?”

“It’s not as good as it could be,” Caccia retorted.

“Charles,” Catterall said, “I want to tell you that every time we write legislation it’s an accommodation of a whole lot of different interests, especially in a country as diverse as ours. Consider this, Charles: The last time there was perfect legislation it came down the mountainside on two stone tablets, and it was dictated by God. And Charles? You are not God.”

Then Catterall gathered Anderson, Caccia and the other Environment Committee Liberals, along with Chrétien’s director of policy and research, Paul Genest. Neither side got everything it wanted, but the legislation was tweaked enough to allow both sides to vote for it, and it passed in June 2002. Catterall uses the point to illustrate the extent that “whipping” caucus can be less violent coercion and more glad-handing and gentle persuasion. Rather than a disciplinarian conveying edicts from on high in the leadership’s office, Catterall portrays the whip as a conduit channelling information in both directions between the leadership and the caucus.

“It is a simple fact of life,” she says. “If you have a hundred and eighty Members of Parliament, if every person was 100 percent satisfied with the details of every piece of legislation—as I said, we would have discussions about what goes into it, about how we’re doing things, and if you had any group of people from across the country together, they would
never agree entirely. And this country is about making those accommodations for our differences and for our diversity—it may be the most difficult country in the world in that way.”

FEW MPS WERE AS
accepting of the way leaders exerted power as Catterall or Broadbent. And for the less comfortable, it wasn’t just the power of the party leader that was problematic; it was also the professional staff who worked close to the centre of power, whom Liberal MP Sue Barnes referred to as “this system of unelected people around the leader.”

Time and time again, MPs from all parties lamented the amount of power exercised by the leader’s office. Long-time MPs first elected in the Reform Party felt this acutely. “I think our democracy would be better served if parties were very principled and stuck to their principles. But the pursuit of power takes over the adherence to principles,” said Conservative MP Brian Fitzpatrick.

“Look at the power—[the] prime minister can appoint every single judge, every single commissioner, every single … federal position. His office has the authority and power to do that,” said Conservative MP Art Hanger. “I think they have too much power.” As did several of his Reform Party colleagues, Hanger attributed the change to the moment his party shifted from reforming government to forming it. “People who had fought for and developed the Reform Association all of a sudden were part of the political machinery. They were no longer that grassroots push, as much. And then as time went on—after the first election—then you could see the change,” he said.

Former Liberal MP Andrew Telegdi agreed—although Telegdi interpreted the cause through his own partisan lens.
“Harper … has everything going to the PMO, which means that the contribution that the other MPs can make is very seriously curtailed,” said Telegdi. “That’s the problem—and then it makes Members of Parliament redundant. So we have to make reforms because otherwise we are under-utilizing the Members of Parliament and alienating ourselves from the Canadian electorate.” It was Telegdi who watched the early Reformers with admiration for their commitment to putting their constituents before their party. But that era has passed, he says: “Well, this has switched 180 degrees.… It’s the nature of the beast. I mean to me, it’s government wanting to control.”

Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t quote the rare present-day MP who, like his spiritual forebears in the Canadian Alliance, exhibited the courage to contradict his leader—Conservative MP Brent Rathgeber. “I joined the Reform/conservative movements because I thought we were somehow different, a band of Ottawa outsiders riding into town to clean the place up, promoting open government and accountability,” Rathgeber blogged upon his resignation from the party in June 2013. Elected as MP in 2008 to represent the Alberta riding of Edmonton–St. Albert, Rathgeber was displeased when his party leaders edited his private member’s bill. The original bill would have required the government to disclose any public sector salaries higher than $180,000. But in committee, Rathgeber’s fellow Conservatives upped the salary level to $400,000, profoundly decreasing its potential effect. In protest, Rathgeber walked away from the Conservative Party. “Compliant MPs just do what they are told by PMO staffers. That the PMO operates so opaquely and routinely without supervision is an affront to the constitutional requirements of
responsible government,” Rathgeber continued online. “I barely recognize ourselves, and worse I fear that we have morphed into what we once mocked.”

Centralization of power was a concern expressed by many sitting MPs—notably, all on the opposition benches—who responded to a project Samara initiated on the subject of redesigning Parliament. “The greatest challenges facing Parliament in the twenty-first century are the increased powers of the prime minister and the executive branch, and their refusal to permit Parliament to do its job of holding government to account,” said Carolyn Bennett, Liberal MP for the Toronto riding of St. Paul’s. Her colleague in the Liberal caucus, Vancouver Centre’s Hedy Fry, expressed similar concerns that Parliament “is at risk of being redundant and irrelevant due to increased power in the hands of the executive.”