Before you ask, I don’t have a hot take for you on Trump’s executive order on Friday night (other than apparently, the inmates have taken over the asylum and there is nothing but a bunch of ham-fisted amateurs running the show now). And I didn’t find most of the hot takes circulating around to be terribly edifying either. But what I can talk about is Parliament, and the group of MPs who think they have the solution to changing it. They of course, are completely and utterly wrong. (But that’s why you read this blog anyway, right?)
Aaron Wherry apparently got a preview copy of the book and spoke to some of the MPs who co-edited the volume. Among them are Michael Chong – author of the woefully inadequate and hugely problematic Reform Act 2014 that creates more problems than it solves; Liberal Scott Simms (author of no particularly terrible bills that I can think of off-hand, but we’ll return to him in a moment), and NDP MP Kennedy Stewart, whose passion for democratic reform gave us e-petitions and an attempt to financially penalise parties who don’t run an adequate number of women in elections. Wherry’s premise of the piece – maybe it’s time to reform Parliament and not the electoral system?
The problem is, “reforming Parliament” is a bit of a mug’s game so long as MPs don’t actually know what their own job is – which is most of them, incidentally. And given what Wherry has mentioned in his preview of this forthcoming book, some of these MPs don’t know either. For example, Kenney Stewart is moaning that limited time that backbenchers have to table initiatives. If he needs a reason why, it’s because MPs aren’t lawmakers. That’s the government’s job. It’s the backbenchers’ job is to hold the government to account. You don’t do that when you’re spending your time and resources pursuing your own hobby horses and initiatives, and that’s a problem.
Scott Simms, meanwhile, wants to propose some mechanism for backbenchers from provincial legislatures to “pass motions for consideration by the House of Commons.” Err, really? Again, they have their own work of holding their own provincial governments to account, not to mention they have their own jurisdiction to worry about without meddling in the federal government’s. That’s why we have orders of government. Oh, and Chong? Worries that it’s not about how MPs are elected but what happens to them once they get to Ottawa. Of course, I’ve written time and again (and again, and again) about why his bill didn’t actually solve any problems, but in fact exacerbated them because the real problem is the way in which we select party leaders. He doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to fix that problem, or even public acknowledge that it’s at the root of the problems we have with our parliament currently.
Of course, it’s a good thing that there’s another book coming out before theirs which actually tells MPs what their jobs are and provides some clear-headed thinking about the system. (Yes, that was a shameless plug. You’ll be hearing a lot of them over the next few weeks).