Is Canada governable?
A bill passes through the Commons against the wishes of the government, instructing it to do something that cannot be done, namely to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 35% starting next year. The government declares it has no intention of abiding by its provisions, though the opposition insists the fate of the planet rides upon it. Yet neither government nor opposition considers the matter an issue of confidence...
The government agrees to let the bill pass in the Senate, where it had faced a filibuster, in exchange for the Liberals’ agreement to pass the government’s budget -- a money bill, whose defeat by the unelected upper house would be without precedent. Liberal senators reply that the budget itself is “unconstitutional” and “illegal”, insofar as it is alleged to have broken a promise made to certain provinces, a constitutional principle that had until now escaped notice.
In much the same vein, the Prime Minister is heard to complain that rogue elements within the foreign affairs department are substituting their own views of Canada’s role in the world for those of elected officials -- a charge seemingly upheld some days later by a memo from senior bureaucrats to departmental staff outlining the apparently novel concept of “alignment” with government policy.
Off Parliament Hill, the provinces continue to expand their own powers and privileges at the expense of the federal government -- now immigration is added to the list, now foreign affairs -- even as they claim a larger and larger share of the federal budget. Canada’s contribution to the fight against global warming is a chaos of overlapping taxes and regulations, federal and provincial, designed entirely without reference to one another. A meeting of provincial finance ministers ends with no agreement even on a common securities regulator, leave aside the broader question of internal free trade -- one of the founding purposes, supposedly, of Confederation.
Confederation? The province of Quebec, notwithstanding a steady stream of concessions up to and including formal Parliamentary recognition as a “nation,” holds an election in which the nominally “federalist” Liberal government is reduced to the barest of pluralities. Two-thirds of the National Assembly is now in the hands of parties that are dedicated to an independent Quebec, whether de jure (the Parti Québécois) or de facto (the “autonomist” Action Démocratique).
Meanwhile, Newfoundland is making Quebec-ish noises, even vowing to become “maitres chez nous,” in protest at being given a special exemption from a new equalization formula; Saskatchewan is suing the federal government because it only gains an extra $288-million from the same formula; and Nova Scotia is in open revolt for being offered a choice between the two.
And while all of this is going on, native protesters are blocking railways, barricading roads, seizing provincial parks, and occupying towns, in most cases with absolute impunity, to back up land claims that can add up to 100% or more of a province’s territory.
Senate obstructionism. Bureaucratic rebellion. Provincial expansionism. Native lawlessness. Quebec separatism. On this Canada Day, the question is perhaps more pertinent than ever: Is Canada governable? Or is the federal government descending ever further into impotence?
Some of this is simply the inevitable consequence of minority government, whose vulnerability invites exploitation. Some is the legacy of many years of one-party rule, a permanent Liberal establishment seeking to frustrate the Conservatives at every turn. (Remember the heat Stephen Harper took for musing aloud, just before the last election, about the constraints placed upon him by the courts, the bureaucracy and the Senate? Doesn’t seem so far-fetched now, does it?)
Some reflects institutional weakness at the centre in one of the world’s most decentralized federations -- an ill without remedy, it would seem, since any amendment to the constitution now requires the assent of the provinces, not only collectively, but individually. No doubt, too, that governments at all levels have fewer levers of power at their disposal than they might have had in the past, having willingly forgone some of these under various international trade treaties.
But some of the present drift and division is rooted in a breakdown of basic norms of democratic governance.
Governability depends on the various players in the political arena agreeing to certain ground rules: respect for the law, respect for democracy, respect for each other, and for the broader national interest. All of these are now in various stages of decay and neglect.
The natives who are now openly defying the law across much of southern Ontario, would not feel quite such ease in doing so had they not watched others before them advertise their contempt for the rule of law, and get away with it. Some native reserves, notably in Ontario and Quebec, have long been no-go zones, where police dare not intrude. Nor is this phenomenon restricted to natives. What was -- is? -- the consensus among the Quebec political class, but that the province could separate unilaterally, i.e. outside the bounds of law or constitutionality?
Likewise, the senators who were openly threatening to defeat the federal budget were perhaps pushing the limits of what is democratically tolerable, even in this country -- though no more so than they were in shelving government legislation to restrict their term of office to eight years. If they did not quite dare to press ahead with the first, moreover, they have plainly got away with the second. And with each new act of defiance, each new encroachment upon the principle that the power to legislate is reserved to those the people have elected for the purpose, they are emboldened to further outrages.
With contempt for the law, and contempt for democracy, being in such wide circulation, it was perhaps inevitable that our political leaders should come to evince such contempt for each other. If, after all, we cannot even agree to obey the law, or to accept the will of the people, why should we expect that other broad principles of democratic government, though they command universal assent in other countries, would prove any less controversial? Principles, for example, such as the notion that we are all part of the same self-governing body of citizens, the same polity -- the same, you know, nation.
When the premiers cannot bring themselves to accept one of the basic distinguishing features of a country, the free circulation of goods and services within its borders, it is not because they are rank protectionists -- though they are that. It is because, deep down, they do not recognize each other as countrymen. And when the federal government fails to enforce the common market upon them, because it fears it lacks the legitimacy to do so, it confirms not only its own helplessness, but that, deep down, the premiers are right.
It may seem odd, speaking of the federal government’s weakness, at a time of such concern over the accumulation of power in the prime minister’s office. But the powers of a prime minister, even in possession of a majority, are increasingly confined to his immediate surroundings. Pierre Trudeau once famously said that MPs were nobodies once they got 50 yards off Parliament Hill. The same it seems, is becoming true of PMs.
6/30/2007
